Pantomime, among the ancient Romans, denoted not a spectacle but a person. The pantomimes were a class of actors who acted wholly by mimicry in gesture, movements, and posturings, corresponding therefore pretty closely to the modern ballet-dancers. When they first made their appearance in Rome cannot be ascertained; probably the histriones (Etrusc. hister, 'a dancer') brought from Etruria to Rome 364 B.C. were pantomimes; but the name does not once occur during the republic, though it is common enough from the very dawn of the empire. Augustus showed great favour to this class of performers, and is consequently supposed by some writers to have been himself the inventor of the art of dumb acting. The most celebrated pantomimes of the Augustan age were Bathyllus (a freedman of Mæcenas), Pyllades, and Hylas. The class soon spread over all Italy and the provinces, and became so popular with the Roman nobles and knights that Tiberius reckoned it necessary to administer a check to their vanity, by issuing a decree forbidding the aristocracy to frequent their houses, or to be seen walking with them in the streets. Under Caligula they were again received into the imperial favour; and Nero, who carried every unworthy weakness and vice to the extremity of caricature, himself acted as a pantomime. From this period they enjoyed uninterrupted popularity as long as paganism held sway in the empire.
As the pantomimes wore masks, no facial mimicry was possible; everything depended on the movements of the body. It was the hands and fingers chiefly that spoke; hence the expressions, manus loquacissime, digiti clamosi, &c. To such perfection was this art carried that it is said the pantomimes could give a finer and more precise expression to passion and action than the poets themselves. The subjects thus represented in dumb show were always mythological, and consequently pretty well known to the spectators. The dress of the actors was made to reveal, and not to conceal, the beauties of their person; and as, after the 2d century, women began to appear in public as pantomimes, the effect, as may easily be supposed, of their costume, or lack of costume, was prejudicial to morality. Hence pantomimic exhibitions were denounced by the early Christian writers, as they were even by pagan moralists like Juvenal.
The pastoral drama in mediæval Italy gave birth to the opera, and already in the 16th century we find on the Spanish stage ballets with allegorical figures. Into France also about the same time the ballet was introduced. But the improvised Italian comedy was already familiarly known far beyond Italy, with its conventional comic figures, Pantalone and Arlecchino. In England the mask and so-called opera of the 17th century supplied the place of the modern pantomime, which grew out of an attempt to reproduce a popular light dramatic entertainment, varied with song and dance, itself the parent of the modern French vaudeville. Colley Cibber mentions as the first example a piece on the Loves of Mars and Venus. Geneste gives the year 1723 as the commencement of pantomime in England, with Harlequin Dr Faustus by John Thurmond, presented at Drury Lane. John Rich (1681-1781) produced splendid pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden, and from that time this form of entertainment became a traditional institution.
In the older English pantomimes the harlequin played a serious as well as merely comic part; columbine (originally his daughter) was a village maiden whose lover was pursued by the constables—the prototypes of the modern policemen. The predominance of the clown seems to be a modern development, mainly due to the exceptional ability of Joseph Grimaldi. Now the chief reliance of the manager is on scenic and spectacular effects, large sums of money being lavished on the mise en scène.