HISTRIONES. - From the Latin histrio -onis (also minus), that is, comedian, mime, this was the name given to the actor in the Roman theater.
Their first homeland seems to have been Sicily; from there they crossed to the mainland to settle in Rome, where their success undermined that of the tragic and comic poets. The profession of the istriones was one of those that brought with it, for whoever practiced it, a minima capitis deminutio, as a degrading trade.
The Catholic Church, from the earliest centuries, began a determined struggle against them for a twofold reason: the immorality they brought onto the stage and their having lent themselves to the derision of Christian rites. On the first point, immorality, even pagan testimonies bear witness. Seneca states: «nothing is more dangerous than to linger at some spectacle» (Epist., I. 1, 7). Particularly immoral among the istriones were the «timelici», so called because they danced before Bacchus, named Timele, displaying themselves in every shamelessness and triviality to amuse the public (Martial, Epigram., I, 76). So great was the immodesty of the performances, the words and the music that Tiberius himself complained of it in the Senate and prohibited such performances. But they were readmitted later by Nero, who then in turn had to prohibit them because of the spread of public indecency (Tacitus, Annales, IV, 14).
As long as they nevertheless remained on the stage, the Church treated them with great severity. St. Cyprian calls them teachers of impurity and excludes them from communion (Epist., 1: PL 4, 211 ff.). The same severity is found among the other Africans (cf. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, IV, 26: ibid. 41, 132 ff.), and among the Fathers in general, from St. Jerome (Epistolae, 4, 5: ibid. 22, 515) to Paul Orosius (Historiarum, V, 5: ibid. 31, 807), down to writers outside the patristic era (Alcuin). The councils too were not gentle with the histriones. On St. Genesius the Mime see: GENESIUS, saint, martyr.
The histriones were excluded from the Sacraments and from the ecclesiastical ministry, but also from legitimate ecclesiastical acts. A cleric had to withdraw immediately from the place where a histrio was performing some scene (Councils of Laodicea [ca. 343-80], can. 54; of Carthage [419], can. 2; of Agde [506], can. 39; Trullan [692], can. 24).
The Christian emperors Theodosius the Elder (386) and Theodosius the Younger (424) prohibited performances on solemn days, and there was an entire restrictive legislation (Cod. XI, 40).
The Church triumphed fully only when, in place of the scandalous stage performances of paganism, it established the medieval representations, a creation of Christianity. The Church's condemnations of the histriones do not, however, sound like a condemnation of entertainment in itself and of the art of one who makes himself the instrument of others' entertainment. Play can be lawful or unlawful by reason of its matter, time, place, and other circumstances. Therefore the profession of histrio, says St. Thomas, is not in itself evil, if the play in itself and in its circumstances is not contrary to decency, since play is necessary to recreate man and relieve him of the pains inseparable from human life (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 168, a. 3 ad 3). On the other hand the histriones who mock modesty and exalt shamelessness in their public performances sin against charity and against modesty or against the virtue they deride in the specific case, since they are guilty of direct scandal.
This judgment, if it has only a historical value for the ancient histriones, has by analogy a present-day value for the manner of behaving of those who are in some way the heirs of the art of entertaining: extras, variety artists, stars and divas of the cinema, theater artists, radio commentators, etc.
Bibliography2 works
Giuseppe Sima