Laughter in Ancient Rome (27 page)

“Bad” emperors too were revealed by their particular style of laughing and joking. Ancient discussions of the imperial “monsters”—from Caligula through Domitian to Elagabalus—repeatedly use laughter, and the transgression of its codes and conventions, to define and calibrate different forms of cruelty and excess, the very opposites of
civilitas.
Sometimes this was a question of an emperor not tolerating jokes made at his expense. It was said that Commodus instructed the marines, who usually looked after the huge awnings used to shade the Colosseum, to kill the people in the audience who he believed were laughing at him (no wonder Dio was worried about cracking up).
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On other occasions it was more a question of the emperor laughing in the wrong way, in the wrong place, or at the wrong things, or making particularly sadistic (or just bad) jokes.

In the case of Claudius, his quips were decidedly feeble, or “cold” (
frigidus
): Suetonius was unimpressed by a pun on the name of a gladiator, Palumbus, which literally means “wood pigeon” (when the crowd clamored for Palumbus, Claudius promised him “if he could be caught”).
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Caligula’s quips were menacing rather than cold. “At one of his more lavish banquets,” Suetonius writes, “he suddenly collapsed into a fit of guffaws [
in cachinnos
]. The consuls who were reclining next to him asked him politely why he was laughing. ‘Only at the idea that at one nod from me, both of you could have your throats cut instantly.’”
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And Commodus’ biographer in the
Augustan History
nicely observes that “he was also deadly in his jokes” (
in iocis quoque perniciosus
) before telling the nasty story of how the emperor put a starling on the head of a man who had a few white hairs among the black. The bird pecked at the white hairs, thinking they were worms, causing the man’s scalp to fester—and presumably killing him in the end.
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This story echoes a theme prominent in the
Life
of Elagabalus: that the jokes of an autocrat can be literally murderous. But that is not all. In the part factual, part fantasy world of this biography, Commodus’ prank also parodies a whole tradition of imperial jokes about, or against, gray hairs and baldness. One of the commonest themes in the ridicule of an emperor was the state of his head: Julius Caesar was repeatedly mocked for being bald and was said to have combed his remaining hair forward to hide his bald patch (a time-honored tactic in the circumstances, and a time-honored theme of further mockery); Domitian too (the “bald Nero”) is supposed to have taken it as an insult if anyone joked about his lack of hair.
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But this particular story of Commodus surely looks back to one of the jests of Augustus, at his daughter, Julia, collected by Macrobius. Julia was said to have worried about her gray hairs, and she took to having them plucked out by her maids. One day Augustus visited her after this had been going on. “Pretending not to notice the gray hairs on her clothes . . . he asked his daughter whether, in a few years’ time, she would rather be bald or gray. When she replied, ‘Personally, father, I prefer to be gray,’ he told her off for the lie by saying, ‘Why, then, are these women making you bald so quickly?’”
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The contrast is clear. The wise Augustus jokingly reproves his daughter for plucking her gray hairs. The tyrant Commodus sets a bird on the head of an innocent man to do exactly that—and kills him.

Other aspects of imperial laughter are not so predictable. A different theme in this anecdotal and biographical tradition uses laughter to highlight various issues of control. Laughter in day-to-day practice was most likely as controllable for Romans as it is for us (see pp. 43–44). But one powerful Roman myth of laughter (like our own) was that as a natural irruption, it challenged the human ability to master it, and so the proper observance of the social protocols of laughter was the mark of a man (usually a man) fully in control of himself. It was one diagnostic of the faults of the emperor Claudius that he found it difficult to master his mirth. At his first attempt to give a public reading from his newly composed
History of Rome,
there was trouble from the beginning, when general laughter broke out at the sight of a very fat man breaking several benches, presumably with his sheer weight, by sitting on them. But it went from bad to worse, as the poor young prince did not manage to get through the recitation without cracking up whenever he recalled the hilarious incident. It was a telling sign of his incapacity, mental and physical.
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Roman protocols of control, however, operated the other way round too: the question was not simply whether the gentleman could control his laughter but whether he could control his desire to tell a joke (“to keep his
bona dicta
to himself,” as Ennius’ famous phrase had it; see p. 76) or resist the temptation to make jests of the wrong sort. Suetonius’ two chapters on the jocularity of Vespasian nicely illustrate this. Like Dio, the biographer generally applauds this emperor’s wit, and he quotes with admiration all kinds of textbook quips that would have met with the approval of Cicero or Quintilian—from the clever insertion of lines of poetry to the use of a jest to deflect hatred. (In fact, the match with the oratorical handbooks is so close that it is conceivable that their discussion of laughter lies somewhere behind these reflections of Suetonius’.) But even here the specter of the
scurra
was not far away: Vespasian’s
dicacitas
could be, Suetonius admits,
scurrilis.
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Yet the sharpest cutting edge of imperial laughter is seen not so much in the emperor’s ability to control his own outbursts of laughing or joking as in his attempts to control those of others. One classic tyrannical attempt to prohibit laughter is supposed to have occurred under Caligula, at the death of his sister Drusilla. According to Suetonius, Caligula ruled that during the period of mourning for her, no one—on pain of death—should laugh, bathe, or dine with their family (a significant trio of “normal” social human activities, with “laughing” first in Suetonius’ order). This was an obviously fruitless, not to say unenforceable, ruling and (whatever its truth) is recounted in the biography for precisely that reason. But it should also take its place with other tyrannical attempts—successful or unsuccessful, mythical or not—to dominate the forces of nature: just as Xerxes tried to bridge the Hellespont, so (more domestically) Caligula tried to conquer the natural forces of laughter among his subjects.
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An even more sinister aspect of imperial control was the attempt not to prevent laughing and joking but to impose them on the unwilling. Soon after describing Caligula’s rules for mourning, Suetonius tells of a particularly choice piece of imperial cruelty. Caligula insisted first that a man watch the execution of his own son, then that the father come to dinner with him that very afternoon: there, with a tremendous show of affability, the emperor “pushed him to laughing and joking” (
hilaritas
and
ioci
are the Latin words). Why did the man go along with it? asks Seneca, who tells a slightly different version of the story. There is a simple answer: because he had another son.
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We even find a hint of a more moderate version of the imperial exaction of laughter in Suetonius’
Life of Augustus.
Toward the very end of the emperor’s life, when he was staying in his villa on Capri, he still retained his generosity and jocularity: he gave presents and playfully insisted that the Greeks and Romans in his entourage swap dress and speak each other’s language; indeed, “there was no kind of fun [
genus hilaritatis
] that he refrained from.” But even here, and even with that most “civil” of emperors, there is a touch of menace, at least in Suetonius’ description. For in those fun-filled dinner parties, Augustus not only “allowed but demanded” that his young guests show “complete freedom in joking” (
permissa, immo exacta, iocandi licentia
).
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If laughter was a most uncontrollable bodily reaction, it was nevertheless (or perhaps for that very reason) one that emperors tried to govern, some with a lighter touch than others. To put it a different way, in the literary economy of imperial rule, the emperor’s attempt to govern laughter could be a vivid political symbol of the “unnaturalness” of autocracy, even in its more gentle forms.

LAUGHTER BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW

Perhaps even more striking is the fact that these stories so often site laughter at the interface between the emperor and his nonelite subjects—ordinary Romans, provincials, or rank-and-file soldiers. For when ancient writers chose to represent the interaction between the ruler and some ordinary person or pictured him outside the palace in the people’s space, they almost always did so in jocular terms. We have already seen (p. 131) Augustus tolerating a quip about his paternity from “some provincial.” Even Caligula (whose tyrannical manipulation of laughter was particularly marked) is said to have put up with the banter of a Gallic shoemaker on one occasion. In Dio’s words, “There was once a Gaul who caught sight of the emperor sitting on a high platform, dressed in the costume of Jupiter, and issuing oracles. The man burst out laughing. Caligula summoned him and asked, ‘How do I come across to you?’ And the man answered (I’m giving his exact words), ‘Like a right idiot.’ But he got off scot free, because he was a shoemaker. It is easier, I suppose, for people like Caligula to put up with outspokenness from ordinary people than from those of rank.”
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But there was also the more general question of how—or in what rhetorical register—the emperor’s interactions with the common people were represented. Augustus’ bantering and jocular engagement with the nervous petitioner (“Do you think you are giving a penny to an elephant?”) is typical. Another vivid case is the nice
iocus balnearis
(bathhouse quip) of the emperor Hadrian, who is said to have entered a set of public baths and noticed a veteran soldier rubbing his bare back against a wall. When Hadrian asked why he was doing that, the man replied that he did not own a slave to rub him down. The emperor’s generous response was to present him with some slaves and the money for their upkeep (a canny recognition of the fact that slaves on their own were no free gift). But obviously the word got around, for another time, Hadrian went to the baths and found a number of old men rubbing themselves down on the walls. No slaves for them: he made them get together to rub one another down. The point of the story was to show that Hadrian was a man of the people, warmhearted, but no fool—not to mention the kind of person who would respond to a transparent scam with a jest.
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I am not for a moment suggesting that all relations between the Roman emperor and his subjects were “a laugh” or that there really was a consistent atmosphere of jocularity (whether relaxed or tense) when the ruler confronted ordinary Romans face-to-face. Of course, that cannot always—or even often—have been the case, and almost certainly not in the kind of unmediated exchanges that the anecdotes ask us to imagine. If Hadrian really did visit the ordinary baths, my guess is that any joking encounters he had with the great unwashed (or washed) would have been very carefully choreographed and closely policed. My point is that in Roman writing, confrontations between the ruler and individual representatives of the ruled were overwhelmingly delineated, debated, and discursively formulated in terms of laughing and joking. Literary representations, at least, used forms of laughter to facilitate communication across the political hierarchy, allowing a particular form of jocularized conversation to take place between high and low. In part this no doubt served to mask the differences of status. At the same time, laughter marked the limit of the tyrant’s civility and could show him up for what he was: a tyrant (just as it could show up the subversive joker too, as subversive). Laughter, in other words, was a key operator in the discourse of Roman political power relations between emperor and subject.

So it was across other axes of power too: the discursive structures of one form of power in Roman culture and society often mapped broadly (even if details differed) onto others. For “tyrant versus subject,” for example, we may read “god versus human” or “free versus slave.” In these cases too, laughter could be a key signal and signifier in the operation of power—as a couple of vivid examples drawn from these other areas make clear.

Ovid often uses laughter in the
Metamorphoses
as a marker of the relationship between mortals and immortals. You do not need to read far into these poetic tales of transformation to realize that laughing in its various registers—from smug smirks through ripples of joy to triumphant cackles—was an important element in the discourse of power between human beings and the forces of the divine. On the one hand, the gods can use laughter to show their delight at their ability to change the shapes and forms of their human victims. So, for example, when he catches the elderly herdsman Battus trying to trick him, Mercury laughs as he turns the old man into a flint stone.
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On the other hand, human laughter aimed at a god or goddess sometimes heralds the transformation of the laugher into a beast, bird, or inanimate object: the laughter is a display of human defiance, which the deity promptly punishes by the removal of human form and status. But in the more general articulation of power in the poem, this laughter also acts as a signal to the reader that the power differentials between immortal and mortal are about to be exposed or reasserted. So, for example, the servant girl Galanthis laughs when she thinks that she has tricked Juno into giving Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, an easy childbirth—and is promptly turned into a weasel.
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There is a similar pattern in the story of King Piereus’ daughters, who challenge the Muses to a singing contest and lose. When they laugh at the victors, they are turned straightway into magpies.
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