idolopoeia

— The plays' capacity to present the political actors on stage as characters actively engaged in interpreting and thus making their way through the very plots that their own actions and interactions were constituting owed a great deal to forensic rhetoric and the training in theopoeia (impersonating historical and mythological characters), prosopoeia (impersonating abstractions or 'things unknown'), and idolopoeia (impersonating dead people)