Once-popular, The Fountain of Fair Fortune was a pantomime. To children of the twentieth century who had experienced talking pictures, it was unbearably dull. But in an earlier age—not the era of silent films, but the Roman Empire before Christ—the rise of pantomime was directly related to its vast territory.
The Bible said that, to prevent people from building the Tower of Babel, God made humanity speak different languages, leaving them unable to communicate with one another.
Ancient Rome, meanwhile, had conquered too many countries and regions, and there were simply too many people speaking all manner of languages. When the Ancient Greeks spread Hellenization, they made the conquered territories speak Greek. Legend had it that from Greece to India, knowing one language—Greek—was enough. Yet staging a performance in only one language was impractical too, because it would draw too few spectators. Poets, playwrights, and orators often exaggerated the truth because their goal was to attract an audience; performing in several languages on the same stage was even less possible.
Pantomime solved that problem. An envoy from Asia Minor once praised it: "The artist's gestures are so compelling, and the things he conveys so clear, that even those who cannot understand the explanation can understand it."
If The Fountain of Fair Fortune was incomprehensible, perhaps the actors simply had not performed well enough. After all, they were students.
Later, after a fire in the auditorium, the play was no longer staged at school. Christmas was no longer celebrated there either. Everyone boarded the Hogwarts Express and reunited with their families.
The first time Pomona saw Trinity in the cinema, she realized that Trinity was not a ruthless woman who killed without blinking. It was like the first time she saw Fitzgerald refuse to let Isidora take away her pain—that expression