by Mary Beard
These monkey themes set the scene for the rest of this chapter, which looks next at human mimes and mimics and closes with Apuleius’ version of crossing species boundaries. In between, I return to the example of Anacharsis, who spent most of the party agelastos (unlaughing), and to the question of what could get a nonlaugher to laugh—which involves similar issues of mimicry and the dividing line between animals and humans.
MIME, MIMICRY, AND MIMESIS
Monkeys stood better than any other creature for the connection between mimicry and laughter. But they were not the only mimics in the Roman world to signal laughter. Hovering over the Roman orator as he was tempted to raise a laugh with a wicked impersonation of his opponent was the specter of the Roman mime and its actors. There was at Rome an ambivalent relationship between the practice of oratory and the practice of the stage in general: orators could, and did, learn tricks of the trade from skilled actors, but nonetheless actors were definitely at the other end of the social, political, and cultural hierarchy from Cicero and his like; according to the axioms of Roman power, which partly correlated status with the ownership of one’s own words, an actor was condemned to be only a mouthpiece of the scripts of others.47 There was no such ambivalence about mime. The mime actor (mimus), like the scurra, was a dreadful antitype of the elite orator. Mime was the one ancient theatrical genre most firmly associated with laughter, but to suggest that in raising a laugh a Roman orator was playing his part in a Roman mime amounted to an insinuation that he was quite beyond the pale. So why were mimes so laughable—and so unacceptable? What was their role in the “laughterhood” of Rome?
Mime is a contested genre in modern scholarship. We know much less about Roman mimes than we would like to. We tend to speculate with misplaced confidence on what we don’t know—while sometimes overlooking some of the obvious things we do. There is general agreement that whatever its debt to an earlier Greek tradition, mime was a particularly important medium in Rome, influencing all kinds of literary production, from Horace through Latin love elegy to Petronius (“the missing link in Roman literary history,” as Elaine Fantham once dubbed it).48 There is agreement too that mime was one of the few ancient theatrical genres that featured women as performers, and both male and female actors had speaking parts—this was not mime in our (silent) sense of the term.49 After that, things become murkier.
It is sometimes assumed that there was a fairly clear distinction between mime and “pantomime”—a performance (again quite unlike the modern genre of the same name) normally consisting of silent dancers accompanied by singers. But in practice, ancient writers blurred the distinction; like the learned diners in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, they slipped easily between talk of mime and talk of pantomime (see pp. 78–79).50 It is also commonly said that, in sharp contrast to performers in other major theatrical genres of antiquity, mime actors performed without masks. That may be so, but it is a claim that rests largely on one passage of Cicero’s On the Orator—where the character of Strabo asks, “What could be more ridiculus than a sannio? But he produces laughter [ridetur, “is laughed at”] with his face, his expression, his voice, in fact with his whole body. I can say that this is funny [salsum] yet not in a way that I would want an orator to be, but like a mime actor.”51
The modern interpretation rests on the idea that if the face is a prompt to laughter, the character concerned cannot have been wearing a mask (for that would have hidden the face). But this passage does not say that. It refers to the face and expression of some kind of clown (sannio) and compares his general style of laughter production with that of a mime actor.52 In any case, a funny expression might actually be the expression of a mask—especially as we have a strong hint in Tertullian of a tradition of masked mime (“The image of your god covers his foul and notorious head,” he writes of what seems very likely to be a mime actor).53 Perhaps we are seeking uniformity where none is to be found.
For the rest, there is a wide range of conflicting and incompatible testimony on the nature of Roman mime, onto which it is hard to impose much convincing order. Roman writers sometimes strongly associate mimes with low life, suggesting that performances took place in front of common crowds on the street, but other times they refer to mimes put on in the residences of the elite and in front of some very upmarket fans of the genre.54 They sometimes imply that mimes were improvised, off-the-cuff performances, though our knowledge of mime comes mostly from what survives of crafted literary versions, including those written by the well-to-do (so it is said) Laberius, who was notoriously asked by Julius Caesar to act in one of his own mimes (insult or flattery?).55 Sometimes our sources suggest that the plots were drawn from everyday life and were by and large bawdy to boot; that is certainly what the genteel characters of the Saturnalia assumed (see p. 78), and plenty of the surviving fragments on papyrus focus on adultery stories, farts, and the “lower bodily stratum” in its limited varieties.56 But other mime plots were clearly mythological, even if they ended up as lusty parodies rather than straight renderings (such as Laberius’ Anna Peranna or the versions of Virgil’s Eclogues performed by wellknown mime stars).57
It is not hard to see why some scholars have rather desperately resorted to constructing a chronological development (whether a shift in the character and audience of the mimes from popular to elite culture, or alternatively an ever-increasing scale of bawdiness—“lewder as time went on,” as one critic recently put it58). Nor is it hard to see why others have suggested that mime was something of a catchall category that embraced “any kind of theatrical spectacle that did not belong to masked tragic and comic drama.”59 The idea that the ancient mime could be as loose a term as the modern farce is an attractive one, and it conveniently accommodates the otherwise awkwardly conflicting evidence. But even so, it tends to sidestep (or not take seriously enough) those two things that we know for sure about mime: its whole point was to make people laugh, and it was a strikingly imitative genre.
There can be no doubt that mime and laughter went together, and for that reason alone, mime deserves its share of the limelight in this book. Where we have met it in earlier chapters, it has always been as a laughter raiser (for better or worse, vulgar or not). This connection can be documented time and again. It is emphasized, for example, in some of the memorial verses composed to commemorate notable actors or authors in the genre. Philistion, an early imperial mime writer, is written up in a verse that proclaims how “he made the mournful lives of men to mix with laughter.” A similar message is conveyed in the memorial to the mime actor Vitalis, who is said to have “unleashed laughter in sad hearts.”60 And as late as the sixth century CE, the Sophist Choricius of Gaza defends the power of mimes against Christian critics of the genre by praising their restorative and laughter-provoking power and—interestingly, taking another view of laughter’s role on the species boundary—argues that laughter was in fact a property shared by humans and the gods.61
Why, then, was mime so powerful a producer of laughter? Again, the reason that any individual laughed at any individual performance is lost to us; answers might range from some carnivalesque pleasure in bums and farts to the simple fact that everyone else in the audience was splitting their sides. But in the discussions of mimes in our elite authors, the key factor links laughter and—as the very name suggests—the imitative nature of the genre. This went far beyond the more general (and philosophically controversial) questions of mimesis that underlay all theatrical representation; the hilarity of the mime was linked to its specific practices of mimicry.62
It remains debatable how far ancient actors in the major theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy “acted” in our terms. There are some hints that, as time went on, various forms of impersonation gradually became more important in mainstream ancient drama, with greater stress on, for example, realistic characterization of language and accent—even from behind a stylized mask.63 All the same, imitation of this kind was never taken to be a defining feature of the tragic or comic theater as it was
of the various performance traditions that go under the heading of mime. Cicero and Quintilian both point to the aggressive mimicry of this genre. The anecdote about the (panto)mimes in Macrobius also centers on the realistic imitation of the mad Hercules, although the audience misread it (see p. 79).64 And those ancient scholars who attempted to define the essence of mime (for modern scholars are not the first to try to impose order on the tricky complexities of classical culture) repeatedly emphasized its imitative qualities. For example, Diomedes, a fourth-century grammarian, writes of its “imitation of different forms of speech,” its “bawdy imitation of lewd words and deeds,” and how it was named for its mimetic properties (“as if it were the only genre that used imitation, although other forms of literature [poemata] do likewise, but it alone, as if by some particular prerogative, claimed rights over what was common property”); along similar lines and at roughly the same date, Evanthius refers to mime’s “everyday imitation of common things and trivial people.”65
We cannot write this off merely as a grammarians’ solution, resorting to etymology (“mimes are mimetic”) as a convenient means of explanation. For Cicero, Quintilian, and Macrobius insist that the mime actors’ mimicry was instrumental in the production of laughter. The audience laughed at the imitation and pretense of these actors, which was not far from saying—by easy shorthand and slippage—that the audience laughed at the actors themselves (if they didn’t, the mime would fail). It was this aspect, as much as the whiff of low life, that determined the orator’s fear of being mistaken for a mimus. That would mean he had failed the challenge confronting the elite public speaker: how to provoke laughter (as a ridiculus) without simultaneously becoming its butt (ridiculus in the other sense).
This is a simple set of connections between laughter and mimicry and mime but one that can enrich our understanding of some famous passages of Roman literature. I have already highlighted (p. 159) one particular line in Catullus’ poem on the verses he wants given back: the tart who is hanging onto his poetry tablets laughs, he writes, mimice ac moleste. I glossed this provisionally as “in the style of a mime actress,” and that is generally the sense that most translators of the poem now give. For Guy Lee, this was the “odious actressy laugh” of the whore; for John Godwin, the woman was “laughing like an actress”; for Peter Whigham, she was “like a stage tart.” Commentators too take broadly this line, with Kenneth Quinn reducing the image to that of a pouting ancient equivalent of a modern cinema starlet.66 Some of this may underlie Catullus’ invective; it seems likely that there was laughter on (as we would say) both sides of the curtain at a mime, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that mime actors and actresses had a distinctive, perhaps lewd, laugh—though hardly, I think, a starlet’s pout. But Catullus’ gibe is edgier than that. Almost impossible as it is to translate, it parades the idea of vulgar, bodily, laughable imitation on the part of the thieving whore. It may also point to the fact that if the girl is to be seen in a mimic guise, then—as much as she is cackling “like a stage tart”—we too are laughing at her. And that, of course, is exactly what the poem itself is doing.
Some of these issues also underlie the so-called Quartilla episode, near the beginning of what survives of Petronius’ first-century CE novel, Satyricon. Modern critics have intensely discussed this story—partly because there are so many gaps in the text we have that it is an intriguing challenge to explain exactly what happens and in what order.67 But it is clear enough that, as the surviving story opens in the standard version, the narrator and the antiheroes of the novel receive a visit in their lodgings from an attendant of Quartilla, a priestess of the phallic god Priapus. She announces the imminent arrival of her mistress—who is coming to call on the men in response to their earlier disruption of Priapus’ holy rites. When the priestess arrives shortly after, she sheds a stream of histrionic tears about the sacrilege committed, then embarks on a full-on orgy—many of whose details are (maybe happily) lost in the lacunae of the text as it has come down to us.
As most critics have observed, laughter is a recurring element in this episode (and Maria Plaza has rightly pointed to many of the tricky interpretative difficulties it raises in the narration—in terms of who is laughing at whom and whose laughter we treat as authoritative68). But there is, for my concerns in this chapter, a particularly relevant outburst immediately before the scripted orgy starts. Just as Quartilla moves from her crocodile tears to the preparations for the sexual party, the women laugh in a terrifying way—and then everything resounds mimico risu.69 The same issues of translation come up again. We find, in various modern versions, “stagy laughter,” “farcical laughter,” “rire théâtral,” and the “laughter of the low stage.”70 But once again, that is only part of the point. As Costas Panayotakis and others have clearly shown, this section of the Satyricon is constructed around the themes and conventions of mime—and mimetic plots.71 This might indeed suggest that Quartilla and her attendant laugh in a “stagy” way, with all the ideas of pretense that might entail, or that they laugh with the bawdy vulgarity of mime actors.
Yet the explicit phrase mimico risu encourages us to focus more directly on the connections and associations of mime and on the wider “economy” of laughter in these performances—as it involves both actors and audience. It is an economy that Petronius here both exploits and inverts. Quartilla’s mime show ought to have raised some hearty chuckles from its audience, for that is the nature and purpose of mime. In fact, the reaction of the audience in the text—by which I mean the narrator and his friends—is dazed astonishment. Partly the butts of the joke, partly nonlaughing spectators, they can only exchange glances. They do not laugh at all. In a way, this is a subversion of the genre. Petronius is not simply drawing on mime but also upsetting its very conventions, destabilizing the assumed relationship between actors and audience and hinting at further questions about who exactly is laughing at whom.72
DEATH BY LAUGHTER—AND SOME AGELASTIC TRADITIONS
There were even wider—and sometime dangerous—implications in Roman connections between different forms of imitation and laughter. One of these is starkly illustrated in an anecdote preserved in Festus’ second-century CE dictionary, On the Meaning of Words.73 Under the entry for Pictor (painter), we read of the death of the famous fifth-century BCE artist Zeuxis: “The painter Zeuxis died from laughing when he was laughing immoderately at a picture of an old woman that he himself had painted. Why the story was related at this point by Verrius when his purpose was to write about the meaning of words, I really do not understand—and when he also quoted some not particularly clever anonymous lines of poetry about the same thing: ‘What limit is he going to set on his laughter, then, / Unless he wants to end up like that painter who died laughing?’”74 This story was to have a notable afterlife in a self-portrait by Rembrandt, painted in his old age. It shows the artist laughing, and in the background is an apparently ugly figure. The significance of this scene has often puzzled critics. Is this, for example, Rembrandt as Democritus? Almost certainly it is not. For the secondary figure in the background seems clearly female, and if so, this must surely be Rembrandt as Zeuxis—facing his end, with a specifically painterly reference (see fig. 6).75
I am not concerned here with the truth of the story (it is first attested centuries after the death of Zeuxis, and even assuming that the reference in Festus to the Augustan writer Verrius Flaccus is correct, we have no idea what his source might have been). Nor am I concerned with the physiological possibility of death through laughter—a well-known urban legend in both ancient and modern culture. My question is simply why would we imagine that Zeuxis would find a painting of an elderly lady so laughable? And so very laughable that it killed him?
We might think in terms of mainstream ancient misogyny (and of the despised cultural category of the crone). What else are old women fit for, except to be laughed at? What would an artist do who had made an image of a crone, except laugh at it? Are old women deadly, even in the laughter the
y provoke? Misogyny of this sort may well be part of it, but there is more to this story of laughter than that.76
Whatever Zeuxis’ paintings really looked like (they are all lost), later descriptions and discussions, largely of Roman date, focused on their imitative quality. This is most clearly seen in the famous, and much analyzed, story of the mimetic competition between Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasius recounted by Pliny the Elder: Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that it deceived the birds (who came to peck at them), but it did not secure his victory, because Parrhasius created an image that deceived even Zeuxis (he painted a curtain, which Zeuxis tried to pull back).77 The anecdote in Festus about the painting of the old woman is another—so far unrecognized—story on the same theme, suggesting an even more challenging aspect of Zeuxis’ mimetic prowess and another aspect of the laughable properties of Roman imitation. Here it is surely Zeuxis’ own imitation that he finds so hilarious—and it kills him. It is hard not to imagine that Rembrandt knew exactly what he was doing when he re-created himself in the guise of Zeuxis.
This story of Zeuxis leads us in various directions. It points us, obviously, to other ancient examples of those killed by their own laughter. But it also gestures in a different direction, toward the nonlaughers, the agelasts, in the classical world—for one memorable anecdote provides a link between a group of unfortunate victims of their own laughter and a notorious Roman who had supposedly never laughed in his whole life. This offers us a glimpse of a scene so funny in ancient terms that it could either produce laughter powerful enough to kill or produce a chuckle in a man whose trademark was that he never cracked up. It is a memorable scene that will also bring us back, in the final section of this chapter, to the borderline between human and animal—but this time with asses and donkeys as the focus of attention.
