by Mary Beard
Cicero’s gibes at Vatinius are instructive here. They have been taken as some of the most extreme examples of assassination by jest. As we have seen (above, p. 106), Cicero repeatedly ridiculed Vatinius’ apparently disgusting appearance (in particular his facial swellings), which he made stand for Vatinius’ “despicable nature” and exclusion from the communal values and good sense of the laughing crowd. Of course, we have no idea what Vatinius really looked like or how unsightly his strumae were (and neither did those later Roman writers who commented on them); it would certainly make a difference to how we judged the repartee to know whether the target was a gross disfigurement or just a slightly puffy face and a few warts. But it is worth noting that some ancient views presented the pattern of joking at Vatinius’ expense in rather different terms from those of modern critics. Seneca, for example, refers to the way that Vatinius deflected the gibes by joking about his own appearance,89 and some of the bons mots that Quintilian and (especially) Macrobius collected imply a relationship of much more jocular bantering between Cicero and Vatinius. On one occasion, Macrobius explains, Vatinius was ill and complained that Cicero had not been to visit him. “I wanted to come when you were consul,” Cicero quipped, “but nightfall caught up with me” (one of a series of jokes about the ludicrously short terms of office of consuls under Julius Caesar). Macrobius goes on to say that Cicero was getting his revenge here, because when he had returned from exile, “brought back, he boasted, on the shoulders of the state,” Vatinius had retorted, “So where did your varicose veins come from, then?”90
The point is that it is very hard to calibrate from the outside the aggression that comes with joking and banter, as many modern observers of the British House of Commons find—amazed to see that those who have insulted each other bitterly are, two hours later, sharing a drink in the Commons Bar. We should not assume that Cicero’s jesting “invective” was always an aggressive weapon of social and political exclusion; it might also have been an interactive idiom shared between the orator and his apparent victim.91
QUINTILIAN’S ADVICE TO THE JOKING ORATOR
Some 150 years after Cicero wrote On the Orator, Quintilian composed his twelve-volume Handbook on Oratory. In the middle of the sixth book—much of which is devoted to how the orator might appeal to the audience’s emotions (and which opens with an extraordinary account of the death of Quintilian’s wife and two sons)—is a long chapter on laughter, almost as long as Strabo’s diversion in Cicero’s treatise. It is here that we find his comparison between Cicero and Demosthenes (see above, p. 103), his sound bite on risus being not far from derisus (p. 28), and his struggles to come up with a working definition of the word salsum (p. 115).92
Predictably enough, Cicero was one of Quintilian’s major sources,93 and there are many overlaps between the two accounts: Quintilian, for example, shares the division of wit into the categories of dicto (verbo in Quintilian) and re, warns against face pulling as an acceptable means of producing laughter for the elite orator, and advises his readers not to frame jokes against whole classes of people.94 He even includes some of the same examples of jokes and quips as Cicero—though his gift for telling them certainly does not equal his model’s. He rather mangles the joke about the thieving slave (“Nero said about a dreadful slave that there was no one in the house more trusted, as nothing was hidden away or locked”).95 And he seems to have missed the point of one of the better bons mots in On the Orator. As an example of a joke by overstatement, Strabo quotes Crassus’ gibe about Gaius Memmius, the tribune of 111 BCE: “He fancies himself so exalted that when he is coming into the Forum, he ducks his head to pass under the Arch of Fabius.” This turns up in Quintilian as “Cicero’s remark about the very tall man: he hit his head on the Arch of Fabius.”96
But there are significant differences too. For a start, Quintilian includes a much wider range of witty sayings than the dramatic date of On the Orator made possible: Cicero was restricted to jokes uttered before 91 BCE; Quintilian could cite quips from famous jokesters of later periods, including Cicero himself and the emperor Augustus. But Quintilian also drew on other discussions of laughter and related topics, including a book on “urbanity” by Domitius Marsus, to which he devotes a critical appendix (arguing, among other things, that Marsus’ definition of urbanitas was too general),97 and he structured his discussion under different headings, with different emphases, sometimes raising significantly different topics and anxieties, major and minor.
Quintilian makes a great deal of, for example, the analogy between wit and cookery. Cicero had hinted at this in On the Orator: Strabo at one point remarks that the things he is discussing amount to “seasoning” (condimenta) for day-to-day talk or legal cases. But Quintilian develops this into an extended analogy, linking laughter and food in a way that is an important theme in other writers (see below, pp. 148–51). Pinpointing the root of the word, he writes of salsum as “a simple seasoning of a speech, which is sensed by some unconscious judgment, rather like the palate. . . . For just as salt when it is sprinkled generously over food, though not in excess, brings a pleasure all of its own, so witticisms [sales] in speaking have something about them that gives us a thirst for listening.”98 He also puts even more emphasis than Cicero had on the gentle character of oratorical wit. “Let us never want to hurt anyone [with our joking],” he insists, “and let’s have nothing to do with the idea that it is better to lose a friend than a jest.”99 We might be seeing here a chronological shift in oratorical style (from the gloves-off style of the Republic to the slightly insipid decorum of the Principate100), but honestly, two isolated discussions are not a strong enough foundation for any such argument.
Quintilian also introduces some striking observations not found in On the Orator. He claims, for example, that another characteristic of the scurra is that he makes jokes against himself (“one does not approve of that in an orator”).101 And he suggests that some words prompt laughter in and of themselves. “The word stomach [stomachus] has something funny about it,” and so does the word satagere (“bustle about” or even, in the context, “overact”).102 But there are two major anxieties about the use of laughter that bulk even larger in Quintilian’s discussion than in Cicero’s: the first is the potential for laughter to rebound on the joker, and the second is that prompts to laughter are very often untrue.
Strabo’s presentation revealed lurking worries that the orator might become, like the clown, the object of the laughter he provokes. This comes to the foreground in Quintilian’s Handbook, which stresses on several occasions the dangerously ambiguous nature of the laughter process. Referring, for example, to Cicero’s claim that laughter has its foundation “in what you might call the ugly or dishonorable,” he raises the possibility that pointing the finger at such things might rebound: “When these features are pointed out in others, that’s called urbanitas; when they rebound [reccidunt] on the speaker, that’s called foolishness [stultitia].” There are even those, he observes later, who do not avoid jokes that rebound on themselves (in ipsos reccidere), and he proceeds to tell the story of a particularly ugly orator who made himself vulnerable by taking a sideswipe at the appearance of someone else.103
Quintilian also plays even more explicitly than Cicero with the different sides, active and passive, of the word ridiculus, with the implication that the man who raises a laugh risks becoming (in our, passive, sense) ridiculous. The starkest example is found earlier in the book, before the section dedicated to the use of laughter. Discussing the epilogues of speeches (which might sometime include wit), Quintilian as often includes a description of what to avoid. On one occasion, he explains, the prosecutor was waving in court the bloody sword with which he claimed the victim had been murdered. The other advocate pretended to be scared and hid; when he was called on to speak, he peeped out—his head still partly covered up—and asked if the man with the sword had gone. “Fecit enim risum sed ridiculus fuit” (he raised a laugh but was ridiculous).104 Cicero might well have compare
d the performance to that of a mime actor.
Quintilian’s concerns about truth and falsehood take us further from Cicero’s themes. Cicero in fact was generally unperturbed by the lying and deception that joking could involve—as we can see in another joke about Memmius, the tribune of 111 BCE, that Strabo recounts. Crassus, he explains, once claimed in a speech that Memmius had been involved in a brawl over a girl with someone called Largus and had bitten a large chunk out of the man’s arm. Not just that, but all over the town of Tarracina, where the brawl took place, the letters LLLMM started to appear—which Crassus claimed stood for “Lacerat Lacertum Largi Mordax Memmius” (or, as the Loeb translation nicely renders it, “Mordacious Memmius lacerates Largus’ limb”). It raised a good laugh—and every word of it was made up. For Cicero, that was a fine jest, appropriate for an orator, whether it was broadly true with just a sprinkling of “fiblets” (mendaciunculis) or a total fabrication.105
It was not so for Quintilian. In a more extreme version of the traditional ancient concerns about the truth of rhetoric, he starts his section on “laughter raising” with a worry about falsehood in joking: “What brings the greatest difficulty to the subject is, first of all, that a joke [dictum ridiculum] is usually untrue.” Although he does not often return directly to this problem, it hovers over the discussion—as when he states that “everything that is obviously made up produces laughter.”106
This is a concern that we find elsewhere in Roman discussions of laughter in very different literary genres. One of the most memorable versions of this theme of truth versus falsehood in the production of laughter is in fact to be found in the Fables of Phaedrus, written in the first half of the first century CE. It is the story of a competition in front of an audience between a scurra, “well known for his urban wit” (notus urbano sale), and a peasant (rusticus)—as to who could do the best imitation of a pig. The scurra had started the show on the first day, winning loud applause for his pig noises, but the peasant challenged him to a second round on the very next day. An even bigger crowd turned up, determined to deride (derisuros). The scurra repeated his performance of the previous day, to great applause. Then the peasant came forward, pretending that he had a real pig concealed underneath his clothes—which in fact he did. He tweaked the animal’s ear to make it (really) squeal, but the audience still preferred the scurra’s version, voting it a much better imitation of a pig than the real pig. As they threw the peasant off the stage, he produced the animal to prove to the audience what a mistake they had made.107
It’s a dense story, made all the more complicated by the layers of simulation and dissimulation involved (even the peasant is pretending to be pretending). But the simple idea that the scurra, the professional jokester, could please the audience with his imitation noise better than the peasant could with his real pig is just what Quintilian would have been worried about.
SERO?
I started this chapter with a play on words that Quintilian much admired. Cicero—who had been pressed to specify at Milo’s trial when Clodius had died—replied with a single (hilarious) word: sero (late/too late). Why did Quintilian find this response such a good joke? I am far from clear that I have the final answer to that. But the discussions of oratorical laughter in both On the Orator and the Handbook do bring us a little closer to understanding its impact on Quintilian. Various factors made this a quip of which one might especially approve. It was spontaneous and unprepared. It was a response rather than an unprovoked attack. It applied only to Clodius, rather than being a class action.
No less important, for Quintilian at least, it was true . . . unlike some of the instances of laughter and joking in the Roman imperial court that we will explore in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 6
From Emperor to Jester
LAUGHTER AND POWER
The opening pages of this book featured an encounter between an emperor and a senator in the Colosseum, with laughter—in some form—on both sides: the senator and writer, Dio Cassius, chewing on his laurel leaf to disguise the fact that he was cracking up; the emperor, Commodus, reportedly grinning in a triumphant and threatening fashion. We have also briefly glimpsed some revealing stories of the laughter and two-edged jocularity of the emperor Elagabalus (see p. 77), who was on the throne some thirty years after Commodus, from 218 to 222 CE, gleefully recounted in his fantastical biography—more fantasy than real life, it is usually reckoned.
In what is, to my knowledge, the first recorded use of the whoopee cushion in world history, his Life explains how Elagabalus raised a laugh as his guests were literally deflated at dinner—and his pranks are said to have included the display of hilarious lineups of eight bald or one-eyed or deaf or gouty men. In the theater, his laughter drowned out that of the rest of the audience. Other tales from the same, flagrantly unreliable source recount how he “used also in fact to joke with his slaves, even ordering them to bring him a thousand pounds in weight of spiders’ webs and offering a reward,” or how “when his friends became drunk, he used often to lock them up, and suddenly in the night he would send in lions and leopards and bears—tame ones—so that when they woke up at daybreak, or worse, during the night, they would find lions and leopards and bears in the room with them. And many of them died from it.”1
The extravagant fantasies in the Augustan History are often more historically revealing than they appear—not simply inventions but absurd magnifications of traditional Roman concerns. We might see some of these stories of Elagabalus as inverted reflections of the anxieties that Quintilian expressed over the truth and falsehood of jokes and laughter. A chilling consequence of Roman autocracy is imagined here as the capacity of the tyrant to make his jokes come (horribly and unexpectedly) true: the tigers and so on were harmless, but the guests died anyway.2
It is a truism that the practice of laughter is closely bound up with power and its differentials (what social practice isn’t?). The interesting question—which this chapter tries to broach—is, in what particular ways was laughter related to Roman power? We start with emperors and autocrats and move (via masters and slaves, and an extraordinarily jocular account of a chilling audience with the emperor Caligula) to reflect on the place of the joker or jester at Rome—both inside and outside the imperial court, both as a cultural stereotype and (insofar as we can glimpse it) as a character in day-to-day social reality. Several topics that we touched on in the last chapter appear again, in particular the idea of that declasse antitype to the elite orator, the scurra, who is the tricky, shifting subject of the final section of this chapter. My aim is to put laughter back into our image of the imperial court and its penumbra and to highlight the part that jokers played in Roman elite culture; it turns out to be a much larger and more significant one than we tend to acknowledge.
EMPERORS GOOD AND BAD
Roman autocracy was embedded in the culture of laughter and the joke—in a pattern that stretched back well before the reign of the first emperor, Augustus.3 It may not now be the best-known “fact” about the brutal dictator Sulla, who held brief and bloody control of the city in the 80s BCE, but in antiquity, like a number of Hellenistic tyrants and monarchs (see pp. 151, 207), he had the reputation of being an enthusiastic laughter lover. It was presumably not by chance that he was associated with precisely those jokesters whose style of jesting Cicero and Quintilian urged the orator to avoid. “He was so fond of mime actors and clowns, being very much a laughter lover,” wrote the historian Nicolaus of Damascus in the late first century BCE, “that he gave them many tracts of public land. A clear proof of the pleasure he took in these things are the satyric comedies that he wrote himself in his native language [Latin].”4 Plutarch too picked up the tradition, explaining that the dictator “loved a joke” (philoskōmmōn) and at dinner was completely transformed from the austere character that he was at other times. Even just before his death (caused, in Plutarch’s lurid story, by a ghastly ulceration that turned his flesh to worms), he was carousing with comics, mime act
ors, and impersonators.5
Some of the associations between autocrat and laughter are easily predictable. The basic Roman rule (which we meet again in its direct descendant, the medieval tradition of the rex facetus6) was that good and wise rulers made jokes in a benevolent way, never used laughter to humiliate, and tolerated wisecracks at their own expense. Bad rulers and tyrants, on the other hand, would violently suppress even the most innocent banter while using laughter and joking as weapons against their enemies. Anecdotes about imperial laughter illustrate these axioms time and again. Whether they are literally true or not we cannot tell, and the fact that there are examples of jokes apparently migrating from one prominent jokester to another (see pp. 105, 253n23) strongly suggests that we are dealing with cultural stereotype or traditional tales rather than fact. But they point to the bigger truth—a political lesson as much as an urban myth—that laughter helped to characterize both good and bad rulers.7
Dio neatly sums up one side of this in discussing Vespasian: the emperor’s civilitas (that ideal quality of treating his people as fellow citizens, not subjects) was demonstrated by the fact that “he joked like one of the people [dēmotikōs] and was happy to take jokes at his own expense, and if any of the kind of slogans that are often anonymously addressed to emperors were posted up, leveling insults at him, he would post up a reply in the same vein, without being at all bothered by it.”8 Of course, civilitas was always something of a veneer (there was no real equality between citizens and the emperor, and especially not between the emperor and the ordinary, nonelite citizens who are often instrumental in these jokes). But it was nevertheless an important veneer in those intricate games of imperial power whose ground rules had been established under the emperor Augustus. And it is around Augustus that a large number of these anecdotes—of jokes tolerated or enjoyed—cluster.
