Laughter in Ancient Rome (35 page)

This is a simple set of connections between laughter and mimicry and mime but one that can enrich our understanding of some famous passages of Roman literature. I have already highlighted (p. 159) one particular line in Catullus’ poem on the verses he wants given back: the tart who is hanging onto his poetry tablets laughs, he writes,
mimice ac moleste.
I glossed this provisionally as “in the style of a mime actress,” and that is generally the sense that most translators of the poem now give. For Guy Lee, this was the “odious actressy laugh” of the whore; for John Godwin, the woman was “laughing like an actress”; for Peter Whigham, she was “like a stage tart.” Commentators too take broadly this line, with Kenneth Quinn reducing the image to that of a pouting ancient equivalent of a modern cinema starlet.
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Some of this may underlie Catullus’ invective; it seems likely that there was laughter on (as we would say) both sides of the curtain at a mime, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that mime actors and actresses had a distinctive, perhaps lewd, laugh—though hardly, I think, a starlet’s pout. But Catullus’ gibe is edgier than that. Almost impossible as it is to translate, it parades the idea of vulgar, bodily, laughable imitation on the part of the thieving whore. It may also point to the fact that if the girl is to be seen in a mimic guise, then—as much as she is cackling “like a stage tart”—we too are laughing
at her
. And that, of course, is exactly what the poem itself is doing.

Some of these issues also underlie the so-called Quartilla episode, near the beginning of what survives of Petronius’ first-century CE novel,
Satyricon.
Modern critics have intensely discussed this story—partly because there are so many gaps in the text we have that it is an intriguing challenge to explain exactly what happens and in what order.
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But it is clear enough that, as the surviving story opens in the standard version, the narrator and the antiheroes of the novel receive a visit in their lodgings from an attendant of Quartilla, a priestess of the phallic god Priapus. She announces the imminent arrival of her mistress—who is coming to call on the men in response to their earlier disruption of Priapus’ holy rites. When the priestess arrives shortly after, she sheds a stream of histrionic tears about the sacrilege committed, then embarks on a full-on orgy—many of whose details are (maybe happily) lost in the lacunae of the text as it has come down to us.

As most critics have observed, laughter is a recurring element in this episode (and Maria Plaza has rightly pointed to many of the tricky interpretative difficulties it raises in the narration—in terms of who is laughing at whom and whose laughter we treat as authoritative
⁶⁸
). But there is, for my concerns in this chapter, a particularly relevant outburst immediately before the scripted orgy starts. Just as Quartilla moves from her crocodile tears to the preparations for the sexual party, the women laugh in a terrifying way—and then everything resounds
mimico risu.
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The same issues of translation come up again. We find, in various modern versions, “stagy laughter,” “farcical laughter,” “rire théâtral,” and the “laughter of the low stage.”
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But once again, that is only part of the point. As Costas Panayotakis and others have clearly shown, this section of the
Satyricon
is constructed around the themes and conventions of mime—and mimetic plots.
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This might indeed suggest that Quartilla and her attendant laugh in a “stagy” way, with all the ideas of pretense that might entail, or that they laugh with the bawdy vulgarity of mime actors.

Yet the explicit phrase
mimico risu
encourages us to focus more directly on the connections and associations of mime and on the wider “economy” of laughter in these performances—as it involves both actors and audience. It is an economy that Petronius here both exploits and inverts. Quartilla’s mime show ought to have raised some hearty chuckles from its audience, for that is the nature and purpose of mime. In fact, the reaction of the audience in the text—by which I mean the narrator and his friends—is dazed astonishment. Partly the butts of the joke, partly nonlaughing spectators, they can only exchange glances. They do not laugh at all. In a way, this is a subversion of the genre. Petronius is not simply drawing on mime but also upsetting its very conventions, destabilizing the assumed relationship between actors and audience and hinting at further questions about who exactly is laughing at whom.
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DEATH BY LAUGHTER—AND SOME AGELASTIC TRADITIONS

There were even wider—and sometime dangerous—implications in Roman connections between different forms of imitation and laughter. One of these is starkly illustrated in an anecdote preserved in Festus’ second-century CE dictionary,
On the Meaning of Words.
⁷³
Under the entry for
Pictor
(painter), we read of the death of the famous fifth-century BCE artist Zeuxis: “The painter Zeuxis died from laughing when he was laughing immoderately at a picture of an old woman that he himself had painted. Why the story was related at this point by Verrius when his purpose was to write about the meaning of words, I really do not understand—and when he also quoted some not particularly clever anonymous lines of poetry about the same thing: ‘What limit is he going to set on his laughter, then, / Unless he wants to end up like that painter who died laughing?’”
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This story was to have a notable afterlife in a self-portrait by Rembrandt, painted in his old age. It shows the artist laughing, and in the background is an apparently ugly figure. The significance of this scene has often puzzled critics. Is this, for example, Rembrandt as Democritus? Almost certainly it is not. For the secondary figure in the background seems clearly female, and if so, this must surely be Rembrandt as Zeuxis—facing his end, with a specifically painterly reference (see fig. 6).
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I am not concerned here with the truth of the story (it is first attested centuries after the death of Zeuxis, and even assuming that the reference in Festus to the Augustan writer Verrius Flaccus is correct, we have no idea what his source might have been). Nor am I concerned with the physiological possibility of death through laughter—a well-known urban legend in both ancient and modern culture. My question is simply why would we imagine that Zeuxis would find a painting of an elderly lady so laughable? And so very laughable that it killed him?

We might think in terms of mainstream ancient misogyny (and of the despised cultural category of the crone). What else are old women fit for, except to be laughed at? What would an artist do who had made an image of a crone, except laugh at it? Are old women deadly, even in the laughter they provoke? Misogyny of this sort may well be part of it, but there is more to this story of laughter than that.
⁷⁶

Whatever Zeuxis’ paintings really looked like (they are all lost), later descriptions and discussions, largely of Roman date, focused on their imitative quality. This is most clearly seen in the famous, and much analyzed, story of the mimetic competition between Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasius recounted by Pliny the Elder: Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that it deceived the birds (who came to peck at them), but it did not secure his victory, because Parrhasius created an image that deceived even Zeuxis (he painted a curtain, which Zeuxis tried to pull back).
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The anecdote in Festus about the painting of the old woman is another—so far unrecognized—story on the same theme, suggesting an even more challenging aspect of Zeuxis’ mimetic prowess and another aspect of the laughable properties of Roman imitation. Here it is surely Zeuxis’ own imitation that he finds so hilarious—and it kills him. It is hard not to imagine that Rembrandt knew exactly what he was doing when he re-created himself in the guise of Zeuxis.

This story of Zeuxis leads us in various directions. It points us, obviously, to other ancient examples of those killed by their own laughter. But it also gestures in a different direction, toward the nonlaughers, the agelasts, in the classical world—for one memorable anecdote provides a link between a group of unfortunate victims of their own laughter and a notorious Roman who had supposedly never laughed in his whole life. This offers us a glimpse of a scene so funny in ancient terms that it could either produce laughter powerful enough to kill or produce a chuckle in a man whose trademark was that he never cracked up. It is a memorable scene that will also bring us back, in the final section of this chapter, to the borderline between human and animal—but this time with asses and donkeys as the focus of attention.

The history and culture of laughter are necessarily bound up with those who do not laugh. The story of laughter should not leave out those who do not get the joke. Yet agelasts rarely get much cultural attention (and indeed are peculiarly difficult to study), except at the moment when they too break down and something finally elicits laughter from them. One of the most powerful motifs in the European fairy tale is the “princess who would not laugh” and the (usually) erotic origins and consequences of her first hilarious outburst.
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And the famous classical Greek story of how the goddess Demeter, grieving for the loss of Persephone, was induced to laugh when Baubo lifted her skirts and exposed her genitals has been as intensely discussed by modern feminist literary critics as by classicists.
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In addition to Athenaeus’ brief account of the sage Anacharsis, who cracked up only at the sight of a monkey, there is a wide range of stories from the Roman period (even if often focusing on characters from the Greek past) that concern much more determined, long-term, or sometimes involuntary agelasts and explain what finally got them chortling and with what consequences.

One of these offers a different perspective on the links between laughter and imitation.
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This tale is again from Athenaeus but drawn (and maybe adapted) from a multivolume history of Delos by one Semus—now lost apart from some short quotations and dated, only by guesswork, any time between the third century BCE and the mid- or late second century CE.
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It concerns a man called Parmeniscus of Metapontum, who had been to consult the oracle of Trophonius in Boeotia. One feature of this particular oracle was that people temporarily lost their ability to laugh after the consultation,
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but unusually, the loss seemed to be permanent in Parmeniscus’ case—forcing him to seek the advice of the Delphic oracle. The Pythia gave an apparently encouraging response: “You ask me about laughter soothing [
meilichoiou
], unsoothed one [
ameiliche
]; mother at home will give it to you—honor her greatly.”
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But going home to his mother did not restore Parmeniscus’ laughter as he had hoped. Later—and still unable to laugh—he happened to be in Delos and visited the temple of Leto, Apollo’s mother, “thinking that her statue would be something remarkable to look at. But when he saw that it was just a shapeless piece of wood, he unexpectedly laughed. And seeing the meaning of the god’s oracle and freed from his affliction, he honored the goddess greatly.”

We have very little idea of what elements of historical truth, if any, are embedded in this suspiciously classic tale of the oracle’s riddling opacity and the consultant’s misinterpretation (Parmeniscus failed to spot that it was Apollo’s mother who was meant).
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We do not know if Parmeniscus was a bona fide historical character or at what date the events were supposed to have taken place.
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But strictly factual or not, the story offers some important reflections on ancient laughter and on ancient religious ideology—as Julia Kindt has recently argued in a detailed analysis of Parmeniscus’ adventures.
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For Kindt, the point of the story turns on the understanding of religious images, on different modes of religious viewing, and on the relationship between anthropomorphic statues of the gods and alternative forms of divine images, such as Leto’s statue—aniconic, less naturalistic versions capturing the essence of the deity in a plank of wood or a barely worked stone. It is certainly true that without any knowledge of those two complementary and competing modes of representation in ancient religious culture (the iconic versus the aniconic), it would be hard to make much sense of the story. But Kindt goes on to suggest that the real essence of the story is a lesson in the rules of visuality, as Parmeniscus comes to appreciate “the complexities of divine representation”—and demonstrates his appreciation in the changing quality of his laughter, which “becomes more self-reflective.”
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I rather doubt it. So far as I can see, those “complexities” are no more than the context and peg for Parmeniscus’ most important lesson: namely, how to interpret the words of the oracle correctly. And there is no hint in the story of any change of quality in the laughter: Parmeniscus “unexpectedly laughed.”
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The important issue is much simpler than Kindt implies: Why did Parmeniscus laugh?