These pantomimi seem to have been held in great honour; many were children of the Graces and the Virtues! The tragic and the comic masks were among the ornaments of the sepulchral monuments of an archmime and a pantomime. Montfaucon conjectures that they formed a select fraternity.[35] They had such an influence over the Roman people, that when two of them quarrelled, Augustus interfered to renew their friendship. Pylades was one of them; and he observed to the emperor, that nothing could be more useful to him than that the people should be perpetually occupied with the _squabbles_ between him and Bathyllus! The advice was accepted, and the emperor was silenced. The parti-coloured hero, with every part of his dress, has been drawn out of the great wardrobe of antiquity: he was a Roman Mime. HARLEQUIN is described with his shaven head, _rasis capitibus_; his sooty face, _fuligine faciem obducti_; his flat, unshod feet, _planipedes_; and his patched coat of many colours, _Mimi centunculo_.[36] Even _Pullicinella_, whom we familiarly call PUNCH, may receive, like other personages of not greater importance, all his dignity from antiquity; one of his Roman ancestors having appeared to an antiquary's visionary eye in a bronze statue; more than one erudite dissertation authenticates the family likeness; the nose long, prominent, and hooked; the staring goggle eyes; the hump at his back and at his breast; in a word, all the character which so strongly marks the Punch-race, as distinctly as whole dynasties have been featured by the Austrian lip and the Bourbon nose.[37] The genealogy of the whole family is confirmed by the general term, which includes them all; for our _Zany_, in Italian _Zanni_, comes direct from _Sannio_, a buffoon: and a passage in Cicero, _De Oratore_, paints Harlequin and his brother gesticulators after the life; the perpetual trembling motion of their limbs, their ludicrous and flexible gestures, and all the mimicry of their faces:--_Quid enim potest tam ridiculum, quam_ SANNIO _esse? Qui ore, vultu, imitandis motibus, voce, denique corpore ridetur ipso_. Lib. ii. sect. 51. "For what has more of the ludicrous than SANNIO? who, with his mouth, his face, imitating every motion, with his voice, and, indeed, with all his body, provokes laughter."[38]