Laughter in Ancient Rome (16 page)

So, for example, laughter features as one diagnostic of the emperor’s mad villainy or perverse extravagance in the biography of the third-century CE emperor Elagabalus—which belongs to that strange, partly fictional, partly fraudulent, but hugely revealing collection of imperial lives known as the
Augustan History
(or
Historia Augusta
—the history, that is “of the emperors,”
Augusti
).
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In what is almost a parody of a pattern that we shall see repeated in the lives of earlier emperors in less tendentious accounts (see chapter 6), Elagabalus outdid his subjects in laughter as much as in everything else. In fact, he sometimes laughed so loud in the theater that he drowned out the actors (“He alone could be heard”)—a nice indication of the social disruption caused by gelastic excess. He also used laughter to humiliate. “He had the habit too of inviting to dinner eight bald men, or else eight one-eyed ones, or eight men with gout, or eight deaf men, or eight with particularly dark skin, or eight tall men—or eight fat men, in their case to raise a laugh from everyone, as they could not fit on the same couch.” It was not so much the mad replication that caused the laughter but rather his slapstick exposure of the victims’ fatness. There was a similar comic style in his experiment with a Roman prototype of whoopee cushions: “Some of his less prestigious friends he would sit on airbags, not cushions, and he had these deflated while they were dining, so that the men were often suddenly found under the table in the middle of their meal.”
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This is a combination of power, dining, laughter, and practical jokes to which we shall return.

An even richer discussion that often goes unnoticed (or is merely pillaged for some of the individual jokes it contains) is found in the second book of Macrobius’
Saturnalia.
Writing in the context of a highly learned, late antique subculture, Macrobius (through the scripted contributions of his various characters) offers the closest thing we have from the ancient world to an extended history not so much of laughter but of joking, and, indirectly at least, he reflects on different styles of jokes and on the nature and importance of “old jokes.”

The scene is simple. In keeping with the lighthearted atmosphere of the festival, the Saturnalia, that provides the dramatic context of the work, each of the discussants in turn picks a joke from the past to recount to the others (Hannibal and Cato the Elder are the earliest Roman “jokers” cited, though—true to type—the Greek character in the discussion, Eusebius, contributes a quip from Demosthenes, and the Egyptian Horus picks an epigram of Plato’s).
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This leads on to a rather more systematic anthologizing of the quips of three historical characters—Cicero, the emperor Augustus, and his daughter, Julia—and occasionally to wider reflections on laughter.
³³
In part, Macrobius’ account matches the standard historical template, with its emphasis on
antiqua festivitas
and the fearlessness, if not the rudeness, of the jokers of earlier times.
³⁴
But it also carefully shows what hangs on the choice of a favorite joke and how that choice may relate to character. Predictably, it is one of the uninvited guests, the oddball bully Evangelus, the man most concerned to undermine the atmosphere of literary high culture, who chooses the joke about sex; the buttoned-up grammarian Servius can hardly bear to tell a joke at all and in the end settles for a dry piece of wordplay.
³⁵

The final section of their discussion turns, significantly, to another key institution of Roman laughter: mime (in Latin,
mimus
). This particular form of dramatic display was not, as its name in English might suggest, a silent affair, dependent on gesture alone, but a performance with words, sometimes improvised, sometimes scripted, and both male and female actors. Its precise character and history are much less understood than modern textbook accounts sometimes suggest, as is its precise relationship to another ancient genre—pantomime. But two features are clear. First, mime could sometimes be very bawdy, and our genteel debaters of the
Saturnalia
are careful to stress that they will not actually bring the mimes into their banquet, only a selection of the jokes—so avoiding the bawdiness (
lascivia
) but reflecting the high spirit (
celebritas
) of the performances.
³⁶
Second, it was the one and only cultural form at Rome whose primary, perhaps even sole, purpose was to make you laugh. So Roman writers repeatedly stressed—and that was the message blazoned on the tombstones of some mime actors.
³⁷

I shall later argue (see pp. 167–72) that the hilarity so strongly associated with mime is one aspect of the more general importance of imitation and impersonation in the production of Roman laughter, from actors to apes. But Macrobius’ discussion already gestures in that direction with a series of stories about the competition between two pantomime actors, Pylades and Hylas, to present convincing imitations of mythical characters. In the cleverest of these, the audience is reported to have laughed at Pylades, who was playing the mad Hercules, because he was stumbling around “and wasn’t maintaining the manner of walking appropriate to an actor.” He took off his mask and berated them: “Idiots,” he said, “I’m playing the part of a madman.” In a nice twist, the audience turns out to have been laughing at a man for what they imagined was a bad piece of acting, when in fact it was a perfect example of (laughable) impersonation.
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Sometimes it is not a lengthy discussion, such as Macrobius’, but just a couple of unnoticed words in some little-read text that can shed unexpected light on the operations and significance of laughter in Roman culture. The collected volumes of Roman oratorical exercises that go under the general title of
Declamations
have recently attracted some keen scholarly attention, but even so they are still relatively underexploited. A combination of rhetorical training and after-dinner entertainment, these exercises usually started from a fictional (or at least fictionalized) legal case, on which the learner orators or celebrity after-dinner speakers would take different sides, for defense or prosecution. The collections gathered together some of these cases, along with excerpts from particularly notable speeches by famous rhetorical showmen; they represent, in a sense, both a manual of models to imitate and a compilation of oratorical “greatest hits.”
³⁹

One telling example, from the collection compiled by the elder Seneca in the early first century CE, concerns a (fictionalized) version of the case of Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, who was expelled from the Senate in 184 BCE for inappropriate conduct while holding office.
⁴⁰
Several shorter and slightly different variants survive elsewhere in Latin literature,
⁴¹
but the declamation centers on the relationship between Flamininus and a prostitute, whom—in his infatuation—he had taken with him when he left Rome to govern his province. At dinner there one evening, she remarked that she had never seen a man’s head cut off, so to please her, Flamininus had a condemned criminal executed right in front of her in the dining room. Then, in the fictionalized world of the declamation, he was accused of
maiestas
(often translated as “treason” but better as “an offense against the Roman state”).
⁴²

The oratorical highlights focus not on the rights and wrongs of the execution of the criminal as such (the man had, after all, been condemned to death anyway) but on its context. The declamation is in fact a treasure-house of Roman clichés on the proper separation of the official business of state from the pleasures of ludic entertainment and the jocular world of the dinner party. Many of the quoted speakers found snappy ways of summing up this underlying issue. Taking “the forum into a feast” (
forum in convivium
) was no better than taking “a feast into the forum” (
convivium in forum
), quipped one. “Have you ever seen a praetor dining with his whore in front of the rostra?” asked another, referring to the raised platform in the Forum from which speakers traditionally addressed the Roman people.
⁴³

Held up for specific criticism is the fact that the executioner was drunk when he killed the man and that Flamininus was wearing slippers (
soleae
), both signs of private pleasure rather than official duty. But another marker of transgression lies in the “jokes” being made of the serious business of state. An execution has been turned into “a dinner table joke” (
convivales ioci
), Flamininus is himself accused of “joking” (
ioci
), and the woman is said to have been “making fun” (
iocari
) of the fasces, the symbols of Roman power. In fact, according to one of these rhetorical reenactments of the terrible scene, when the unfortunate victim was brought into the room, the prostitute laughed (
arridet
)—not, as the translation in the Loeb Classical Library has it, with very different implications, “smiled.”
⁴⁴
There is, I suspect, a sexual resonance here; laughter was often associated with ancient prostitutes, so it is exactly what you might expect this, or any, whore to do.
⁴⁵
But more than that, the single word
arridet
(emphatically at the end of the sentence) underlines the irruption of gelastic frivolity into the world of state business.
⁴⁶

What happened next, however, brings into focus a different role of laughter in the social interaction around this dinner table. The whole occasion is written up in decidedly melodramatic terms (we are asked to imagine at one point that the unfortunate criminal misreads the scene as the preliminary to a pardon and actually thanks Flamininus for his mercy). But what did the other guests do once the execution had been carried out? One man wept, one turned away, but another laughed (
ridebat
)—“to keep in with the prostitute” (
quo gratior esset meretrici
).
⁴⁷

This is laughter provoked by something quite different from the jokes of Macrobius. Jocular and (transgressively) ludic though the laughter of this whole scene may be, there are no verbal quips to prompt the outbursts. We see instead the laughter of (inappropriate) pleasure on the part of the woman and the laughter of flattery, or (to put it more politely) of social alignment, on the part of another dinner guest. This is another example of that nexus of signals implied by a laugh—from pleasure to approval to outright sycophancy—to which we shall return.

CLASSIC LITERARY LAUGHS: THE LESSONS OF VIRGIL’S BABY

The study of laughter does not merely reanimate some less-known works of Latin literature; it also encourages us to look again, through a different lens, at some of the most canonical. We have already glanced at Horace’s
Satires
and at Catullus. There are many more cases where laughter plays a role, sometimes disputed, in the most famous Latin classics to have survived from the Roman world: from Ovid’s
Art of Love,
with its parodic set of instructions to young women on how to laugh,
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through Virgil’s reference to Venus’ laugh, which enigmatically seals the discussion between her and Juno at the beginning of
Aeneid
4 (and with it the fate of Dido),
⁴⁹
to the opening of Horace’s
Art of Poetry,
where he lists the kinds of representational incongruities that would, he claims, make anyone laugh (“If a painter wanted to put a horse’s head on a human neck . . . would you be able to keep your laughter in?”).
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The most famous, and controversial, of all such references to laughter, however, is the especially puzzling end to Virgil’s puzzling fourth
Eclogue.
This poem was written around 40 BCE, against the background of promising attempts—fruitless as they proved in the long term—to secure peace in the civil war between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony. It heralds the coming of a new golden age for Rome, embodied in or brought about by the birth, imminent or recent (the chronology is vague), of a baby boy. Virgil celebrates this baby in messianic terms (hence the title “Messianic Eclogue” often given to the whole poem)—“the boy under whom . . . a golden race shall rise up throughout the world” and so on. But who was the baby? This has been a major source of dispute for centuries, with suggestions ranging from the yet unborn child of either Octavian or Mark Antony (both of whom turned out, inconveniently, to be girls) through a purely symbolic figure for the return of peace to Jesus—whose birth, this idea goes, Virgil was unwittingly prophesying.
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But almost equally controversial has been the significance of the last four lines of the poem (60–63), which address the baby and focus on the “laughter” (
risus
) exchanged between him and his parent(s). What is this
risus,
and whose
risus
is it anyway?