Laughter in Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  68. Vesp. 19.2.

  69. Suetonius, Iul. 51. See also Suetonius, Iul. 49.4; Dio 43.20; and the discussion in Beard 2007, 247–49.

  70. The clearest ancient example of laughter presented in these terms is found in the Greek story of Baubo, who exposes her genitals and makes the mourning Demeter laugh; it is explicitly called apotropaic by, for example, Zeitlin 1982 (145). For further references and brief discussion, see above, p. 174.

  71. The “evil eye” is far too catchall a solution to be useful; see further Beard 2007, 248.

  72. Barton 1993, 140, briefly discusses Vespasian’s funeral (though not the triumph)—seeing the joker along these lines, as “the monstrous double” of the emperor.

  73. For example, Juvenal 5; Martial, Epigram. 2.43, 3.60, 4.85; Pliny, Ep. 2.6. Gowers 1993, 211–19, discusses the ideology and the practice of such inequalities.

  74. SHA, Heliog. 25.9.

  75. Petronius, Sat. 49, raises all kinds of questions about food and deception. Apicius’ “patina of anchovy without anchovy” is a more mundane case (4.2.12).

  76. D’Arms 1990 is a useful overview of the general paradoxes of equality and inequality of the convivium; further aspects are discussed by Barton 1993, 109–12; Roller 2001, 135–46; Roller 2006 (for the hierarchies implied by posture), esp. 19–22, 85–88, 130–36.

  77. The most acute discussions of this particular area include Roller 2001, 146–54 (focusing on verbal exchanges witty and otherwise at the dinner party), and Damon 1997, an important study that lies in the background of much of my exploration in the pages that follow.

  78. I am borrowing here Lévi-Strauss’s famous phrase, for which see Lévi-Strauss 1997 [1965].

  79. Schlee 1893, 98.18–21.

  80. Damon 1997, 1–19, is a good introduction, with further bibliography, to some of the main debates about parasites; 23–36 sketches the main characteristics of the figure; 252–55 summarizes her key conclusions on the “sites of discomfort” (255) in the institution of patronage. Other useful recent discussions of different aspects of the parasite, and his cultural origins, include Nesselrath 1985, 88–121; J. C. B. Lowe 1989; Brown 1992; J. Wilkins 2000, 71–86; Tylawsky 2002; König 2012, 242–65.

  81. Xenophon, Symp. 1.11–16, and, for example, 2.14, 2.20–23, 4.50. Halliwell 2008, 139–54, is a sharp discussion of different modes of laughter throughout this work, rightly stressing the role of mimicry and questioning quite how uninvited we should imagine Philip to be (143–55). Huss 1999, 104–6, lists numerous close—or not so close—ancient parallels.

  82. Damon 1997, 37–101, reviews these plays. Maltby 1999 discusses four particular characters (from Plautus’ Menaechmi, Captivi, Persa, and Stichus). How far we are meant to identify significantly different types in this repertoire of characters—to distinguish, say, the “parasite” from the “flatterer”—is anything but certain; I have not here attempted to delineate any precise calibration of these hungry, flattering jokesters.

  83. Arnott 1972 remains one of the best, most sympathetic introductions to the play—and to the role of its parasite.

  84. Stich. 221–24: “logos ridiculos vendo. age licemini. / qui cena poscit? ecqui poscit prandio? / . . . ehem, adnuistin? nemo meliores dabit.” Logi is a loan word whose Greek associations may have remained strong (see also ll. 383, 393), but later in the play (l. 400) the Latin dicta is used as an exact equivalent for these jokes.

  85. Stich. 454–55: “Libros inspexi; tam confido quam potis, me meum optenturum regem ridiculis logis.” For the role of jokebooks, see above, pp. 201–5.

  86. Ridiculus: Stich. 171–77 (whose precise order is uncertain), 389. Catagelasimus: Stich. 630 (the slightly awkward translation brings out the point). Ritschl 1868, 411, asserts that ridiculus never holds a passive sense in this period (“non sit is qui risum movet invitus, sed qui iocis et facetiis risum dedita opera captat”), a view widely followed (by, e.g., Maltby 1999). This seems to me highly implausible and—by missing the subtlety signaled in l. 630—reduces the Stichus to the uninteresting play it has been taken to be. (See the damning comments on it summarized by Arnott 1972, 54.) Bettini 2000 reaches similar conclusions on Gelasimus to my own, by a different route (see esp. 474); Sommerstein 2009, despite an apparent zeal to oversystematize laughter in Aristophanes, also points to some of these ambivalences.

  87. It provides, for example, the main subject of a long essay by Plutarch: Mor. 48e–74e (= Quomodo adulator).

  88. Seneca, Ep. 27.5–7: “Habebat ad pedes hos [servos], a quibus subinde cum peteret versus quos referret, saepe in medio verbo excidebat. Suasit illi Satellius Quadratus, stultorum divitum arrosor et, quod sequitur, arrisor et, quod duobus his adiunctum est, derisor, ut grammaticos haberet analectas.” Satellius’ quip (that he should have “scholars to gather up the bits”) appears to work by pushing further the idea of the commodification of knowledge and its relation to the slave economy: analecta was the title of the slave whose job it was to pick up crumbs around the dinner table, here imagined as scholars picking up the dropped crumbs of the host’s quotations. Roller 2001, 148–49, briefly discusses the passage, linking the three terms rather differently. Similar connections underlie a clever (but usually overlooked) pun in Juvenal 5. This poem sends up a dysfunctional dinner party where a client puts up with the humiliation of his status, to the scorn of the satirist. Toward the end, we learn what scraps the client is to be served, in contrast to the lavish food of his host. They include semesum leporem—or “half-eaten hare,” as the commentaries explain (from lepus, leporis). But, of course, that leporem could also come from a word we noted in the last chapter among the vocabulary of joking: that is lepos, leporis (wit or joking). So on the client’s menu may be half-eaten hare, but it could also be a half-eaten joke. A nice illustration of the overlap between laughter and hierarchical banquets!

  89. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 6.234c–262a; sympathetically discussed by Whitmarsh 2000, with reference to the wider Greek (prose) tradition of parasites and flatters.

  90. 6.248d–f.

  91. 6.252d.

  92. 6.249e.

  93. Green 2006, 1–47, is a clear introduction to the work (though Green’s interests focus on Diodorus’ account of the fifth century BCE); Stylianou 1998, 1–139 (specifically on the early fourth century BCE), has greater detail.

  94. Diodorus Siculus 34/5.2.8–9. Sources for the Sicilian slave revolts and brief discussion can be found conveniently in Shaw 2001.

  95. Suetonius, Tib. 57.2.

  96. Nat. D. 1.93: “Latino verbo utens scurram Atticum fuisse dicebat.” The passage has caused critics considerable trouble (see, for example, Dyck 2003, 177), but the basic point (often missed) is that it almost certainly exposes an untranslatable difference between the Greek and the Roman idiom of laughter (while paradoxically seeing Socrates in distinctively Roman terms). I say almost certainly because (as Stephen Halliwell reminds me) if Zeno was addressing an audience including Romans (such as Cicero), he may have adjusted his vocabulary accordingly.

  97. Fraenkel 1922 (pinpointed in Fraenkel 2007, xiii).

  98. Corbett 1986 collects many of the wide-ranging citations, but he struggles (probably fruitlessly, as I shall suggest) to impose any clear explanatory structure on the sometimes bafflingly varied usages of the word scurra (and his efforts certainly did not impress Don Fowler: “It is almost a model of how not to go about an investigation of this kind” [1987, 90]). By far the sharpest discussions I know are Barton 1993, for which the scurra is part of the repertoire of elite antitypes in Rome; Habinek 2005, 182–85, stressing the scurra as a category of anxiety.

  99. See, for example, Plautus, Trin. 199–211; Curc. 296–97 (assuming the servi of the scurrae are like their masters); Most. 15–16.

  100. SHA, Heliog. 33.7; Corbett 1986, 73.

  101. On this view, the wide range of usages of the term reflects the range of boundaries that could be laid, in different places, between the proper and improper practice of laughter at Rome—
hardly now recoverable.

  102. Palmer 1989 and M. Roberts 1993 give useful overviews of these poems.

  103. Conybeare 2002, 197–98, explains how critics have tried to get rid of the word iocantur, which has an impeccable manuscript tradition.

  104. Conybeare 2002.

  7. BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL—ESPECIALLY MONKEYS AND ASSES

  1. Macrobius, Sat. 2.5.

  2. Sat. 2.5.9.

  3. Julia’s jokes are the subject of Long 2000 (especially the Macrobian context) and Richlin 1992b (with a discussion of her life). The text signals, without explicitly mentioning, Julia’s fate: the account is tied to her “thirty-eighth year” (2.5.2), that is 2 BCE, the year of her exile to Pandateria. The different phases of her exile, in conditions of varying severity, are reviewed by Fantham 2006, 89–91.

  4. Carter 1992, 190.

  5. I am referring here not just to moments when a woman laughs (or women laugh) at a man (or men) but when she laughs, in a gendered role, as a woman, at a man (which is what, in its powerful and positive valuation, the giggle signifies). Halliwell’s prostitutes (2008, 491) and most uses of κιχλίζειν do not quite match this, though Theocritus, Id. 11.77–78 (girls giggling at the unfortunate Polyphemus), comes close; in Latin, Horace, Carm. 1.9.22, is rather further away.

  6. Carter 1992, 189 (she continues on 190: “To reproduce this giggle, a man must identify with a woman rather than with another man and perceive some aspects of male desire as foolish”).

  7. Ars am. 3.279–90 (“Quis credat? Discunt etiam ridere puellae,” 281). Martial, Epigram. 2.41, explicitly looks over his shoulder at Ovid (the Paelignian poet) in ridiculing Maximina, a girl with three black teeth: “Ride si sapis, o puella, ride / Paelignus, puto, dixerat poeta.” The quotation “Ride . . .” is probably a loose allusion to this passage of Ars Amatoria rather than taken from a lost Ovidian poem; see Cristante 1990; C. Williams 2004, 150–51.

  8. Gibson 2003, 211, lists various passages in Latin where lacuna is used for other types of “bodily hollows.” Martial, Epigram. 7.25.6, uses gelasinus (a transliteration from the Greek) for “dimple.” But in general, dimples are not major players in Roman literary culture.

  9. Gibson 2003, 212.

  10. I follow the reading and punctuation of Gibson 2003, 60 (with 212–13)—“est quae perverso distorqueat ora cachinno; / risu concussa est altera, flere putes; / illa sonat raucum quiddam atque inamabile: ridet / ut rudet a scabra turpis asella mola” (ll. 287–90)—though none of the uncertainties affect the main point of my argument here.

  11. Critchley 2002, 29. Critchley’s observations in this section (25–38) have influenced some of the main themes of this chapter, in particular his stress on the role of humor at and across the boundaries between the human and the animal (“Humour explores what it means to be human by moving back and forth across the frontier that separates humanity from animality, thereby making it unstable,” 29). As I hope to show, Roman writing strikingly foreshadows this major point.

  12. Ars am. 3.283.

  13. Lucretius 6.1195; Suetonius, Claud. 30.

  14. Met. 1.640 (where rictus is a convincing emendation for the manuscript ripas), 1.741. This is a repeated image in the poem: see, for example, 2.481 (the beautiful face of Callisto deformed by a lato rictu on her transformation into a bear), 13.568 (Hecuba on the cusp of transformation into a dog “rictuque in verba parato latravit”). The thirteenth-century pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula picks up the animality of the rictus: “Rictus ei, non risus inest, et sacrificari / Deberet certe potius quam sacrificare” (2.148–49); a rictus belongs to the sacrificial animal, not the human sacrificer. See also Miller 2010, 15, 150.

  15. The poem is discussed as a literary play on the traditions of flagitatio by Fraenkel 1961; Selden 2007, 524–27. Goldberg 2000; 2005, 108–13, stress its comic legacy.

  16. Translators and critics differ on the precise point of comparison between the dog and the woman. Most take it, as I have, to refer to the facial distortion; a few stress instead the sound of yelping, taking os as “mouth” rather than “face”: “with the noisome yap of a Gallic hound,” as Selden renders it (2007, 525). For the rictus of dogs and possible points of comparison with human laughter, see Lucretius 5.1063–66; Plautus, Capt. 485–86; Apuleius, Apol. 6 (discussed by Tilg 2008, 113–15).

  17. For this popular usage—eliding the different species and subspecies, the tailed and the tailless, the chimps, baboons, gorillas, and other simians —I must apologize to primatologists. Scientists (modern and ancient) identify a wide variety of different characteristics and crucial distinctions. In particular, monkeys and apes belong to different scientific families (apes being hominoids; monkeys being either Cercopithecidae, Cebidae, or Callitrichidae). But these technical distinctions do not significantly impact on day-to-day debates and representations.

  18. The title of this section is borrowed from Connors 2004; it was too good to miss (and is not wholly unparalleled in antiquity: see n. 24).

  19. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.613d.

  20. See pp. 46–47 for “laughing” primates (and “laughing” rats).

  21. Connors 2004 is the most up-to-date and sophisticated study of Roman ideas of apes (summing up, on 179, their perennial fascination: “Our human shape is replicated in them but also [from one point of view] distorted: wild, hairy, they meet our gaze across an unbridgeable divide between human and animal, nature and culture”). McDermott 1935; 1936; 1938 are still useful points of reference. All these provide an important background to the rest of this section. For “ape lore” in later periods and the cultural construction of modern primatology, see Janson 1952; Haraway 1989; De Waal 2001. Although chimpanzees’ tea parties may be a thing of the past, the use of primates higher up the cultural food chain is alive and well: see, e.g., Self 1997, a satiric novel in which human beings have been changed into chimpanzees.

  22. Pindar, Pyth. 2.72–75. I am skating over some of the difficulties of this “critic-bedevilled sentence,” on which see C. Carey 1981, 49–55 (quote on 49).

  23. In addition to McDermott 1935 and 1938, Demont 1997 and Lissarrague 1997 assemble and discuss a wide range of classical Greek references to the habits of monkeys; for those in comedy in particular, see Lilja 1980. As these studies show, the stereotype of the monkey in classical Greece is not restricted to imitation and deception but also includes, for example, ugliness, low birth, and ferocity.

  24. Aristophanes, Eq. 887–90. The context is some political banter in which two rivals are trying to bribe Dēmos, the personification of the Athenian people, with a cloak. The repartee shows that the reference to the monkey signals both mimicry (“No, I’m only copying your ways, as a man at a drinking party might when he borrows another man’s slippers to go and have a crap”) and flattery or bribery (“You’re not going to out-toady me”). Sommerstein 1981, 93, 191, misses some of the point, which is seen by Neil 1901, 127, and Demont 1997, 466. Suda, s.v. πιθηκισμοῖς περιελαύνεις, points explicitly to the various possible significances of “monkey business” here: trickery, flattery, and imitation.

  25. Phrynichus, frag. 21 (Kassel and Austin). The best guess is that the final “monkey” would have been a sycophant (see also Demosthenes, De cor. 242; Aristophanes, Ach. 904–7).

  26. Summed up briskly at Connors 2004, 183–84, 189. Isidore, Etym. 12.2.30, refers to the etymology but insists that it is false. The Greek pairing of πίθηκος (monkey) and πιθανός (persuasive) could open up other related possibilities, puns, and associations.

  27. Cicero, Nat D. 1.97 (Ennius, Satir. frag 69 [Vahlen] = ROL2 Ennius, Satir. 23). The pun works despite (or because of) the fact that the first i in similis is short, in simia long. Other examples of such wordplay include Ovid, Met. 14.91–98; Martial, Epigram. 7.87.4; Phaedrus, Fabulae 4.13.

  28. Connors 2004, 189–99, 202; briefly, hitting the nail on the head, John Henderson 1999, 34.

  29. Lissarrague 1997, 469.

  30. Sat. 1
.10.18; with Gowers 2012, 316–17.

  31. Aelian, NA 5.26 (see also 6.10); for the snares, see 17.25 (with Diodorus Siculus 17.90.1–3—though in a nice inversion of teaching and learning, Diodorus claims that the monkeys taught the hunters this trick). It is noteworthy that Aristotle’s main discussion of apes and monkeys (HA 2.8–9, 502a16–b26) does not stress their capacity for mimicry.

  32. A. King 2002, 433–34, reviews the representations of monkeys, etc., at Pompeii and includes a brief discussion of those I refer to here; McDermott 1938, 159–324, is a comprehensive catalogue of images of simians in all media from the classical and preclassical Mediterranean world.

  33. M. Della Corte 1954, 210n498 (it is now lost).

  34. From the House of the Dioscuri (6.9.6–7); see PPM 4.976, no. 225. It is not impossible that there were such performing monkeys in Pompeii, as the discovery there of a simian skeleton hints (Bailey et al. 1999).

  35. Often the image of the escape of Aeneas is discussed alone, but de Vos 1991, 113–17, makes clear the link between it and the image of Romulus; followed by J. R. Clarke 2007, 151–52. For dog-headed baboons (cynocephali), see McDermott 1938, 4–13, 35–46.

  36. Brendel 1953.

  37. McDermott 1938, 278–80; J. R. Clarke 2007, 153–54 (“comic resistance”). Cèbe 1966, 369–70, lists further explanations.

  38. Plutarch, Mor. 64e (= Quomodo adulator 23). Plutarch elsewhere—Mor. 60c (= Quomodo adulator 18)—casts the mythical simian Cercopes as flatterers, again eliding monkey, laughter, and flattery. Hercules carried off this mischievous pair of creatures, upside down, hanging over his shoulder, after they tried to steal his weapons. In the longest, late version of the story (ps.-Nonnus, Comm. in IV Orationes Gregorii Naz. 4.39, of the sixth century CE; with Nimmo Smith 2001, 29–30), they start to discuss his “black arse”—and Hercules bursts out laughing and lets them off. For the complex tradition of the Cercopes (who in some versions gave the name to Pithecusae, modern Ischia), see Marconi 2007, 150–59; note also Woodford 1992; Kirkpatrick and Dunn 2002, 35–37; Connors 2004, 185–88.