by Mary Beard
67. Macrobius attributes some Fescennini to the emperor Augustus (Sat. 2.4.21); otherwise, as Oakley (1997, 60) rightly insists, the only institutional context attested in the late Republic and early empire is the wedding ritual (Hersch 2010, 151–56); whether or not the term should be applied also to the ribald, joking verses sung at a Roman triumph—as Graf (2005, 201–2), along with many others, implies—is far less clear.
68. Conybeare 2013 is a major study of laughter focused on biblical and theological texts, Jewish and Christian, to which readers frustrated by my limitations are warmly directed!
4. ROMAN LAUGHTER IN LATIN AND GREEK
1. The OLD, for example, offers “to smile at, upon or in response to” for arridere/adridere and “to laugh at, mock, make fun of” for irridere; ridere with a dative suggests “to laugh as a sign of goodwill.” The etymology of ridere is obscure, despite occasional attempts to relate it to the Sanskrit for “to be shy” or to the Boeotian form κριδδέμεν (a variant of γελᾶν, “laugh”).
2. Ovid, Ars am. 2.201; Terence, Ad. 864; Horace, Ars P. 101.
3. Silius Italicus 1.398; another decidedly sinister use of arridere (Seneca, Controv. 9.2.6) is discussed on pp. 79–80. It most likely indicates mocking laughter at Cicero, De or. 2.262.
4. Eun. 249–50; Priscian in GLK 3.351.11 (= Inst. 18.274). Most modern translators and critics who have rightly focused on this passage (e.g., Damon 1997, 81; Fontaine 2010, 13–14) have also missed the full nuance, whichever way they choose to translate adridere.
5. Martial, Epigram. 6.44: “omnibus adrides, dicteria dicis in omnis: / sic te convivam posses placere putas” (ll. 3–4, as the manuscripts have it); the typical sting in the tail turns out to be the man’s fondness for oral sex. For the emendation, see Shackleton Bailey 1978 (quotation on 279, my emphasis—and he goes on: “Since that compound does not take a dative in classical Latin, omnibus must become omnis”); this reading is now incorporated in his Teubner edition of 1990 and repeated in the Loeb Classical Library edition of 1993. For critical discussion of the emendation and Shackleton Bailey’s interpretation of the poem, see Grewing 1997, 314; Nauta 2002, 176–77.
6. Catullus 39, passim; Tacitus, Ann. 4.60 (a more sinister context).
7. Ovid, Ars am. 3.283 (advising girls not to display immodici rictus while laughing); Lucretius 5.1064 (of dogs); see further p. 159.
8. Nonius Marcellus 742 (Lindsay): “non risu tantum sed et de sono vehementiore vetustas dici voluit.”
9. Verr. 2.3.62. That at least is Cicero’s highly colored presentation of the scene (he admits that Apronius’ uproar is only extrapolated from his laughter at the trial).
10. Persius 1.12; see 1.116–18 for an explicit comparison with Horace.
11. Catullus 13.5; Suetonius, Vesp. 5.2; Lucretius 4.1176.
12. Nonius Marcellus 742 (Lindsay) quoting Accius (= ROL2, Accius, Tragoediae 577) on the pounding of the ocean—the text is not entirely certain, and on another reading cachinnare could refer to the screeching of a seabird; Catullus 31.14 (of the ripples of Lake Garda), 64.273 (“leviter sonant plangore cachinni”). There is a curious set of relations here with aspects of the Greek laughter lexicon. Γελᾶν, in Greek, is commonly used for the behavior of the sea. Cachinnare matches (even if it is not directly derived from) the Greek καχάζειν, which does not appear to be used metaphorically for the sound of water, though the very similar Greek word καχλάζειν (with a lambda) is a regular term for “splashing.” It is tempting to think that this pairing lies somewhere behind Catullus’ play with cachinnare (or perhaps καχάζειν and καχλάζειν are not as separate as modern lexicography likes to make them).
13. M. Clarke 2005 is a useful recent review of relevant material stressing the unfamiliarity of the Greek semantics of “smiling”: see also Lateiner 1995, 193–95; Levine 1982; Levine 1984. For the stress on the face: Sappho 1.14; Hom. Hymn 10.2–3 (note that, very unusually, Homer, Il. 15.101–2, has Hera laughing “with her lips”).
14. Halliwell 2008, 524, part of a longer, careful discussion (520–29) of Greek laughter terminology and its physical referents, though apart from this appendix, μειδιῶ has hardly a mention in the book.
15. For example, Virgil, Aen. 1.254 (see also Homer, Il. 15.47); Servius Auct. (ad loc.) quotes a parallel passage from Ennius, which uses ridere rather than subridere: Ennius, Ann. 450–51 (ROL) = 457–58 (Vahlen).
16. Catullus 39. In Kaster 1980, 238–40, the key examples are Sat. 1.4.4, 1.11.2 (quoted), 3.10.5, 7.7.8, 7.9.10, and 7.14.5 (translated accordingly in his edition of Macrobius for the Loeb Classical Library), but note also 1.2.10 (involving the whole face) and 7.3.15 (accompanying an apparent insult), neither of which quite match. Kaster is, I suspect, too keen to find smiles in both Macrobius and the texts he uses for comparison. He refers, for example, to the smiles of Cicero’s dialogues “as an instrument of amused debate and rejoinder,” but the Ciceronian passages he cites refer explicitly to a variety of “laughing” (ridens, adridens, etc.). I am relieved that König 2012, 215–26, has (independently) similar reservations over details in Kaster’s argument on smiling, although for different reasons.
17. Catullus 39.16; Ovid, Ars am. 2.49; Ovid, Met. 8.197; Livy 35.49.7; Quintilian, Inst. 6.1.38 (renidentis a plausible emendation for the manuscript residentis).
18. Apuleius, Met. 3.12; Valerius Flaccus 4.359; Tacitus, Ann. 4.60.2.
19. 1.2.10.
20. This is obviously made more complicated by the fact that os, oris (occasionally used with renideo, as at Ovid, Met. 8.197) could refer to the face or the mouth.
21. I am thinking here of the work of such scholars as Paul Ekman (1992; 1999) and that discussed in ch. 3, n. 18. I hope that by this point in the book I do not need to explain why I do not follow such a universalist path.
22. Chesterfield 1890, 177–79 (letter of 12 December 1765, to his godson), reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 342–43: “The vulgar often laugh but never smile; whereas, well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.” Similar sentiments are expressed in Chesterfield 1774, vol. 1, 328 (letter of 9 March 1748), reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 72.
23. “Kissing,” Jones’s (as yet) unpublished paper given at Columbia University in 2002, also points to the ancients’ careful calibration of different styles of kissing.
24. Le Goff 1997, 48 (“I wonder whether smiling is not one of the creations of the Middle Ages”); see also Trumble 2004, 89.
25. Plutarch, Caes. 4; Edwards 1993, 63.
26. The survival of so much Roman writing on oratory—some of which is concerned with how or whether to make the listener laugh (on which see pp. 107–20, 123–26)—may exaggerate the apparent preponderance of joking terms over laughter terms, but there is no reason to imagine that the whole imbalance should be ascribed to this.
27. A piece of popular wisdom rejected by Quintilian: “Potius amicum quam dictum perdendi” (6.3.28). It is possibly echoed by Horace, Sat. 1.4.34–35 (but different versions of the text and its punctuation give a significantly different sense; see Gowers 2012, 161), and by Seneca, Controv. 2.4.13. There are some echoes in modern sloganizing too, but the point is always reversed: “It’s better to lose a jest than a friend.”
28. Cicero, De or. 2.222 (= Ennius, frag. 167 Jocelyn; ROL1, Ennius, unassigned fragments 405–6).
29. “Cato,” Disticha., prol.: “Miserum noli irridere” (likewise “Neminem riseris”).
30. Sonnabend 2002, 214–21, offers a brisk summary of scholarship on these lives; A. Cameron 2011, 743–82, is a fuller and more recent discussion (though underplaying, as most critics do, some of the work’s importance, whatever its fictionality: “trivial . . . product,” 781). The collection was probably produced in the late fourth century CE.
31. SHA, Heliog. 32.7, 29.3 (“ut de his omnibus risus citaret”), 25.2.
32. Sat. 2.1.15–2.2.16.
33. 2.3.1–2.5.9; on the style of these jokes and Macrobius’ possible sources, see pp. 104–
5, 130–31, 202.
34. 2.2.16 (antiqua festivitas); 2.4.21 (Augustus’ “Fescennines”); see pp. 68–69.
35. 2.2.10, 2.2.12–13. On Evangelus and Servius, see Kaster 1980, 222–29.
36. Sat. 2.6.6–2.7.19 (avoidance of lascivia, 2.7.1); for mime’s bawdy character in general, see pp. 168–69, 170.
37. AP 7.155; PLM3, 245–46; see further above, p. 169.
38. 2.7.16 (on the blurring of mime and pantomime here, see pp. 168, 170).
39. For an overview, see Bonner 1949; Bloomer 2007; Gunderson 2003, 1–25 (a more theorized account). Spawforth 2012, 73–81, considers the interface between Greek and Roman traditions.
40. Controv. 9.2.
41. Principally, Livy 39.42–43; Valerius Maximus 2.9.3; Cicero, Sen. 42. Briscoe 2008, 358–59, reviews the variants.
42. On the law in this case, see Bonner 1949, 108–9.
43. 9.2.9, 9.2.11.
44. Drunkenness: 9.2.3; slippers: 9.2.25; ioci: 9.2.1; iocari: 9.2.9–10; laughter: 9.2.6.
45. For the erotics of laughter, see pp. 3, 157–59. Halliwell 2008, 491, collects a wide range of instances (in Greek) of sexualized laughter, from the classical to the early Christian period.
46. Another example of (sexualized) laughter as a transgressive irruption into the public official sphere is found in the trial of Maximus, the (likely fictionalized) Roman prefect of Egypt (P.Oxy. 471). The “transcription” of the prosecution speech focuses on Maximus’ relationship with a young boy, whom he included in his official business. One specific accusation is that the boy used to laugh in the midst of Maximus’ clients. See Vout 2007, 140–50 (but note that the text does not claim that the boy was laughing “in the face of his clients,” 148; the point is that he was laughing in the sphere of serious, official business).
47. Controv. 9.2.7.
48. Ars am. 3.279–90 (discussed on pp. 157–59).
49. Aeneid 4.128; discussed by Konstan 1986, careful to acknowledge the problem of reading this as a smile (“the smile, or perhaps it is a laugh,” 18). Though intended for high school students, Gildenhard 2012, 138–39, offers a concise paragraph summing up the main interpretative problems of Venus’ laugh.
50. Ars P. 1–5 (“Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit . . . risum teneatis?”). The passage is more puzzling than it seems, for the laughable incongruities are in fact standard themes in Roman painting; see Frischer 1991, 74–85; Oliensis 1998, 199–202.
51. Coleiro 1979, 222–29, reviews the main suggestions; more briefly, Coleman 1977, 150–52.
52. Du Quesnay 1977, 37, is unusual in arguing that the singular “parent” here is the father.
53. “Enigmatic” is the euphemism of Nisbet 1978, 70, for the final four lines of the Eclogue.
54. The text has been a matter of dispute since the Renaissance at least, with both Politian and Scaliger advocating what is now the standard reading against the manuscripts, largely on the basis of the parallel passage in Quintilian (Inst. 9.3.8). Just to add to the complexity, the manuscript versions of Quintilian do in fact include the same version of these lines as the Virgilian manuscripts, but Quintilian’s use of this passage as an example of a plural relative (qui) attached to a singular referent (hunc) makes it clear that he had in mind a different text, more or less as modern editors have it. The issues are reviewed by Coleman 1977, 148–49; Clausen 1994, 144 (from which I take the word natural). Note, however, some remaining support for the manuscript reading: for example, F. della Corte 1985, 80.
55. The quotation is from Clausen 1994, 144 (my emphasis); similarly R. D. Williams 1976, 119; Norden 1958, 63 (“Ridere c. acc. heisst überall sonst ‘jemanden auslachen’, nicht ‘ihm zulachen’”). Both Perret 1970, 55, and Nisbet 1978, 77n135, see that this is far too sweeping and cite many counterexamples, including Ovid, Ars am. 1.87.
56. Pliny NH, 7.2, 7.72 (see p. 25), with Norden 1958, 65–67; Nisbet 1978, 70. This modern tradition of seeing the baby’s risus as similar to that of Zoroaster goes back principally to Crusius 1896, 551–53.
57. See, for example, Perret 1970, 55 (“Il ne peut s’agir du sourire de la mère à l’enfant”); the different versions are briefly reviewed by R. D. Williams 1976, 120, and Coleman 1977, 148.
58. Nisbet 1978, 70; words such as tenderness and intimacy (Putnam, 1970, 162; Alpers 1979, 173) recur in these discussions.
59. Whatever the sentimentality, Nisbet is one of the very few translators to stick firmly to the word laugh rather than smile (translations in 2007 reprint of Nisbet 1978).
60. Catullus 61.209–13 (“Torquatus volo parvulus / matris e gremio suae / porrigens teneras manus / dulce rideat ad patrem / semihiante labello”). Modern critics are divided on whether this is merely a close epithalamic parallel (a vague back-reference for Virgil) or a direct source (e.g., Putnam 1970, 163: “borrowed”). Hardie 2012, 216–18, reviews the more general links between this Eclogue and Catullus 61 and 64. We should note that there is no hint of divinity in the laughter of Catullus 61 and that the divinity implied in Theocritus, Id. 17.121–34, a possible inspiration for the final line of the Eclogue, has nothing to do with any laughing baby.
61. Bataille 1997, 60. He continues, “All of a sudden, what controlled the child falls into its field. This isn’t an authorization but a fusion. It’s not a question of welcoming the triumph of man over deteriorated forms, but of intimacy communicated throughout. Essentially the laugh comes from communication” (italics in the original).
62. Parvulescu 2010, 161–62, rightly detects echoes of Virgil in Kristeva’s treatment of the laughter exchanged between mother and child (esp. Kristeva 1980, 271–94).
63. Warner 1998, 348.
64. It is striking that hardly any classical treatment of this text references its role in modern theory—nor, it must be admitted, vice versa. In fact, there is some sorry mangling of the Latin in the nonclassical discussions; for example, “Incipe, puer parvo” in the first printing of Warner 1992 (348; later corrected), introducing yet another ungrammatical scribal error into a complex text.
65. The bibliography on constructing identity and on cultural change in the Greco-Roman world is now immense. In addition to other works cited in the following notes, significant contributions include Millett 1990; Woolf 1994; Goldhill 2001; Dench 2005; Mattingly 2011.
66. Epist. 2.1.156 (“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit”). As Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 24–25, points out, modern scholars rarely quote the very different view of Ovid, Fast. 3.101–2, whose language alludes to Horace.
67. For examples, see Van Dommelen 1997; Hill 2001, 14, (constellation); Webster 2001, 217–23 (hybridity and creolization); Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 27–28 (bilingualism); Le Roux 2004, 301 (crossbreeding, métissage). The influence (and terminology) of such theoretical and comparative studies as Bhabha 1994, esp. 112–16 (for “hybridity”), and Hannerz 1987 is clear.
68. Wallace-Hadrill 2008. The clearest summary of the arguments is at 17–27, which also offers a punchy critique of some of the currently favorite metaphors while opting instead for the model of bilingualism (and also for a model of Greco-Roman cultural interaction based on the diastolic and systolic phases in the operation of the human heart). Wallace-Hadrill 1998 offers a brisk earlier version of his linguistic (code-switching) analogy.
69. Some sensible reflections on the shared traditions of laughter between elite and nonelite are found in Horsfall 1996, 110–11 (though Horsfall is overall more confident than many about our ability to access Roman “popular culture”).
70. Again, there is a vast bibliography. Significant contributions among the new wave of studies of Greek literature and culture in the empire include Swain 1996 (reflecting on “how the Greek elite used language to constitute themselves as a culturally and politically superior group,” 409); Whitmarsh 2001 (the question is “how ‘the literary’ is employed to construct Greek identity in relationship to the Greek past and the Roman present,” 1–2); Spawforth 2012 (“Where Greek culture was concer
ned, an ‘imperial style of signalled incorporation’ made clear the ‘pure’ brand of Hellenism that the ruling power sought to uphold as morally acceptable to the Romans,” 271). Konstan and Saïd 2006 includes a particularly useful range of essays.
71. Goldhill 2001; Woolf 1994 (the phrase is also used as the title of Woolf 1998, which focuses on Gaul).
72. Fraenkel 1922 (the English translation, Fraenkel 2007, reviews the impact of the book, on xi–xxii). From a more strictly historical perspective, the work of Erich Gruen has been particularly influential here; see, for example, Gruen 1990, 124–57.
73. Christenson 2000, 45–55; Beard 2007, 253–56.
74. Terence, Eun. 1–45; with Barsby 1999, 13–19; Brothers 2000, 20–26. Terence’s Thraso derives from Menander’s Bias. But the matter is complicated by the fact that there is a character named Gnatho in Menander’s The Toady and another, Strouthias, who seems to be (from the fragments that remain) the inspiration for part of the portrayal of Terence’s Gnatho. Perhaps Terence conflated the two, keeping Gnatho’s name, or perhaps the same character went under two different names in Menander’s play. See further Brown 1992, 98–99; Pernerstorfer 2006, 45–50 (for the arguments that a single character was called by two different names). Pernerstorfer 2009 attempts a major reconstruction of the play, reprising the conclusions of the earlier article; for another, succinct, attempt to summarize the plot, see Gomme and Sandbach 1973, 420–22.
75. Menander, Kolax frag. 3 (= Plutarch, Mor. 57a = Quomodo adulator 13): γελῶ τὸ πρὸς τὸν Κύπριον ἐννοούμενος. Plutarch does not mention the title of the play but does name two of its characters. See Gomme and Sandbach 1973, 432; Pernerstorfer 2009, 112–13. Lefèvre 2003, 97–98, is almost alone (and unconvincing) in believing that these words “have nothing to do with Terence.”
76. Gomme and Sandbach 1973, 432; Brown 1992, 94; Pernerstorfer 2009, 113.
