Along with chariot races, gladiator fights, and animal hunts, pantomime dance performances led competition for attention in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Pantomime dancers did not speak, but danced to performed music. Music is effective for evoking emotion.^ The musical support in pantomime performance was “varied and comprehensive – the flute, the pipes, the tapping of feet {using an “iron shoe,” called a scabellum}, the clash of symbols, the melodious voice of the actor, the concord of the singers.”^ The orchestra for a pantomime dance was much more potent than that for ancient Greek dramatic performances.^ Pantomime dancing apparently was closely synchronized to music.^ The pantomime account of the Judgment of Paris in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses links distinctive music to specific characters:

each goddess has a different musical accompaniment fitting her mythological character: Ionic for Juno, Doric for the warrior goddess Minerva, and Lydian for Venus.^

Lucian described a pantomime performing:

he danced the love of Aphrodite and Ares, Helius tattling, Hephaestus laying his plot and trapping both of them with his entangling bonds, the gods who came in on them, portrayed individually, Aphrodite ashamed, Ares seeking cover and begging for mercy, and everything that belongs to this story {i.e., Homer, Odyssey 8.266-320}^

Pantomimes presented horrors:

We thought we were looking on Bacchus himself when the old man lustily led the maenads in their furious dance, and played Cadmus tripping in the fall of years, and the messenger coming from the forest where he had spied on the rout of the Bacchants, and frenzied Agave exulting in the blood of her son. Heavens! how divine was the man’s acting.^ ^

Hellenistic and Imperial Roman art recognized individual, internal emotion states. That’s evident in the Hellenistic-Imperial sculptures Laocoön and His Sons, the Blind Homer, the Hanging Marsyas, and the Dying Gaul. Pantomime has aesthetic similarities with Ovid’s early Imperial poetry. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria displays both the soul of a lover and the soul of a rogue. It, and perhaps also Ovid’s Metamorphoses, provided texts for pantomime performances.^ The experience of pantomime dance was varied, short, intense emotions. The audience’s experience of a pantomime performance was probably similar to the experience of hearing a sequence of popular songs on the radio late in the twentieth century.