by Mary Beard
This is a major theme in Plutarch’s biography, written some 150 years after Cicero’s death. From the very first chapter (where Plutarch repeats a joke that Cicero made on his own name, which means “chickpea” in Latin), the Life returns again and again to the theme of the famous orator’s use of laughter: sometimes to his witty bons mots, sometimes to his ill-advised tendency to crack a gag in very inappropriate places. Plutarch admits that Cicero’s exaggerated sense of his own importance was one of the reasons for his unpopularity in some quarters, but he also attracted hatred because he attacked people indiscriminately, “just to raise a laugh,” and Plutarch quotes a variety of his gibes and puns—against a man with ugly daughters, against the son of a murderous dictator, and against a drunken censor (“I’m afraid the man will punish me—for drinking water”).5
One of the most notorious occasions of Cicero’s ostentatious use of laughter was during the final civil war of the Republic—between Julius Caesar and Pompey—which was the prelude to Caesar’s autocratic rule. After much hesitation, Cicero joined Pompey’s camp in Greece in the summer of 49 BCE before the battle of Pharsalus, but he was not, says Plutarch, a popular member of the squad. “It was his own fault, as he did not deny that he regretted having come . . . and he did not hold back from joking or making witty gibes at his comrades; in fact, he himself was always going about the camp without a laugh, and frowning, but he made others laugh, quite against their will.” (“So why not employ him as guardian of your children?” he is said to have quipped, for example, at Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was promoting a decidedly unmilitary type to a command position on the grounds that he was “mild-mannered and sensible.”)6
Several years later, after Caesar’s assassination, Cicero replied to some of these criticisms in a pamphlet now known as the second Philippic, a vicious attack on Mark Antony—who, among other things, had clearly leveled, or repeated, some of the charges of inappropriate jocularity.7 Like Plutarch, Antony had most likely objected to Cicero’s habit of making his comrades laugh in such awful circumstances, and against their will (effectively an assertion of his control over their “uncontrollable” outbursts of laughter). In a characteristic rhetorical sweep, Cicero at first brushes the accusation aside: “I’m not even going to respond about those jokes you said I made in the camp.” But then he does offer a brief defense: “To be sure, that camp was full of gloom, I admit. But all the same, even if they are in dire straits, men do still take some relaxation from time to time; it’s only human. Yet the fact that the same man [Antony] finds fault both with my melancholy and with my jesting is a powerful proof that I took a moderate line in both respects.”8 Cicero justifies laughter as a natural human reaction even in troubled times while also pleading moderation in his conduct.9
It is, however, in his comparison of Cicero and the Greek orator Demosthenes, which forms the postscript to this pair of parallel lives, that Plutarch offers his most pointed comments on Cicero’s use of laughter. These were the two greatest orators of the Greco-Roman world (hence their treatment as a pair), but their use of laughter was starkly different. Demosthenes was no joker, but intense and serious, even—some would say—morose and sullen. Cicero, on the other hand, was not only “addicted to laughter” (or perhaps “quite at home with laughter,” oikeios gelōtos); he was, in fact, “often carried away by his joking to the point of buffoonery [pros to bōmolochon], and when, to get his own way in the cases he was pleading, he handled matters that deserved gravity with irony, laughter, and mirth, he neglected decorum.”10
Plutarch quotes a telling Roman quip about Cicero’s jocularity. During his consulship, in 63 BCE, he was defending Lucius Licinius Murena against charges of bribery, and in the course of his defense speech (a version of which still survives), he made tremendous fun of some of the absurdities of Stoicism—the philosophical system vociferously espoused by Marcus Porcius Cato, one of the prosecutors. When “clear laughter” (the Greek word is lampros, literally “bright”) spread from the audience to the judges, Cato, “beaming” (diameidiasas), simply said, “What a geloios we have for a consul.”11
The Greek word geloios has been translated into English in several different ways: “What a funny consul we have!” “What a comedian we have for a consul.”12 But what did Cato say in his original Latin? One possibility is that he called Cicero a ridiculus consul. If so, it will have been a nice joke, because ridiculus—one of the most basic terms of Latin laughter vocabulary—was a dangerously ambiguous word. For, in a way that constantly destabilized Roman discussions of laughter, ridiculus meant “laugh-able” or “prompting laughter” in two ways: on the one hand, it could refer to something that people laughed at, the butt of laughter (more or less “ridiculous” in the modern sense); on the other hand, it was someone or something that provoked people to laugh (and so it could imply something like “witty” or “amusing”). As we shall find in what follows, this was a pressing ambiguity in Roman culture, exploited and debated in various ways. Here, if Cato really did say that Cicero was a ridiculus consul, he was cleverly pointing the finger at his rival, insinuating that such a smart jokester was also a man that the audience should laugh at.
Quintilian’s discussion of Cicero and laughter enriches this picture. He lays out a similar comparison between Demosthenes (whom “many people think had no capacity for raising laughter in a judge” or even that he firmly wanted nothing to do with it) and Cicero (“whom many think had no moderation in it”). Quintilian himself is rather more charitable on both counts. Demosthenes did not actively dislike jokes, he insists, but was simply not very good at them. As for Cicero (“whether I judge correctly on this, or whether I am swayed by my inordinate passion for this outstanding orator”), he displayed a wonderful urbanitas (wit or urbanity), and “both in his everyday conversations and in his debates in court and cross-examination of witnesses, he uttered more witty remarks [facete] than anyone else.” In fact, Quintilian suggests, Cicero probably did not actually coin some of the rather vulgar sayings often attributed to him.13
Nonetheless, on several occasions in the lengthy discussion that follows, Quintilian finds himself wondering whether certain Ciceronian bons mots were not quite appropriate for a gentleman orator. As we shall see, two antitypes of joker—the vulgar opposites of the cultured wit—stalk discussions of the rhetoric of laughter: the mime actor, or mimus (who has a large part to play in chapter 7), and the scurra (a curious amalgam of jester, scrounger, and man-about-town, who features in this and the next chapter). Quintilian concedes that some of Cicero’s tactics for raising a laugh were uncomfortably close to those of the mimus or the scurra. And he was not the only one to have those qualms. One well-known story, found both in Macrobius and in one of the declamations of the elder Seneca, explicitly pits Cicero in a contest of wits against Decimus Laberius, a writer of mimes (when an encounter in the cramped seats at some spectacle or play leads to a competitive exchange of gibes).14 Macrobius also treats it as common knowledge that Cicero’s enemies used to call him a consularis scurra (“a scurra of consular rank”).15 In fact, another possibility is that Cato exclaimed in Latin, “What a scurra we have for a consul!” There is no Greek equivalent of the word scurra, and Plutarch might reasonably have resorted to geloios as a rough translation.16
In seeking to explain Cicero’s dubious reputation in this area, Quintilian partly casts the blame on his secretary Tiro, “or whoever it was who published the three volumes on this subject.” The “subject” he is referring to is wit or jesting, and this trio of books appears to have been a collection of Cicero’s bona dicta (jokes), not all of which were quite up to scratch. For the problem with jokebooks throughout history is that they are often padded out with some decidedly feeble, or risky, specimens. “If only,” Quintilian continues, “he had been more sparing in the number of jokes [dicta] he included and shown more judgment in selecting than eagerness in collecting them. It would not have exposed Cicero so much to his critics.”17 We know little of this multivolume
compendium of wit and wisdom, but it was not the only such publication of the great orator’s bons mots. In a surviving letter of 46 BCE, Cicero writes to thank his friend Gaius Trebonius, who had just sent him, as a gift, a book containing a collection of his own witticisms. A perfect present for a narcissist, one might say. But here also there was perhaps a problem with the selection, or lack of it (“Whatever I’ve said seems to you to be facetum [witty],” Cicero writes, “but it might not seem the same to others”). Luckily, Trebonius must have had a gift for packaging the quips: “As you tell them, they become venustissima [ever so smart],” Cicero writes in ironically grateful mode. “In fact, readers will almost have used up all their laughter before they get to me.”18
It is presumably these long-lost collections that lie behind the “jokes of Cicero,” the series of “one-liners” we find assembled on a more modest scale in Macrobius and in Quintilian himself. My own particular favorite is his nice swipe at the apparently diminutive husband of his daughter, Tullia: “Seeing his son-in-law Lentulus, a short chap, kitted out with a long sword, he said. ‘Who tied my son-in-law to his sword?’”19 But we should also note another variant on the sero joke among these, suggesting that the pun between “too late” or “a bit late” and “late in the day” was something of a classic. It is one of the gags that Cicero made in Pompey’s camp during the civil war. When he first arrived at the camp, after all his vacillations, people said to him, “You’ve got here a bit late [sero]”—perhaps the equivalent of a sardonic “Better late than never.” “I’ve not come at a late hour [sero],” he retorted. “I don’t see anything ready for dinner yet [nihil hic paratum].”20 Indeed, Cicero’s dicta, or facetiae (as they came more often to be called), were a staple of Renaissance wit and learning and regularly find a place in jokebooks and other such compendia at least up to the eighteenth century.21 It is only the modern world that has tended to forget that Cicero was such a “laughter lover.”
Not that it is likely that Cicero really coined all these jokes ascribed to him. Quintilian was not merely being protective of his hero in suggesting that he had been credited with some feeble specimens that he had never uttered. In a letter written from Cilicia (where he was the provincial governor) in 50 BCE, Cicero complains that “everybody’s dicta are ascribed to me” and jokingly ticks off his correspondent—whose name, appropriately, was Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus (eutrapelos means “witty” in Greek)—for not making a stand on Cicero’s behalf and denying his authorship of the weak imposters; at the same time he flatters himself (or pretends to flatter himself) that his authentic witticisms were stamped with his individual style. “Don’t you protest?” he writes. “After all, I was hoping that I had left such a distinctive brand of quips that they could be recognized in and of themselves.”22
The truth is, of course, that “great men” attract, as much as they utter, bons mots and that jokes migrate among them (nicely demonstrated by the very same gag being attributed to Cicero by Quintilian and to Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, by Macrobius).23 But whether they were authentic or not, the important point is that in antiquity, Cicero was known for his jokes as well as his speeches and treatises, and he had a decidedly edgy reputation for laughter.
CONTROLLING LAUGHTER?
Despite the air of gravitas that has become Cicero’s modern hallmark, some particular aspects of his laughter, wit, and “humor” (a term we cannot resist, though it is treacherous to apply to the ancient world) have remained on the scholarly agenda.24 Recently, for example, Gregory Hutchinson and others have explored how Cicero’s Letters exploit jocularity, badinage, and the culture of shared laughter in constructing epistolary relationships. Laughter and joking in the Letters, as Hutchinson points out, are generally treated as companionable, rather than aggressive, and are often a marker that “the addressee is especially trusted, or especially akin in mind”; when Atticus is away, Cicero writes to him that he has no one with whom he can “joke freely.”25
But an even more influential strand of discussion has concerned the role of humorous invective in Ciceronian speeches and its implications for social and cultural control. Amy Richlin’s important study The Garden of Priapus, first published in 1983, laid much of the groundwork for this—arguing (in a way that is now taken for granted) that the sexual humor in Roman satire, epigram, lampoon, and invective was closely related to hierarchies of power. On Richlin’s model, when Cicero ridicules the sexual behavior of his opponents (casting them on the wrong side of the boundaries that lay between proper, normative Roman maleness and a variety of transgressive antitypes—the pathic, the “softy,” the cinaedus, the mollis), he is using wit and laughter as one weapon in the struggle for dominance.26 This is humor founded not on goodwill but on aggression. It is a classic case of a type of joking that Freud labeled tendentious (as opposed to innocent)—in which, as he put it, “by making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him—to which the third person [that is, in Ciceronian oratory, the audience], who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter.”27
A decade after Richlin’s study appeared, Antony Corbeill, in Controlling Laughter, developed these ideas at length, with a primary focus on Cicero’s speeches and a wider range of targets in mind, from the sexual effeminacy that was one of Richlin’s main concerns to all kinds of bodily peculiarities—such as gout or disfiguring swellings or even “funny” names. For Corbeill, Cicero’s use of laughter at his opponents, whether in the courtroom, the senate, or the assembly, was a powerful mechanism of both exclusion (for it served to isolate the enemy and present him as beyond the social pale) and persuasion (for it united the laughing audience in the affirmation of their shared “ethical standards”). To put it even more strongly, aggressive communal laughter at the deviant, or rather at the man Cicero chose to present as such, was a means of “simultaneously creating and enforcing the community’s ethical values. Jokes become a means of ordering social realities.” One instructive instance of this is Cicero’s attack on Vatinius in 56 BCE, a speech that seems to revel in mocking the grotesque appearance (bull neck, bulging eyes, and nasty swellings, or strumae) of its target while correlating Vatinius’ physical ugliness with his moral and political failings. As the audience joins together in laughter, so Corbeill’s logic goes, “Cicero becomes the society’s moral spokesperson, inveighing against the outrage Vatinius embodies.”28
This has been an extremely influential approach. In fact, most historians of Roman public life and public speaking would now regard Cicero’s use of laughter both as a powerful means of attack and as an equally powerful mechanism for reinforcing, or constructing, social norms.29 It is also an overwhelmingly aggressive (and frankly not very funny) approach to oratorical laughter, which I hope to nuance—or supplement—in the rest of this chapter. I am not looking to overturn it. I have no doubt whatsoever that laughter in the Roman Forum, courtroom, or Senate house could act to isolate the deviant while reaffirming shared social values, nor do I have any doubt that Roman laughter could sometimes be, in Quintilian’s words, “not far from derision.”30 But there was much more to it than that, which has not recently received the attention it deserves.
My focus will be on Cicero’s discussion of the use of laughter in public speaking, its benefits and—more especially—its risks. I shall concentrate not on his speeches but on the central chapters of the second book of his essay On the Orator, which (even if not quite the “mini treatise” on laughter that it is sometimes cracked up to be31) is nevertheless the most substantial, sustained, and challenging discussion of laughter, in any of its aspects, to have survived from the ancient world—a fact that is all too easy to forget in our hunt for the lost views of Aristotle (pp. 29–31).
It is in On the Orator, more than in any other of his surviving works,32 that Cicero offers both theoretical analysis and concrete examples of what was most likely to rouse a Roman audience to laughter, how laughter could be provoked, and
with what consequence for speaker, listeners, or the butt of the joke. The truth is that when we read his speeches, we are usually second-guessing what was funny, when exactly the audience would have laughed—and how enthusiastically. It is one thing to talk generally about the humorous invective of the speech against Vatinius; it is quite another to judge which precise passages would have provoked the most hilarity (were all those physical oddities equally funny?) or how the words might have been delivered in order to do that. But just as Terence’s hahahae enabled us to pinpoint a precise moment of laughter, the discussion in On the Orator gives explicit information (at least as Cicero saw it) on particular outbursts of laughter, even occasionally calibrating its intensity, and reflects on some of the major principles that guide a Roman orator in exploiting jocularity and laughter. It is a discussion that faces questions of laughter itself—its causes and effects—head on.
Cicero’s discussion points his readers to important sides of the laughing process beyond the familiar topics of derision and control (indeed, derision is not an especially prominent theme here). We learn about the physical nature of laughter; about different ways of raising a laugh from an audience, from funny words to funny faces; and about what was off limits as a proper subject of laughter. But one crucial undercurrent is the risk associated with provoking laughter. Laughter was always in danger of rebounding: it was not only the orator’s opponent who could be isolated and exposed by raising a laugh; its provocation could also expose and isolate the orator himself. The two senses of ridiculus (“he makes us laugh” versus “the one we laugh at”) were always perilously close. You had to be careful in playing for laughs.33
