This mime show was not only being staged in a nicer part of town than usual, but it seemed to be attracting a more rarified audience. As I watched, a magnificent litter arrived. The occupant was hidden inside a box screened by yellow linen curtains. The box was fitted atop long wooden poles that were elaborately carved and brightly painted, like two lotus columns from an Egyptian temple laid on their sides. The poles rested upon the shoulders of bearers who were veritable giants, half again as tall as me, twice as broad, and midnight black; such giants are said to come from the land where the Nile begins. Making way for the litter, a vanguard of bodyguards, also giants, bullied their way through the crowd, so that the litter was able to claim a spot at the very front. Some of the spectators who were forcibly displaced grumbled and shook their fists, but the bodyguards stared them down. The curtains of the litter were opened a finger’s width on all sides, allowing the occupant to see out without being seen.
Two young boys circulated through the crowd, holding out cups to solicit offerings for the troupe. One of the boys stopped in front of me and rattled his cup.
“Shouldn’t I see a bit of the show before I decide what I wish to pay?” I said.
“Better to pay now.” The boy grinned. “You never know what might happen.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but begrudgingly I pulled the thinnest copper coin from my depleted purse and dropped it into the cup. The rattle it made seemed to satisfy the urchin, who moved on to badger the people next to me.
Some moments later the two boys disappeared from view, slipping around to the far side of the tent. With its entrance hidden from view and its rear side facing the crowd, the tent would serve as both changing room and backdrop for the presentation. The two boys soon reappeared, both clutching Pan pipes, and stood to either side of the tent, using their bodies to mark the boundaries of an imaginary stage. As they played a shrill fanfare, the crowd settled down, and the show commenced.
It began innocently enough with a skit about a befuddled brothel keeper, who was all leering eyebrows and salacious grins, and his oldest “girl,” an actress with wrinkles drawn on her face with kohl and a huge pair of drooping stage-breasts. She was not merely her employer’s oldest whore, but was also the first well ever drilled in Alexandria-or something like that. The Greek dialogue contained a great many puns that seemed to play off the local dialect. Bethesda got more of the jokes than I did, laughing at bits of dialogue that were merely Greek to me.
When not reciting her lines, the actress turned this way and that, knocking over small props (chairs, table, standing lamp) with her massive breasts. To accompany this buffoonery, the two boys played rude notes on their pipes. Some of the men and women around me laughed so hard they wept and had to blow their noses. A mime show cannot be too bawdy for Alexandrian tastes.
Suddenly, despite her makeup and costume, I recognized the actress.
“Bethesda, look! It’s her. Your double.”
Bethesda gave me a sour look.
“No, seriously. It’s that girl who was running through the streets naked-well, practically naked. You can hardly recognize her, but that’s the girl. I’m sure of it. Amazing, how these mimes can transform themselves!”
Bethesda rolled her eyes and shook her head, still unconvinced of the resemblance.
The skit came to a climax with yet another pun that was completely unintelligible to me but that set off howls of laughter in the audience and earned a sustained round of applause. As the two performers took a bow, it seemed to me that the actress made a special flourish toward the unseen occupant of the elegant litter.
A musical interlude followed, then an acrobatic act in which three men balanced themselves atop the shoulders of a fourth. Then a trained monkey appeared and tried to snatch away the loincloth of the man on the bottom, which caused the human monolith to stagger and sway and finally come tumbling down. The crowd roared with laughter.
More skits followed. The subject matter grew more topical as the program progressed, leading up to a skit about a grotesquely fat merchant throwing back cups of wine and getting very drunk while dictating letters to a scribe. When the fat merchant felt the need to relieve himself, and had to summon two servants merely to rise from his chair, even I knew whom he was meant to represent: King Ptolemy. Everyone in Alexandria knew the story-the king had become so enormously fat, he could no longer relieve himself either fore or aft without assistance.
While the audience hooted with laughter, the actor in the fat-suit waddled across the stage area toward an imaginary latrina (represented by a chair with a hole in it). Assisting him were the two young pipe players, each clutching an elbow and struggling to support his massive weight. When the three of them arrived at the latrina, one of the boys made a great show of searching amid the voluminous robes hanging from the merchant’s vast belly. At last, with a squeal of triumph, the boy revealed a small phallus that looked to be made of leather and brass and was evidently attached to a hidden wineskin or some such container, for a moment later the merchant threw back his head and gave a loud sigh of relief as golden liquid streamed forth from the spout. At first the boy carefully aimed the stream into the latrina, but then, mugging shamelessly to the audience, he began to direct the stream this way and that, deliberately making a terrible mess. The merchant, with his head thrown back and his eyes shut, remained oblivious.
At last, with his bladder finally empty and his phallus tucked away, the merchant began to waddle back toward his chair-then suddenly raised his eyebrows in alarm and shouted for his servants to reverse course. With a great deal of awkward confusion, the three of them turned around and headed back to the latrina.
What followed was an incredibly vulgar display, with the merchant repeatedly attempting to settle his enormous posterior on the latrina, and his two assistants frantically striving to pull apart his huge, unseen buttocks (which remained hidden by the folds of his garment). When at last the merchant was seated, with a great deal of grunting and heaving and a cacophony of gassy squeals (produced offstage, from within the tent, I think), he began to eject a peculiar array of debris from his rear end, which the assistants stooped down to retrieve, one by one. These included various pieces of pottery and bronze ware-lamps and bowls and serving implements-which the servants first displayed to the audience, then offered to the merchant, who wrinkled his nose and waved them away, as anyone would at something that came out of his backside. The laughter of the audience was thick with derision.
At first I took this display to be mere nonsense humor, until a nearby spectator suddenly got the point and muttered aloud, “Ah! They all come from Cyrene!”
Observing the pottery more closely, even I recognized the blue and yellow pattern distinctive to the workshops of Cyrene, a city some five hundred miles to the west of Alexandria-and then I understood the joke. Since the time of Alexander, Cyrene and its surrounding territory, called Cyrenaica, had been a part of Egypt’s kingdom, a western frontier traditionally administered by a younger brother or cousin of the king. Until eight years ago, the regent of Cyrene had been King Ptolemy’s bastard brother, called Apion; but when Apion died, childless, he left a will that bequeathed Cyrenaica to the Roman people. King Ptolemy, deeply in debt to Roman bankers and fearful of Roman arms, did not dare dispute the will-and so the kingdom had lost one of its principal cities, and the Romans had been allowed to establish a province bordering directly on Egypt, only a few days’ march from the capital.