Laughter in Ancient Rome (29 page)

This is a rich account of imperial laughter, even if it has been carefully recrafted into an overtly partisan account in the religious conflicts of the first century CE. It hints at a certain mismatch of the protocols of laughter, between the Jews and the Romans (how far is Philo [mis]reading jocularity as aggressive mockery, and does he correctly understand the regime of laughter appropriate in the imperial court?) and between the imperial guard and the Alexandrian Greeks (whose enthusiastic laughter was taken by the guard as disruptive or frankly threatening). But it certainly construes the encounter between these subordinate envoys and the emperor in more or less the same bantering terms that we have seen in literary texts of very different types and background.

Once more it is important to emphasize that we are a long way from (in Keith Thomas’s words) hearing the laughter that surrounded the Roman emperor (see pp. 50–51), and in fact, in Philo’s account, the imperial guardsman’s objection to the laughter of the gentile delegation is a reminder of how policed any such outbursts might have been. But it also suggests that it is right to see laughter, threatening as it might be, as one important element in the real-life power relations between emperor and people—and a more audible and strident presence in Roman imperial court culture than we usually credit.

JESTERS AND CLOWNS

There are other hints of the prominence of laughter—notably in the presence of designated “laughter makers” in the imperial palace and other elite contexts. In fact, some of the pranks of Elagabalus (exaggerated as the stories in his
Life
certainly are) may not have been so very different in spirit from some of the japes and jocularity that jesters and jokers brought to Roman society, right up to (and perhaps especially among) its uppermost echelons.

The emperor’s court seems to have featured a range of comics, and we know the names of some famous jesters associated with particular rulers. We have already glimpsed Sarmentus (see p. 68), a
scurra
in the circle of Maecenas and Augustus, whose jokes Quintilian references somehow (the surviving text is defective and makes no sense).
⁴⁸
Gabba was another famous Augustan court jokester—whose name was still enough of a literary household word a hundred years later for Martial to compare him to Capitolinus, a prominent jester at the court of Nerva and Trajan (Martial judged Capitolinus the funnier, but on what basis—apart from a strategic preference for the living over the dead—we do not know).
⁴⁹
Another might be Nero’s Vatinius, whose name was an uncanny or contrived throwback to Cicero’s jocular adversary (see pp. 106, 122–23).
⁵⁰
But we also read of groups of jesters or other performers rather too low in laughter’s pecking order to feature prominently as individuals in elite histories.

One particular group—named or nicknamed
copreae
in Latin,
kopriai
(little shits) in Greek
⁵¹
—seems to have belonged exclusively in the Roman palace or among Roman autocrats. That at least is what the usage of the terms suggests (scant as the surviving evidence is), for they only ever refer to characters in the immediate court circle.
⁵²
Dio, for example, claims that after the death of Commodus, there was a cause célèbre about the “little shits” who survived him. In the posthumous propaganda campaign against the emperor’s memory, it was said that people laughed when they were told what the nicknames of these jokesters had been but (not unlike in some modern outrages about public sector salaries) were hugely angry when they learned how much they had been paid.
⁵³
Suetonius mentions in passing the
copreae
who used to attend Tiberius’ dinner table,
⁵⁴
and he tells of the nasty practical jokes they used to play on Claudius before he came to the throne.

Slow, awkward, and misshapen, Claudius was an easy target of the jests of his nephew the ruling emperor Caligula—especially as he was in the habit, so it was said, of dropping off to sleep after dinner while the party was still going on. The
copreae
used to wake him up with a whip “as if they were playing a game” (
velut per ludum
), and it was presumably these same jokesters who used to put “slippers” (
socci
) on his hands while he was snoring, so that when he stirred, he “would rub his face with them.”
⁵⁵
It is not entirely clear what the joke was here.
Socci
had rough bottoms, so presumably Claudius scratched his face. But was there some further significance in them? Perhaps so.
Socci
were a type of footwear sometimes associated with women or effeminate luxury, and this alone might have raised a laugh when Claudius found them on his hands—the ancient equivalent of putting diamond-studded stilettos on his hands, maybe.
⁵⁶
They were also part of the kit both of comic actors (an association that could be taken to imply that the ungainly prince had become a comic spectacle) and of parasites (to whose role in laughter and at dinners I shall shortly turn).
⁵⁷
But however precisely we read the joke here (and it may, of course, have operated in any number of ways), however close a reflection of real court life the report of this incident may have been, there is something undeniably reminiscent of Elagabalus’ jests about the scene.
⁵⁸

These
copreae
are an intriguing but elusive group. They make the occasional appearance in accounts of Roman palace life, but we cannot trace them right down to the hard, documentary evidence of their tombstones or memorials. The funerary record of the city of Rome does, however, offer one glimpse of a curious laughter maker, from the imperial court itself—on what remains of a small, now broken commemorative plaque found just outside the city of Rome in a communal tomb for members of the imperial household.
⁵⁹
It originally marked the niche for the ashes of a man who had been, as it says, a
lusor Caesaris
(a player of Caesar). His name is now missing, but those two words alone indicate that he was a slave of the emperor and that his business was some kind of entertainment. The short description that follows fills out the picture of the man and his life: “dumb eloquent [
mutus argutus
], a mimic [
imitator
] of the emperor Tiberius, the man who first discovered how to imitate barristers [
causidici
].”

What exactly this means—and in particular what it tells us about the character of his act—is not easy to fathom. It was once popularly thought that
Mutus Argutus
was the dead man’s name.
⁶⁰
This is extremely unlikely (for that would surely have featured in the now lost first lines of the text). But suppose it were a name—then it must certainly have been a stage sobriquet, for it is a paradoxical pairing, meaning something like “silent but sharp” or “silent but eloquent.”
⁶¹
Some have suggested, not implausibly, that it should be seen as the slogan of a pantomime actor, in which case the man’s act would have been a mime (in the modern sense of that word—he didn’t speak).
⁶²
But there is also a striking link here with the narrative of Aesop, who was, as we have seen, at first dumb, then powerfully eloquent, and there is perhaps a hint too at similarities in the style of banter inscribed in Aesop’s
Life
and in the jesting culture of the court.

The next words of the text—“a mimic of the emperor Tiberius”—presumably indicate that he was a mimic owned by Tiberius. The slightly awkward Latin could also mean that he was a mimic whose act was to imitate Tiberius (though that would be, one imagines, a risky business).
⁶³
But the final words of the text make clear that the highlight in his repertoire—and his own particular innovation—was mimicry of barristers. It is not, at first sight, easy to imagine the scene at Tiberius’ dinner parties (assuming that is where these performances took place
⁶⁴
) with our entertainer as the star turn. Did the emperor really look forward to a session of after-dinner lawyer imitations? Or did the act consist in something more like spoof declamations? We do not know. But the message of these fragmentary, fleeting, and often overlooked pieces of evidence seems clear: laughter was not only important in the discourse of imperial power but may also have been much more prominent in the social practice of the imperial court than is often assumed.

So it was too in the practice of the elite Roman household more generally. At least, there were more clowns around than we often bother to notice. Beyond various types of dinnertime comic entertainers who may or may not have been hired in,
⁶⁵
we find clear cases of jesters who were permanent residents in houses of the rich. Seneca briefly discusses an intriguing example—interestingly, a woman—in one of his philosophical letters to Lucilius. He refers to the elderly Harpaste, in his own household, his wife’s female clown (
fatua
), who had come to them as part of a legacy. It is a complicated reference. Seneca implies that part of Harpaste’s comic character is that she is a “freak” (
prodigium
), and he reflects briefly (and archly) on prompts to laughter (“If I want to be amused by a clown, I don’t have far to look: I laugh at myself”). He introduces too, as the central philosophical message of the letter, moral reflections about human folly and blindness, for Harpaste has recently gone blind but does not realize it, so keeps complaining that her room is too dark.
⁶⁶
All the same, philosophical metaphor or not, it is also one clear sign that clowns could have a place in the domestic sphere of the rich.

To push this a little further—and much more speculatively—we might wonder how far the jester and jesting culture had a structural role to play in what we have come to call Roman elite “self-fashioning.” If the jester was a regular presence in the domestic world of the elite, how far was the construction and self-imaging of the Roman elite male partly a process carried out in the face of, or against, the ribald, deformed, clever, joking image of the clown? Should we be seeing the clown—as Carlin Barton long ago suggested—as a distorting mirror against, or in, which the Roman saw and defined himself?
⁶⁷

I shall return to that question in the final section of this chapter, in the context of the
scurra.
But for the moment, let me suggest that this idea might help to give a different perspective on a couple of our favorite conundrums of Roman cultural and religious history. The first concerns the jesters and mimics who accompanied an elite Roman funeral, imitating, among other things, the actions of the deceased. In the funeral procession of Vespasian, for example, “Favor, a star mime actor, who wore his [Vespasian’s] mask, . . . loudly asked procurators what the cost of the funeral and the procession was. When he heard it was ten million sesterces, he shouted, ‘Give me a hundred thousand and chuck me in the Tiber.’” A good joke, as Suetonius reports it, on Vespasian’s well-known stinginess.
⁶⁸
The second are the ribald songs and scurrilous rhymes chanted apparently at the expense of the successful general at a Roman triumph. “Romans, lock up your wives. The bald adulterer’s back in town” were the lyrics used at the triumph of Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, harping on that classic topic of a Roman joke—hair loss.
⁶⁹

The function of these customs has long been a puzzle. One of the commonest explanations, which economically kills both birds with one stone, is that the ribaldry or jesting in each case was “apotropaic.” This word is sufficiently technical to appear to be explanatory while also being agreeably primitive—as if we were going back into the deepest wellsprings of earliest Roman tradition. How far any Roman laughter is usefully understood in these terms is debatable.
⁷⁰
But it has always seemed to me that in these two cases (and in the more domestic case of the dog at the door that I looked at earlier, on pp. 58–59), the word shelves the problems rather than solves them. For one thing, it is far from clear what the laughter is supposed to be apotropaic of—what did it ward off?
⁷¹

We might, I venture, get further if we did not think here entirely in terms of some murky area of Victorian anthropology. It is worth reflecting instead that we are witnessing in these instances other examples of the proximity between the elite Roman and the joker. Perhaps more pointedly, we are seeing, reenacted and writ large in these ceremonies, public analogues to the domestic role of jokers in the imperial court or rich mansions at Rome. At the very least, that domestic role hints that it may be less surprising than we usually assume to find jesters and jests so prominent on these ceremonial occasions. The joker accompanied the Roman at the moment of his greatest success—and to the grave. It was in the ribaldry of the jester that one version of Roman elite identity was defined and paraded.
⁷²