Laughter in Ancient Rome (28 page)

Of course, in the
Metamorphoses
the symbol of laughter is even more loaded than this, thanks to the significance of laughing as one marker of the human condition itself. In several Roman stories that focus on the interface between the human and the animal world, the loss of the ability to laugh can be a telling hint that the boundary has been transgressed (see p. 181). In Ovid’s poem, the peal of laughter that emerges from some of the victims immediately before their transformation is surely meant to remind the reader that they are uttering what is, quite literally, their last laugh: as soon as Galanthis has become a weasel, she will laugh no more.
²⁸

More emphatically, laughter also marked the relations between master and slave. As we saw in chapter 1, many themes in Roman comedy (drawn in part from earlier Greek traditions) focused on the hierarchies of slavery and on the interaction of slaves and their owners—parading those hierarchies as both challenged and reinforced, mitigated and occluded, by joking. The idea of the clever comic slave who raised a laugh at the expense of his dim owner both subverted the power relations of slavery as an institution and, I suspect, served to legitimate them.
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But the overriding point is that the interface between master and slave, just as between emperor and subject, was regularly framed in jocular terms.

This comes across especially starkly in a text of very different genre, and one that is much less well known, even among classicists, than Roman stage comedies: the
Life of Aesop,
an anonymous biography, in Greek, of the famous fable-writing slave. It is a puzzling, complex, composite work that probably reached its final form (or something like it) in Roman imperial Egypt of the first century CE, although its ultimate origins may well be much earlier and go back to very different areas and contexts in the classical world.
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Flagrantly fictional (it is unlikely that any such person as Aesop ever existed, still less that he wrote the fables that go under the name
³¹
), it often reaches to the ideological heart of the matter—even if not to the literal truth.

Aesop cuts a “funny” figure. He is a dwarf, potbellied, snub-nosed, hunchbacked, and bandy-legged: “a walking disaster,” as one modern commentator has aptly called him.
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But despite (or because of) his appearance, he is witty, clever—and as good at cracking jokes about others as being a prompt to laughter himself for his sheer bodily peculiarities. Strikingly, at the start of the written
Life
he is also dumb, until, a couple of pages into the story in the principal version of the text, the goddess Isis gives him the faculty of speech and persuades the Muses each to give him a taste of their gifts, such as storytelling.
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Nevertheless, as Leslie Kurke emphasizes, in the very first episode of the story, while he is still mute, Aesop manages eloquently to reveal that a couple of fellow slaves are guilty of the very crime that they are trying to pin on him: namely, eating the master’s figs. He makes the pair vomit up the fruit, thus proving their guilt.
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In the world of jests and entertainment, it was a familiar Roman paradox that—far from the verbal forms we have seen so enthusiastically recommended for the orator—silent wit and eloquence could be found in those who were, or had been, dumb (see p. 144).

Much of the rest of the
Life
is taken up with the laughing relationship between the slave and his new master, a philosopher by the name of Xanthus, who buys Aesop after he has gained the power of speech. This laughter starts from the very moment that Aesop is on display in the slave market, where Xanthus is quizzing the various slaves on sale about their qualities. “What do you know how to do?” Xanthus asks his potential living purchases. “I know how to do everything,” reply two of the slaves, at which Aesop laughs (so heartily, and so badly contorting his face and baring his teeth, that he looked to Xanthus’ students like “a turnip with gnashers”).
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When it comes to Aesop’s turn to be quizzed about what he can do, he replies in a parodically Socratic fashion, “Nothing at all . . . because the other two boys know everything there is.” That is why he had laughed (at them), exposing their foolish overconfidence in their abilities. After some more philosophical banter between Aesop and Xanthus, the philosopher decides to purchase the “walking disaster” rather than the slicker, more attractive slaves on offer—causing the slave merchant to suspect that, in making that choice, Xanthus was having a joke on his trade. “Are you wanting to make a mockery of my business?” he asks. But the tax collectors, whose job it was to collect the sales tax, found the whole transaction so ridiculous that they, in their turn, laughed and remitted the tax. Repeatedly, in other words, the insertion of (written) laughter into this story serves to mark the differentials of power, knowledge, and understanding across the hierarchies of status.
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And so it continues through much of the rest of the tale—until Aesop manages to secure his freedom, and in a baroque finale is forced to his death (by jumping over a cliff) at Delphi.
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The relationship between the slave and his owner is memorably configured in bantering terms, reminiscent of those between subject and emperor. At one point, the exasperated Xanthus, who has just signally failed to answer a philosophical puzzle posed by his gardener and then hears his slave laughing, is forced to ask, “Aesop, are you just laughing [
gelas
] or are you taking the mickey out of me [
katagelas
]?” Aesop neatly extricates himself from the charge (while delivering an even sharper insult): “I’m laughing at the professor who taught you.”
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But much of the best fun comes from the faux naïveté or willful literal-mindedness of Aesop’s responses to Xanthus’ instructions. This was a style of joking that Quintilian identified (and praised) in his
Handbook
(“Titius Maximus once stupidly asked Campatius as he left the theater whether he had been watching a play. “No, I was playing ball in the orchestra, stupid.”
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). The
Life
presents it as a major weapon of the slave in his bantering standoffs with his master. Typical of many exchanges is the anecdote of their visit to the baths. “Bring the oil flask and the towels,” Xanthus says to Aesop as they are getting ready. Once they have arrived, Xanthus asks for the flask in order to rub himself with oil, only to discover that there is no oil inside it. “Aesop,” he says, “where’s the oil?” “At home,” the slave quips back. “You told me to ‘take the oil flask and the towels’; you didn’t mention oil.” Almost immediately after this, Aesop is sent home “to put lentil in the pot,” and that is exactly what he does. When Xanthus gets back for supper with a group of fellow bathers, he finds that there is indeed just one lentil for supper. “Didn’t you tell me to ‘cook lentil’ and not ‘lentils’?” Aesop explains.
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And we laugh.

The point here is not that slavery was a funny institution; it most certainly was not, any more than tyranny was. Nevertheless, in the imaginative economy of Rome—from popular theater to satiric biography—laughter and joking, with many different nuances, offered a way of representing, or occluding, the interface between slaves and their owners. Laughter stood (or was imagined to stand) at the interfaces of power.

LAUGHTER AND IMPERIAL REALITY: EMPERORS AND JESTERS

But what of social reality? In investigating the role of written laughter in the cultural world of Rome, I have insisted that these ancient accounts of laughter and joking are not necessarily true. We cannot assume that they give us a window onto laughter as we might have heard or witnessed it in the imperial court or slave household. But important as those caveats are, they do not entirely dispose of the nagging question of how far these discursive tropes related to the real-life, face-to-face confrontation between ruler and ruled. If the downstairs world of the slave kitchen is completely lost to us, can we tentatively get a little closer to the social reality of laughter upstairs in the Roman palace and in the emperor’s various interactions with his subjects?

Perhaps we can. There are hints that this jocularity was not merely a written convention of imperial biographers or elite Greco-Roman historians but actually marked some of the real-life encounters in the imperial court. One extraordinary version of such banter is found in an eyewitness description by one member of a Jewish delegation from Alexandria to the emperor Caligula in 40 CE.
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Religious and ethnic conflict was endemic in Egyptian Alexandria, and the embassy had come to put the case of the Jews of the city against the rival envoys of the Greek gentile population. The eyewitness in question was the Jewish philosopher Philo. True, this is a very “literary” piece of writing: Philo was an elite intellectual observer of Roman imperial rule whose account of his encounter with Caligula was loaded, highly crafted, and composed against a background of wider conflicts between the emperor and the Jews (focused in part around Caligula’s plan to erect a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem). But Philo was from outside the formal Roman hierarchies of power, from a resistant subject people—yet, in describing his meeting with the emperor, he refers to banter very similar in style to some that we have already looked at. This time we are at least seeing it from the point of view—and the pen—of the petitioner.
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Philo conjures up a vivid impression of both the humiliation entailed in an encounter with Caligula and its various forms of—simultaneously reassuring, puzzling, and deeply threatening—jocularity. He and his fellow Jewish envoys had gone to put their case to the emperor in his garden estates (
horti
) on the edge of the city of Rome. At first the emperor seemed cavalier and decidedly hostile, and Philo complains that his embassy was not getting a serious hearing (part of Caligula’s attention was on the inspection of the properties on his estates and possible home improvements, not on the Alexandrian Jews).
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The emperor’s first reaction was to “grin” threateningly at them (
sesērōs
)—as Commodus had “grinned” at the senators in the Colosseum—and to call them “god haters” (on the grounds that they did not believe that he was a god). Hearing this, the rival group of envoys from Alexandria was overjoyed: “They waved their arms, they danced up and down, and they appealed to him by the titles of all the gods.” Some argument about whether the Jews had offered the proper loyal sacrifices followed—while Caligula continued to inspect the buildings and order new fixtures and fittings. At this point, Philo appeals to another area of the culture of ancient laughter: the Jews, he writes, were being mocked by their opponents as if they were onstage in a mime; in fact, the whole business was “like a mime.”
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Things then took a different turn, as Caligula demanded of the Jews, “Why do you not eat pork?” This caused their rivals to “burst out laughing,” partly because they were amused or delighted with what the emperor had said, partly out of flattery. For just as we saw Terence pointing to the use of laughter as flattery in some of the exchanges in his
Eunuch
(see p. 12), Philo suggests that they wanted to suck up to Caligula by making it seem as if they thought he had spoken “with wit and charm.” On this occasion, however, the flattery may have gone too far: their laughter was so raucous that one of the imperial guards thought it was showing disrespect to the emperor (and we might guess he stepped a little closer to prevent any trouble).
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How heartily, then, should you laugh at the emperor’s jokes? There were clearly competing views. The cautious Philo observes that unless you were one of his close friends, it was not safe even to risk a silent “smile” or “beam” (
meidiasai
). But if so, that is in direct contrast with the tenor of the joking exchanges between emperor and subject that we have seen in other literary texts, as well as with the tenor of Philo’s own account.
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In fact, he goes on to describe another round of ostensibly jocular bantering between Caligula and both deputations, again largely on the subject of dietary restrictions. The Jews tried to explain that different people have different prohibitions and preferences, and one of them intervened to point out that—never mind pork—a lot of people did not eat lamb. That made the emperor laugh again: “Quite right,” he said, “because it’s not nice.” Philo considers this yet more mockery at the expense of the Jewish delegation, but in fact the emperor soon began to mellow (as Philo sees it, through the influence of God). Although his mind was still more on his new windows and rehanging some paintings, he concluded that the Jews were not so much wicked as foolish in their refusal to recognize his divinity—so he merely dismissed them, apparently reaching no judgment on the dispute between the Jews and the gentiles of Alexandria that had been put before him.
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