The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.176

c10.s7.176

Before going further, a word must be said about the mime, for Reich’s view that the Indian drama was influenced not by the Greek drama but by the Greek mime¹ has had a certain amount of support.² Little is known of the Greek mime, in the sense of a regular ὑπόθεσις or stage-play; knowledge of that seems largely confined to the Roman form.³ But the mime was of Greek origin, and numerous notices of mime-actors in the Greek world have been collected from inscriptions;⁴ mimes were acted in the Seleucid empire, for Antiochus IV included some in his triumphal celebrations at Daphne;⁵ and it would seem that companies of mime-actors did visit India. Perhaps the extant parody of the Iphigeneia in Tauris, in which the barbarian king is an Indian and talks pseudo-Indian gibberish,⁶ may bear on this; but in any case it seems to follow from the much-discussed Yavanikā, the curtain against which Indian plays were acted.⁷ The word, to my mind, cannot merely mean ‘Yavana cloth’, because the Yavana name occurs three times in, or in connection with, the classical dramas, and as we have seen that the Yavana cavalry and the Yavana women embody true traditions come down from the period of Greek rule (p. 374), it seems inevitable that the Yavana curtain must also represent a tradition going back to the same period. Now Greek dramas were not acted against a curtain, but Roman, and therefore presumably Greek, mimes usually were;⁸ and the Yavanikā must be, as Reich thought,⁹ the siparium of the mime players. Reich brought out some likenesses between the classical and Indian mime,¹⁰ and perhaps the curtain does make a case for Indians being borrowers,¹ though I feel some doubt about this. But if Indian mime-actors did borrow more than the curtain from the classical mime, which is quite uncertain, what could it come to as regards the serious drama? The answer must be, very little; *perhaps* a stock character like the fool, where he occurs; nothing that goes to the root of the matter. When we talk of Shakespeare, we are not usually thinking of the clowns or the prologue to the Taming of the Shrew; and Reich himself admitted that in Kālidāsa’s most important play, Sakuntalā, there is no trace of the influence of the mime at all.²