Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores. It was this that explained their presence alongside adulterers and gladiators among the class of people defined by the law as infames. Disapproval of the theatre was a venerable Roman tradition. Moralists had always condemned it as a threat to ‘the qualities of manliness for which the Roman people are renowned’.86 Actors, it was sternly noted, were inclined to effeminacy. They rarely had due
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