by Mary Beard
The history and culture of laughter are necessarily bound up with those who do not laugh. The story of laughter should not leave out those who do not get the joke. Yet agelasts rarely get much cultural attention (and indeed are peculiarly difficult to study), except at the moment when they too break down and something finally elicits laughter from them. One of the most powerful motifs in the European fairy tale is the “princess who would not laugh” and the (usually) erotic origins and consequences of her first hilarious outburst.78 And the famous classical Greek story of how the goddess Demeter, grieving for the loss of Persephone, was induced to laugh when Baubo lifted her skirts and exposed her genitals has been as intensely discussed by modern feminist literary critics as by classicists.79 In addition to Athenaeus’ brief account of the sage Anacharsis, who cracked up only at the sight of a monkey, there is a wide range of stories from the Roman period (even if often focusing on characters from the Greek past) that concern much more determined, long-term, or sometimes involuntary agelasts and explain what finally got them chortling and with what consequences.
One of these offers a different perspective on the links between laughter and imitation.80 This tale is again from Athenaeus but drawn (and maybe adapted) from a multivolume history of Delos by one Semus—now lost apart from some short quotations and dated, only by guesswork, any time between the third century BCE and the mid- or late second century CE.81 It concerns a man called Parmeniscus of Metapontum, who had been to consult the oracle of Trophonius in Boeotia. One feature of this particular oracle was that people temporarily lost their ability to laugh after the consultation,82 but unusually, the loss seemed to be permanent in Parmeniscus’ case—forcing him to seek the advice of the Delphic oracle. The Pythia gave an apparently encouraging response: “You ask me about laughter soothing [meilichoiou], unsoothed one [ameiliche]; mother at home will give it to you—honor her greatly.”83 But going home to his mother did not restore Parmeniscus’ laughter as he had hoped. Later—and still unable to laugh—he happened to be in Delos and visited the temple of Leto, Apollo’s mother, “thinking that her statue would be something remarkable to look at. But when he saw that it was just a shapeless piece of wood, he unexpectedly laughed. And seeing the meaning of the god’s oracle and freed from his affliction, he honored the goddess greatly.”
We have very little idea of what elements of historical truth, if any, are embedded in this suspiciously classic tale of the oracle’s riddling opacity and the consultant’s misinterpretation (Parmeniscus failed to spot that it was Apollo’s mother who was meant).84 We do not know if Parmeniscus was a bona fide historical character or at what date the events were supposed to have taken place.85 But strictly factual or not, the story offers some important reflections on ancient laughter and on ancient religious ideology—as Julia Kindt has recently argued in a detailed analysis of Parmeniscus’ adventures.86
For Kindt, the point of the story turns on the understanding of religious images, on different modes of religious viewing, and on the relationship between anthropomorphic statues of the gods and alternative forms of divine images, such as Leto’s statue—aniconic, less naturalistic versions capturing the essence of the deity in a plank of wood or a barely worked stone. It is certainly true that without any knowledge of those two complementary and competing modes of representation in ancient religious culture (the iconic versus the aniconic), it would be hard to make much sense of the story. But Kindt goes on to suggest that the real essence of the story is a lesson in the rules of visuality, as Parmeniscus comes to appreciate “the complexities of divine representation”—and demonstrates his appreciation in the changing quality of his laughter, which “becomes more self-reflective.”87
I rather doubt it. So far as I can see, those “complexities” are no more than the context and peg for Parmeniscus’ most important lesson: namely, how to interpret the words of the oracle correctly. And there is no hint in the story of any change of quality in the laughter: Parmeniscus “unexpectedly laughed.”88 The important issue is much simpler than Kindt implies: Why did Parmeniscus laugh?
Partly, the laughter follows from the defeat of expectations and the incongruity of the statue. In fact the word paradoxōs (unexpectedly) probably suggests this: it was not simply that Parmeniscus laughed when he did not expect to; he also laughed at the unexpected. But there is an underlying issue of imitation here too. In Athenaeus’ account, what finally dispelled Parmeniscus’ inability to laugh was the sight of a statue that was, in his view, a very poor imitation of what it was pretending to be. This is, in other words, another example of how mimesis and, more specifically, the boundaries of successful imitation were linked to the production of laughter. At the same time, it is another clear case of the double-sidedness of laughter and the laughable in the Roman world. For the logic of the story is that this block of wood could seem ridiculous (in our sense) as an image of Leto, but it simultaneously embodied the power to make someone laugh (and in this case, that was the power of the goddess and not ridiculous at all).
Parmeniscus was an unwilling agelast, but others—throughout Greek and Roman culture—were much more active refuseniks in matters of laughter.89 The most notorious nonlaugher in the Roman world was Marcus Licinius Crassus, who lived in the late second century BCE and was the grandfather of the more famous Crassus who died fighting the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. According to Cicero, the satirist Lucilius, who was Crassus senior’s contemporary, first nicknamed him Agelastos (in Greek), and writers from Cicero to Saint Jerome regularly take him as one extreme case of a Roman who hated laughter. As Pliny the Elder summed it up, “People say that Crassus, the grandfather of the Crassus killed in Parthia, never laughed, and for that reason was called Agelastus.”90
But Pliny was overstating the case. For the point that most Roman writers stress is that Crassus had indeed laughed—just once in his life (“But that one exception did not prevent him being called agelastos,” as Cicero insists). What was it that caused Crassus to crack up on that one occasion? The only explanation we have comes from Jerome, again referring back to Lucilius. It was the saying “Thistles are like lettuce to the lips of a donkey”—or perhaps, we should imagine, it was the sight of a donkey eating thistles and the (presumably) common proverb that such a sight evoked.91 For the story of Crassus is very close to a couple of others that writers in the Roman Empire told of notable characters catching sight of a donkey consuming something unexpected—and dying of the laughter this produced.
Death by laughter is a vivid image (and a common cliché) in many cultures, from the casual hyperbole of the phrase “They just died of laughter” (an idiom that we saw with the blustering soldier of Terence’s Eunuch, pp. 10, 14) to the curious stories of people reputed to have literally passed away laughing. We could add to Zeuxis many modern examples, from the novelist Anthony Trollope, who is said to have fallen into a coma after laughing uncontrollably at a reading of a comic novel, to the bricklayer from Kings Lynn who died in 1975 after thirty minutes of hysterics at a television comedy show, The Goodies.92 Two particular ancient characters—the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus and the Greek comic poet Philemon (both of the third century BCE)—provide a striking match for Crassus. For they were said to have died laughing when they saw a donkey eating figs and drinking wine.
Valerius Maximus, in a section on notable deaths in his anthology Memorable Deeds and Sayings, has this to say of the death of Philemon: “Philemon was carried off by the force of excessive laughter. Some figs had been prepared for him and placed in his sight. When a donkey started eating them, he called to his slave to chase the animal off. But the slave didn’t arrive till they were all eaten. ‘Since you’ve been so slow,’ he said, ‘you might as well now give the donkey some wine [merum, unmixed wine].’ And he followed up this witty quip with such a bout of breathless cackling [cachinnorum] that he crushed his feeble old windpipe with the all the rough panting.”93 Much the same was told by Diogenes Laertius about the death of Chrysipp
us (including the detail about the unmixed wine).94
There are all kinds of puzzles and intriguing details in these stories. For a start, “what happened when the donkey ate the figs” looks exactly like one of those free-floating anecdotes that get attached to any number of people, and (as we shall soon see) there are hints that the donkey story, even without its fatal consequences, was part of a wider popular joking tradition. But it may be significant that the same town, Soli in Cilicia, was supposed to be the original home of both Philemon and Chrysippus. Is this, perhaps, a story that had a specific association with that particular place or that gets shifted between different native sons? If so, what would the implications be? The details of the narrative raise curious questions too. Why figs? Is the fact that the Greek word sukon/suka (fig/s) was occasionally used for genitalia part of what makes the story so laughable?95 And why the stress on unmixed wine? In the ancient world, to drink wine that was not mixed with water was usually the mark of the uncivilized or the bestial. Diogenes Laertius’ account of Chrysippus also includes an alternative version of his cause of death: drinking unmixed wine. So should we see a connection between that and what was fed to the donkey?96
Many loose ends remain. Yet it is clear that there is a common theme running through these stories of the fatal power of laughter and the story of Crassus’ single laugh (sharply brought into focus in Tertullian’s passing reference to Crassus—where the violence of his unprecedented laugh actually killed the agelast97). The prompt for each of these peculiarly powerful forms of laughter is the blurring of the (alimentary) boundaries between the human being and the donkey: the quip that made Crassus laugh reformulated donkey diet in human terms; the cue to laughter that finished off Chrysippus and Philemon was a donkey literally crossing the boundary between animal and human diet. As with the monkeys, that edgy dividing line between beast and man was one on which laughter particularly flourished.98
That boundary is of course precisely what is at issue in Apuleius’ second-century CE novel Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass), which tells the story of the transformation of a man into a donkey—and in which Risus (Laughter) reaches the status of a god. It is to a couple of the specifically gelastic aspects of that novel that we now turn, in this chapter’s final section, starting with one episode that acts out in a more complicated way that scene of the donkey stealing human food.
MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF
The main lines of Apuleius’ plot are well known.99 The story is told through the mouth of Lucius, a well-born young man of Greek origin, who in the third of the novel’s eleven books is turned into a donkey (or ass).100 This was a mistaken transformation, needless to say. Lucius was trying out the magic potions of the mistress of the house in which he was a guest, with the help of her slave girl. His idea was to experiment with the ointment that would turn him into a bird—but the girl mixed up the jars, and he ended up as a donkey. Most of the novel is the story of Lucius’ adventures as an animal, or rather as a human being trapped in an animal’s body—an apt symbol of the (ludicrous) transgression of the dividing line between man and beast. In the last book, he is returned to human form under the auspices of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and the story ends with him being enrolled as an official of her consort Osiris by the god himself.101
Almost certainly this plot was not wholly the creation of Apuleius. Another, much shorter and simpler version is preserved with the works of Lucian, under the title Lucius, or The Ass, but the precise relationship—chronological and otherwise—between it and Apuleius’ novel is not known.102 Nor is it certain how either of them related to another work, now lost but described by the Byzantine patriarch Photios in the ninth century as “Lucius of Patrai’s several books of Metamorphoses.”103 But whatever the exact relationship between these texts, and whatever the innovations of Apuleius may have been,104 there is one vivid incident found in both surviving versions of the story that is a strikingly close parallel for the tale of the donkey, the sight of whose eating and drinking is supposed to have killed off Chrysippus and Philemon.105
To follow Apuleius’ account (overall very similar to the shorter version), near the end of his adventures as an animal, Lucius the donkey came into the possession of two brothers, both slaves: one a confectioner, one a cook. Every evening they used to bring home the rich leftovers from their work and spread them out on their table for supper before going off to the baths to freshen up. And every evening, while they were away, the donkey would nip in to gobble up some of the delicacies, “for I was not so stupid or such a real ass that I would leave that delicious spread and dine on the horribly rough hay.”106 Eventually, as the donkey ate more and more of the best goodies, the brothers noticed the disappearances and suspected each other of stealing the food (in fact, one—presciently, in a way—accused the other of an “inhuman” crime107). But soon enough they noticed that the donkey was getting fatter, though it was apparently not eating its hay. Suspicions aroused, they spied on him one evening and broke down in laughter when they saw what was going on—so loudly that their boss heard, came to take a peek, and split his sides too. In fact, he was so delighted with what he had seen that he invited the donkey to a proper dinner, with human food and drink and everyone reclining on couches in the standard human way. Here the animal played the part of the joking parasite—and was even referred to by the master as “my parasite.”108 The guests were consumed with laughter.
Like almost every story in Apuleius, this is much more complicated than it might at first sight appear. At this point in the narrative, the donkey is very close to his final retransformation back into his human form, and his human dietary indulgence here, as well as his role as parasitus, or even “friend” (contubernalis, sodalis), is partly to be read as moving toward that.109 This is also a sophisticated literary parody. As Régine May has shown, the pair of food workers in this story are carefully modeled on cooks as they appear in Plautus’ comedies, and they serve up decidedly Roman-style food. But whereas cooks in Plautus are characteristically those who pinch the nibbles, this pair is resolutely honest—and it is their donkey who is doing the thieving.110
But my interest is in the links with the other donkey stories. It is obvious that the basic point of this extended gag is very similar to that of those other anecdotes: the ass that usurps food intended for human beings causes outrageous laughter. True, no one dies in the stories of the donkey and the food workers, but both versions stress the violence of the laughter provoked by the sight of the animal consuming the men’s food (the master in Apuleius, for example, laughed “till his belly hurt,” adusque intestinorum dolorem; the Greek account likewise refers repeatedly to the power of the laughter evoked111). There is, however, a clear hint that the account of Apuleius is even more closely related to the point and the plot of those anecdotes of death by laughter. He knew some of those particular stories, or he was familiar with the popular joking theme of the “dining donkey,” of which they are the surviving traces—and he was directly exploiting it.112
Broadly similar as they are, there is in fact one significant difference in detail between the two surviving versions of this episode in Lucius’ story.113 In the shorter one, when the donkey is finally in company at the proper dinner table, someone suggests that he have a glass of wine—diluted (“‘This ass will drink some wine too, if someone will dilute it and give it to him.’ The master gave those orders, and I drank what was brought”).114 In Apuleius, by contrast, we find exactly the same insistence on unmixed wine as in the stories of Chrysippus and Philemon. One of the guests at the donkey’s dinner party (a scurrula, a joker) says, “Give our friend here a drop of unmixed wine [merum].” The master agrees. “Supporting the suggestion, he said, ‘That’s not a stupid joke, you rascal, for likely as not this friend of ours is really keen on a glass of mulsum too.’” Mulsum was another form of unwatered wine, mixed only with honey—and that is what “our friend” the donkey was given.115
The implication of this stress on undiluted wine re
mains puzzling, but it is a marked link between The Metamorphoses and those other stories of uncontrollable or deathly laughter. In a characteristically clever literary or cultural parody, Apuleius is complicating the simplest form of the anecdote of the donkey diet—by speaking through the “voice” of the animal but also by prizing apart the different viewpoints on the story and on the laughter so often prompted by the confusion between human and beast. The characters in this novel laugh at the donkey eating like a human being; the readers laugh because they know that the donkey is actually human anyway. Laughter can be shared even when we are laughing “at” different things; there is a tricky relationship, Apuleius reminds us, between laughter within and outside the text.
That is only one brief episode in Apuleius’ sometimes frustrating and delightfully complicated novel, which has attracted an enormous amount of recent critical attention. Some of this attention stems from the influence of Jack Winkler’s classic study of the novel, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass,” which appeared in 1985. Winkler brilliantly focused on the narratological complexities of the text and on the hermeneutic games it revels in playing with the reader and with the slippery voice of the narrator. As his title (which has become something of a mantra in the field of classics) signals, there is a shifting and uncertain relationship between the role of the narrator as author (auctor) and the role of the narrator as character in the book (actor). It is sometimes rather too easy to forget that Winkler was not the first critic to stress the sophistication of Apuleius’ text (against those who deemed it appallingly messy and inconsistent).116 But Auctor & Actor did kick-start a new wave of Apuleian scholarship, which celebrated the cleverness and intricacies of the novel and its artful engagement with earlier literature.
