Choricius of Gaza's "Defense of Mimes" and the question of the continuity of Greek theatre

to an extent uncharted territory in the field oftheatrical history. It is only in the past few decades that works attempting (albeit partially) to map the situation in the Greek environment have started to appear. Though yet more new dramatic texts are being discovered, the processing of these texts is complicated due to the specific and demanding requirements the researcher has to meet when presented with them. The essential requirement for analysing these materials is philological competence and knowledge oftheatrical history. It has traditionally been the case that philologists in the main have approached the texts from the point ofview oftheir discipline only, while theatrologists have rarely had a command of ancient Greek or Latin, or other languages of the multiethnic Byzantine Empire. An equally essential requirement is the knowledge of and respect for the different cultural and religious tradition of the East whose dissimilarity may easily distort conclusions reached by a researcher weaned on Western thought and standards. This dissertation sets out to translate and thematically sort Choricius' Apologia Mimorum, a major literary testament to the lateantique ancient mime, written in the Christian milieu ofthe Rhetorical School of Gaza in the spirit of the antique literary tradition. I attempted to..