Laughter in Ancient Rome (18 page)

These reflections gesture toward a lively, wider debate among historians and archaeologists about the very nature of “Roman” culture. Complex as this debate has become, one simple question largely sums it up: what do we mean by that superficially unproblematic adjective
Roman
(whether “Roman laughter” or “literature,” “sculpture” or “spectacle,” “politics” or “pantomime”)? Which Romans are we talking about? The wealthy literate elite? Or the poor, the peasants, the slaves, or the women? And even more to the point, are we thinking of the term geographically, chronologically, or more integrally linked to political and civic status or to distinctive norms of behavior and culture? Can, for example, an intellectual treatise written in Greek by an Athenian aristocrat in the second century CE count as Roman because Athens was then part of the Roman Empire? Would it be more convincingly Roman if the Greek writer was (like Dio) simultaneously a Roman senator or if we knew that the work was read and debated by Latin speakers in Rome itself?

There are, of course, no right answers to these questions. The most influential recent studies have insisted on disaggregating any unitary notion of “Roman” culture while also arguing against any simple progressive model of cultural change across the ancient Mediterranean.
⁶⁵
No one would now think of the early city of Rome as a cultural vacuum that was gradually filled, in a process neatly labeled “Hellenization,” thanks to its contacts with the Greek world. (The Roman poet Horace would, I suspect, have been horrified to discover that his words “Captured Greece took captive its rough conqueror” would be dragged out of context and turned into a slogan for the simple inferiority of Roman versus Greek culture.
⁶⁶
) Likewise, few historians would now characterize growing Roman influence in the West as a straightforward process of “Romanization”—or, alternatively, think in terms of a clear standoff between “Roman” cultural forms and those of the more or less resistant “natives.”

Instead they point to a shifting cross-cultural multiplicity of “Romannesses,” formed by an often unstable series of cultural interactions summed up in a range of sometimes illuminating, sometimes overseductive, sometimes (I fear) quite misleading metaphors, such as constellation, hybridity, creolization, bilingualism, or crossbreeding.
⁶⁷
In fact, in some of the most radical work, even the basic descriptive language of ancient cultural difference and ancient cultural change in the Roman Empire seems to have been turned inside out and upside down. So, for example, in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s wonderfully heady study
Rome’s Cultural Revolution,
the very opposition between Roman and Greek (Hellenic) culture is drastically subverted. That is to say, Wallace-Hadrill offers a series of powerful arguments for seeing Rome as a prime engine of “Hellenization,” “Hellenization” as one aspect of “Romanization,” and ultimately “Roman” influence as a driver behind the “re-Hellenization” of the Hellenic world itself!
⁶⁸

These vertiginous issues inevitably lurk in the background of any book such as this one. But my most pressing questions are rather narrower and more manageable. For a start, we have to face the fact that we have almost no access whatsoever to the culture of laughter among the nonelite anywhere in the Roman world. Whether the style of “peasant laughter” really was as different from that of the urban elite as we often imagine, who knows? (We shouldn’t forget that the supposed lustiness of the peasant can be as much an invention of the sophisticated city dweller as an accurate reflection of the gelastic life of simple peasant society.)
⁶⁹
In any case, to study “Roman laughter” is now necessarily to study laughter as it is (re)constructed and mediated in a range of elite literary texts. The question is: which ones, and particularly which ones of those produced in Greek or partly rooted in the Greek world? Is there a line to be drawn? Where? Does Plutarch—Greek essayist, priest at the sanctuary of Delphi, and avid student of “Roman” culture—belong in this book, in Stephen Halliwell’s
Greek Laughter,
or in both? Are we in danger of confusing “Greek” with “Roman” laughter? And how much does it matter?

There can be no hard-and-fast rules. Recent critical approaches to the Greek culture of the Roman Empire have stressed many different, sometimes contradictory, aspects: its emphatically Hellenic (even “anti-Roman”) coordinates, its active role in the reformulation of the very categories of “Greek” and “Roman” or in supporting the political and social hegemony of Rome over Greece, and so on.
⁷⁰
In practice, the modern dividing line between “Greek” and “Roman” has sometimes come down to little more than subject matter (if the work in question is about Rome, it tends to be treated as Roman; if about Greece, then it’s seen as Greek—despite the fact that the bifocal, Greco-Roman perspective of Plutarch and others makes nonsense of that procedure). Perhaps even more often, to be honest, it comes down to the territorial divisions of the modern academy. On the one hand, scholars of classical Greek literature tend to embrace and interpret this material as somehow an extension of their territory (it is, after all, written in “their” language and constructively engages with its classical Greek predecessors). Many Roman cultural historians, on the other hand, would claim it as part of their remit (it was written in “their” period and often gestures directly or indirectly to the power structures of the Roman empire). The truth is, there is no safe path to be trodden between seeing this literature in terms of (on the one hand)
being Greek
or (on the other)
becoming Roman
—to conscript the titles of two of the most influential modern contributions to this whole debate.
⁷¹

I shall proceed with some very basic methodological guidelines in mind. First, that the “Greek” and “Roman” cultures of laughter in the period of the Roman Empire were simultaneously both foreign to each other and also so mutually implicated as to be impossible to separate. Simply by virtue of language, some sense of cultural difference could always be mobilized. We have to imagine, for example, that when Virgil had his text of Homer in front of him and was considering how he would reflect the Greek word
meidiaō
in his own epic (see p. 73), he necessarily pondered on the different senses of Greek and Latin words for laughter and what might hang on them. And we caught a glimpse (on p. 78) of paraded ethnic preferences in joking among the elite diners at Macrobius’ Saturnalian dinner party: Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. We certainly need to keep alert for hints of cultural difference. But for the most part, there is little to be gained (and much to be lost) by attempting to prize apart the gelastic culture of imperial literature, still less by distributing these culturally multifaceted texts on one side or the other of some notional “Roman”/“Greek” divide (Plutarch’s
Roman Questions
in,
Leucippe and Cleitophon
out; Apuleius’ Latin version of the story of “Lucius the Ass” in, the parallel Greek version out). Elite Romans, wherever in the empire they lived, learned to “think laughter” in debate with both Greek and Latin texts. We are dealing, in large part at least, with a shared literary culture of laughter and “laughterhood,” a bilingual cultural conversation.

My second guideline serves to limit that very slightly. If we do imagine Roman imperial culture as a conversation (to add, I confess, yet another metaphor to those of hybridity, constellation, and the rest), I have chosen to concentrate on those literary works written in Greek where we can most confidently point to an explicitly Roman side in that script, rather than merely a generalized sociopolitical Roman background. That is sometimes through characters clearly labeled as Roman being featured in a dialogue (as we find, for example, in Plutarch’s
Table Talk
) or through specifically Roman subject matter and context (such as the names, currency, and events that form part of the background to the gags in the late antique “jokebook” the
Philogelos,
or “Laughter lover”).

What is striking is how powerful the Roman intervention in that conversation can be. In fact, as we shall now see, some of the traditions of laughter that may appear superficially to be more or less pure “Greek” turn out to be much more “Roman” than we usually assume. Sometimes we find that what we take as notable traditions of classical Greek laughter are very largely constructions of the Roman period. Occasionally we find that the Greek idiom of laughter adapts to ideas and expressions that are distinctively Latin. And when—conversely—Roman authors take over Greek jokes, we have evidence for the creative adaptation of the original material for a Roman audience. Here again, Terence’s
Eunuch
—with Gnatho the sponger, Thraso the soldier, and the joke about the young Rhodian—offers a nice glimpse of the “Romanization” of Greek laughter and the archaeology of a Roman joke while introducing some of the bigger issues of the final section of this chapter.

TERENCE’S GREEK JOKE

The comedies of Plautus and Terence have long provided revealing instances of the intricacy of Roman engagement with Greek culture—and the philological work of Eduard Fraenkel in the 1920s underpins many discussions of this.
⁷²
The plays are explicitly drawn from Greek models, but the dramatists actively reworked the “originals” into something significantly different, with a new resonance in the Roman context. For example, whatever its Greek source (which is still debated), Plautus’
Amphitruo
closely engages with that most distinctive of all Roman celebrations: the triumphal procession, held in honor of military victory. Plautus in fact comes close to adapting whatever his (Greek) original was into a comic parody of the origins of the (Roman) triumph.
⁷³

In Terence’s
Eunuch,
this creative adjustment goes right down to the individual jokes, so adding a further twist to the scenes of laughter that I looked at in the first chapter—and an important coda to my treatment there. The prologue of the play states clearly that its models were two late fourth-century plays of Menander:
The Eunuch
and
The Toady
(
Kolax
), from which the characters of the soldier and the sponger/flatterer (or toady) were drawn. We have, from various papyrus scraps and quotations, more than a hundred lines of
The Toady,
and these confirm that the characters of Gnatho and Thraso went back to that source (even if they were known by different names in Menander’s play).
⁷⁴
In fact, a brief snatch of dialogue, quoted by Plutarch, seems likely to have been the inspiration for one of the exchanges between the two that I quoted in chapter 1—a classic example of a willfully misleading explanation for an outburst of laughter. This, as we saw (p. 11), is Terence’s version:

Gnatho: hahahae

Thraso:
What are you laughing at?

Gnatho:
At what you just said, and at that story about the guy from Rhodes—whenever I think about it.

And this, to judge from Plutarch (who is discussing the problems of dealing with flatterers), is the “original” passage in
The Toady,
which Terence took over. The sentiment is strikingly similar, and the words are attributed to the sponger/flatterer of the title:

    I’m laughing when I think about the joke

You made against the Cypriot.
⁷⁵

Whether that explanation for laughter was as wickedly misleading in Menander’s play as in Terence’s, we do not have enough information to say (though Plutarch’s claim that the toady was “dancing in triumph” over the soldier with these words suggests that it was). But one thing seems certain: in each play there was some comic reference back to an earlier joke—yet the exact terms of that joke were different. In
The Eunuch,
it was a joke about the Rhodian boy (“chasing after delicacies”). In Menander, it is some (lost) gag about a “Cypriot”—perhaps, as some critics have proposed, connected with the old Greek saying about Cypriot bullocks eating dung (so all Cypriots are “shit eaters”).
⁷⁶

If so, we can only guess what lay behind Terence’s change. Perhaps the Cypriot bullock joke was simply not part of the Roman repertoire and was likely to fall flat in front of Terence’s first audience. Perhaps he entirely rewrote the joke to make a topical allusion to Roman political relations with Rhodes. But maybe Terence changed only the nationality of the quip’s antihero (the boy chasing the delicacies), from Cypriot to Rhodian; after all, in his
Eunuch,
the desired girl came from Rhodes, and maybe there was an intentional link. If so, that would give a deeper resonance, for the more learned members of the Roman audience, to the idea that it was an old joke (see p. 13). In fact, it was so old that it went back not just to Livius Andronicus but (plus or minus the Cypriot–Rhodian switch) to the age of Menander in the fourth century BCE. Here, in other words, the Greek inheritance was not merely adjusted to a different comic context; it was turned into an integral part of the Roman joke itself.