Laughter in Ancient Rome (30 page)

It is to further reflections on these Roman jokers—to the cultural ideology that surrounded them, the cultural connections they signaled, the problems they raised, and the prime contexts in which they were imagined to operate—that I now turn. I am moving away again from the elusive day-to-day reality of Roman social life, back toward the rather more clearly delineated structures of the Roman imaginary and its symbolic assumptions and stereotypes. I start by focusing on the figure of the parasite and the different kinds of laughter associated with the Roman dinner table—raising, in particular, issues of truth and sincerity and the way in which “laughter to order” both oiled the wheels of the Roman social hierarchy and threatened to derail them. I finish, in the final section, by reflecting more precisely on the idea of the
scurra.
Most of the time the Roman emperor still lurks in the background—though the very last character we will meet face-to-face is an early Christian martyr in a poem that turns the elite stereotype of
scurrilitas
on its head and parades the brave victim of Roman persecution as a perfect
scurra.

DINNERTIME LAUGHTER, PARASITES, AND A SLAVE KING

I have pointed to laughter and banter between the great and the small, emperor and subject, in a wide range of contexts: from the baths through the open streets to the emperor’s garden estates. But the key setting for jesters, laughter, and jocular exchanges across the hierarchies of power was that most deceptively (un)hierarchical of Roman institutions: the dinner party or banquet. It was here that Elagabalus was supposed to have deflated his whoopee cushions, it was here that “little shits” played pranks on Claudius with slippers, and it was to a dinner that Caligula invited the man whose son he had just had put to death “and pushed him to laughing and joking.” There is much more to this than the simple fact that dinner was an occasion of play and fun. There was an important interrelationship between jokes and jokers, flattery and food, against the background of the markedly unequal structures of Roman dining and its representations.

It goes almost without saying that the Roman banquet was a paradoxical institution. On the one hand, it promoted equality, in the sense that eating together is one of the most powerful ways of putting all participants on an equal footing; the basic principle of commensality is that those who eat the same are the same (or, for the moment at least, can count themselves as such). On the other hand, it represented, in a particularly vivid way, the inequalities of the diners: the way the food was served, the order of serving, and the seating plan reinforced rather than undermined social hierarchies. Several Roman writers pointed disapprovingly to the practice of serving inferior guests inferior food.
⁷³
And according to the
Augustan History,
another trick of Elagabalus’ was to literalize that inequality by serving the least prestigious diners food that was not merely worse than their superiors’ but entirely inedible: “To the freeloaders [
parasiti
] during the dessert course he often served food of wax or wood or ivory, sometimes pottery, occasionally marble or stone, so that everything was served to them too, but only to be looked at and made out of a different material from what he himself was eating, while they only drank through the individual courses and washed their hands as if they had eaten.”
⁷⁴
Part of the joke here rests on the idea of imitation and mimicry: something is pretending to be food when it is not (just as when Petronius too, in conjuring up Trimalchio’s dinner party, hilariously focuses on the bluff and double bluff of food that appears somehow in disguise
⁷⁵
). But the more sinister side of the joke is that it writes in stone (or wax or wood) the inequities of the imperial dinner table.

The general idea that Roman elite dining was a prime context for the display of social hierarchies (even if they were also partially hidden under the mask of commensality) is well established.
⁷⁶
Less discussed has been the part that jokes and laughter played within that unequal culinary economy: from the role of the joker in exposing the differentials of power and status to the way in which the underprivileged are represented as exchanging jokes (and, along with jokes, flattery) for food.
⁷⁷
It is this “culinary triangle,” of laughter, flattery, and food, that is highlighted in some wonderfully self-aware snatches of ancient writing.
⁷⁸

In classical and Hellenistic Greece, just as at Rome, it was a common idea (or conceit) that a poor scrounger could earn his place at the dinner table through laughter—or, more generally, that there was a trade-off between the economy of laughter and the economy of food. We have already seen in chapter 1 the role in Terence’s
Eunuch
of the “parasite,” who earned his keep by laughing at the feeble jokes of his patron, whether they were funny or not. That basic principle is reflected also in the definition offered by one late antique commentator on another passage of Terence: “
Parasite
is the word for someone who eats with me or at my house, because
para
[in Greek] means ‘at’ and
sitos
[in Greek] means ‘food.’ Or else parasites are so called from obeying [
parendo
] and standing by [
assistendo
], since standing by their superiors they serve their pleasure through flattery.”
⁷⁹

By suggesting different etymologies—one Greek, one Latin—this commentator points to what has been a major topic of debate: the precise relationship between Greek parasites and their Roman counterparts, particularly as they appear in the comedies of Plautus and Terence. How far was the idea essentially Hellenic, sketchily translated into a Roman context? What adjustments or contributions came from the Roman side? Overall, it does seem fairly clear that—whatever its Greek origins—the figure of the parasite became naturalized at Rome and played a part in Roman cultural debate that went beyond (even if it remained in dialogue with) its Greek models. Cynthia Damon in particular has powerfully argued that the parasite as a cultural category was deeply integrated into debates at Rome around that central Roman institution patronage: or to put it more strongly, the stereotype was developed as a negative symbolic antitype of the Roman client, combining flattery, exploitation, and humiliation.
⁸⁰
It is no coincidence that in the description of Elagabalus’ discriminatory menus, it is the parasites who were the recipients of the fake food.

Laughter is a key coordinate too. For on the one hand, the freeloader laughed to cue, providing a reliably laughing audience for the jokes, good or bad, of his patron. On the other, he could be expected to
produce
laughter among the other guests in return for a good meal—as we find already in Xenophon’s
Symposium
(written sometime in the first half of the fourth century BCE), where Philip the jester arrives hungry and more or less uninvited and makes himself welcome through mimicry and joking.
⁸¹
This idea comes over even more strongly in various Roman comedies (whatever their precise relationship with their Greek sources of inspiration)—where we meet a number of characters who swap jokes for a free meal while vociferously complaining about their lot.
⁸²
It is a particularly vivid theme in Plautus’
Stichus,
whose most prominent character (despite the title, which blazons the name of another) is a parasite, the aptly named Gelasimus (Mr. Laugher, from the Greek
gelaō
). The play is cruelly concerned with the trials of a parasite’s life.
⁸³

Early in the drama, Gelasimus turns to the audience to try to get a dinner out of one of them in return for a joke: “I’m selling jokes,” he says. “Come on, make a bid. Who’ll say dinner? Anyone give me lunch? . . . Was that a nod? You won’t find better jokes anywhere.”
⁸⁴
In fact, what he is trying, jokingly, to auction off is not only jokes but the whole parodic paraphernalia of the parasite—including his private jokebooks, that collection of pre-prepared wit and one-liners that had been his regular meal ticket until the dinner invitations dried up. Later in the play, when he has abandoned the sale, we find him referring to his books in an effort to dig out the right jokes to impress his patron (“I’ve consulted my books: I’m sure as I can be that I’ll keep my patron with my jokes”).
⁸⁵
Throughout the play, various ambiguities of laughter recur, almost as a linking theme. One, as we might expect, focuses on the word
ridiculus:
the parasite is actively
ridiculus,
in the sense that he prompts laughter in others with witty gags; he is also passively
ridiculus,
in that he and his plight are repeatedly laughed at. Another aspect of ambiguity is exploited by the character of Epigonus, Gelasimus’ once and possibly future patron. In addressing the parasite, he plays on Gelasimus’ name, with more Latinized Greek—derived now from the Greek
katagelaō
(deride or laugh at). “I don’t want you to stop being a laugher,” he says at one point, “and become a laugher at me” (“Nunc ego non volo ex Gelasimo mihi fieri te Catagelasimum”).
⁸⁶

There is a complex set of issues and identities at stake in the image of the parasite and the laughter he both voices and attracts. Of course, the material we have is entirely from the perspective of the elite and disapproving observer. Even if the plots of some of the comedies encourage us to imagine the world from the point of view of the underdog, the word
parasite,
like
flatterer,
remains a loaded and hostile value judgment, not a self-descriptor. That said, it is clear that one major social fault line reflected in (and exploited by) Roman literature was precisely the problematic relationship between flattery, laughter, and the supposed friendship between host and guest—or more generally between the powerful and their hangers-on. A prominent issue in the Greco-Roman ethics of social behavior was “how to tell a flatterer from a (real) friend.”
⁸⁷
That issue is magnified in debates that cluster around the image of the parasite—in which we see how the demands of flattery risked undercutting the sincerity of laughter and exposing the (hungry) sycophant and the vain host for what they were. What is more, the laughter of the flatterer could be hard for the host or patron to distinguish from the laughter of derision directed against himself, or accidentally rebounding onto him. The sentiments of Epigonus in the
Stichus
are, in fact, not very different from those of Xanthus that we read in the
Life of Aesop
(p. 139): “Are you laughing or taking the mickey?”

These dilemmas are cleverly captured in a letter of Seneca, who (among other verbal nuances) plays with the possible ambiguities of the word
arrideo
—which can mean not only “to laugh in response to” but also “to laugh supportively” and so also “to flatter” (see above, pp. 71–72). Seneca is discussing a tedious and foolish host, Calvius Sabinus, the consul of 26 CE, who had slaves specially trained to remember great works of literature word for word; they stood at the foot of his couch at dinner and prompted him in reciting the lines (which, even with their help, he still could not manage). It was too much for one of his subordinate guests, Satellius Quadratus, who was driven to quip about the stupidity of it all. In telling this story, Seneca links the behavior of the one who comes to eat up the food (
arrosor
), the one who comes to flatter / laugh supportively (
arrisor
), and the one who comes to quip or to laugh at their meal ticket (
derisor
)—in this case, all the same person, of course. Quadratus was, he says, “a feeder off the foolish rich and—what follows—a flatterer of them and, what is connected to both, a laugher at them.”
⁸⁸

The issue of the laugher’s sincerity is highlighted in a different way in a story of Dionysius II, the fourth-century BCE tyrant of Syracuse. This is preserved in Athenaeus’ late second-century CE anthology and encyclopedia,
The Philosophers’ Banquet,
in a section devoted entirely to anecdotes about parasites, including their excesses, playfulness, loyalties, and disloyalties.
⁸⁹
Athenaeus offers a colorful range of these characters, from Cleisophus, the parasite of Philip of Macedon (who limped when the king was wounded in the leg and made a face when the king tasted bitter food, as if he also had eaten it
⁹⁰
), to Andromachus of Carrhae, the parasite of Licinius Crassus (who ended up betraying his patron to the Parthians and so bringing about his defeat in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE
⁹¹
). The story of Dionysius focuses directly on the problems of laughter. The tyrant challenged one of his hangers-on, Cheirisophus, who had laughed when he noticed Dionysius laughing some distance away and out of earshot. Why, he asked, was the man laughing when he could not possibly have heard what was being said?—a question that risked disrupting the implied contract between the patron and the laughing flatterer (that the flatterer must laugh when the patron does) by exposing its underlying hypocrisy. The clever flatterer replied, “I trust you that what was said was funny.” He reestablished the contract, in other words (albeit in a way that not even the most gullible patron would be able to take entirely seriously).
⁹²