Other parts can be taken by women, who are forbidden to appear on the stage in “legitimate” tragedy and comedy. Often the dances and postures of these actresses are indescribably vulgar, and their reputation for easy conduct is too well established. For all that, their presence brings unsteady youths to the theaters like flies, and affairs with actresses are quite normal things with a type of young bloods. Once Cicero was defending a free and easy client, a certain Plancus. “He’s accused of having run off with an actress?” declared the advocate. “Why _that’s_ just an amusement excellently sanctioned by custom!” The stories portrayed by the mimes correspond with their general character:--a robber chief befooling the clumsy constables sent to take him, a lover surprised by the return of a jealous husband and forced to hide in a large box, a beggar who suddenly stumbles into a fortune, a descent into the world of ghosts, episodes revolving around the introduction of a very clever trained dog, etc. Some of the acting is of high order, but there are few mimes which do not abound in lines and situations extremely gross,--for all that the open-air theaters are packed from morn until sunset. =323. The Pantomimes: Their Real Art.=--All considered, the pantomimes represent a higher degree of art. Here we have only one actor, who, with the aid of a chorus and a great orchestra of lutes and lyres, undertakes to tell a whole story merely by his dancing and rhythmic motions. A really great _pantomimus_ wins and deserves the favor of highly cultivated aristocrats. Pylades and Bathyllus in Augustus’s day had the fashionable world practically at their feet, and Paris was one of the prime intimates of Nero. The greater the skill the fewer the words that need to be spoken; the chanting of the chorus while the pantomimus is changing his costumes giving hint enough of the characters he is portraying. The music, florid and descriptive, keeps the audience in mood for the dancing. All sorts of subjects can thus be portrayed, including those of old Greek tragedies, the actor slipping from one character to another with consummate art:--now he is Agamemnon, now Clytemnestra, now Orestes. He can take male or female parts alternately, delineate the deepest passions, and tell a whole story with what his admirers call his “speaking hands,” and his “eloquence of dancing.”