Laughter in Ancient Rome (36 page)

Partly, the laughter follows from the defeat of expectations and the incongruity of the statue. In fact the word
paradoxōs
(unexpectedly) probably suggests this: it was not simply that Parmeniscus laughed when he did not expect to; he also laughed at the unexpected. But there is an underlying issue of imitation here too. In Athenaeus’ account, what finally dispelled Parmeniscus’ inability to laugh was the sight of a statue that was, in his view, a very poor imitation of what it was pretending to be. This is, in other words, another example of how mimesis and, more specifically, the boundaries of successful imitation were linked to the production of laughter. At the same time, it is another clear case of the double-sidedness of laughter and the laughable in the Roman world. For the logic of the story is that this block of wood could seem ridiculous (in our sense) as an image of Leto, but it simultaneously embodied the power to
make
someone laugh (and in this case, that was the power of the goddess and not ridiculous at all).

Parmeniscus was an unwilling agelast, but others—throughout Greek and Roman culture—were much more active refuseniks in matters of laughter.
⁸⁹
The most notorious nonlaugher in the Roman world was Marcus Licinius Crassus, who lived in the late second century BCE and was the grandfather of the more famous Crassus who died fighting the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. According to Cicero, the satirist Lucilius, who was Crassus senior’s contemporary, first nicknamed him
Agelastos
(in Greek), and writers from Cicero to Saint Jerome regularly take him as one extreme case of a Roman who hated laughter. As Pliny the Elder summed it up, “People say that Crassus, the grandfather of the Crassus killed in Parthia, never laughed, and for that reason was called Agelastus.”
⁹⁰

But Pliny was overstating the case. For the point that most Roman writers stress is that Crassus had indeed laughed—just once in his life (“But that one exception did not prevent him being called
agelastos,
” as Cicero insists). What was it that caused Crassus to crack up on that one occasion? The only explanation we have comes from Jerome, again referring back to Lucilius. It was the saying “Thistles are like lettuce to the lips of a donkey”—or perhaps, we should imagine, it was the sight of a donkey eating thistles and the (presumably) common proverb that such a sight evoked.
⁹¹
For the story of Crassus is very close to a couple of others that writers in the Roman Empire told of notable characters catching sight of a donkey consuming something unexpected—and dying of the laughter this produced.

Death by laughter is a vivid image (and a common cliché) in many cultures, from the casual hyperbole of the phrase “They just died of laughter” (an idiom that we saw with the blustering soldier of Terence’s
Eunuch,
pp. 10, 14) to the curious stories of people reputed to have literally passed away laughing. We could add to Zeuxis many modern examples, from the novelist Anthony Trollope, who is said to have fallen into a coma after laughing uncontrollably at a reading of a comic novel, to the bricklayer from Kings Lynn who died in 1975 after thirty minutes of hysterics at a television comedy show,
The Goodies.
⁹²
Two particular ancient characters—the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus and the Greek comic poet Philemon (both of the third century BCE)—provide a striking match for Crassus. For they were said to have died laughing when they saw a donkey eating figs and drinking wine.

Valerius Maximus, in a section on notable deaths in his anthology
Memorable Deeds and Sayings,
has this to say of the death of Philemon: “Philemon was carried off by the force of excessive laughter. Some figs had been prepared for him and placed in his sight. When a donkey started eating them, he called to his slave to chase the animal off. But the slave didn’t arrive till they were all eaten. ‘Since you’ve been so slow,’ he said, ‘you might as well now give the donkey some wine [
merum,
unmixed wine].’ And he followed up this witty quip with such a bout of breathless cackling [
cachinnorum
] that he crushed his feeble old windpipe with the all the rough panting.”
⁹³
Much the same was told by Diogenes Laertius about the death of Chrysippus (including the detail about the unmixed wine).
⁹⁴

There are all kinds of puzzles and intriguing details in these stories. For a start, “what happened when the donkey ate the figs” looks exactly like one of those free-floating anecdotes that get attached to any number of people, and (as we shall soon see) there are hints that the donkey story, even without its fatal consequences, was part of a wider popular joking tradition. But it may be significant that the same town, Soli in Cilicia, was supposed to be the original home of both Philemon and Chrysippus. Is this, perhaps, a story that had a specific association with that particular place or that gets shifted between different native sons? If so, what would the implications be? The details of the narrative raise curious questions too. Why figs? Is the fact that the Greek word
sukon
/
suka
(fig/s) was occasionally used for genitalia part of what makes the story so laughable?
⁹⁵
And why the stress on unmixed wine? In the ancient world, to drink wine that was not mixed with water was usually the mark of the uncivilized or the bestial. Diogenes Laertius’ account of Chrysippus also includes an alternative version of his cause of death: drinking unmixed wine. So should we see a connection between that and what was fed to the donkey?
⁹⁶

Many loose ends remain. Yet it is clear that there is a common theme running through these stories of the fatal power of laughter and the story of Crassus’ single laugh (sharply brought into focus in Tertullian’s passing reference to Crassus—where the violence of his unprecedented laugh actually killed the agelast
⁹⁷
). The prompt for each of these peculiarly powerful forms of laughter is the blurring of the (alimentary) boundaries between the human being and the donkey: the quip that made Crassus laugh reformulated donkey diet in human terms; the cue to laughter that finished off Chrysippus and Philemon was a donkey literally crossing the boundary between animal and human diet. As with the monkeys, that edgy dividing line between beast and man was one on which laughter particularly flourished.
⁹⁸

That boundary is of course precisely what is at issue in Apuleius’ second-century CE novel
Metamorphoses
(or
The Golden Ass
), which tells the story of the transformation of a man into a donkey—and in which Risus (Laughter) reaches the status of a god. It is to a couple of the specifically gelastic aspects of that novel that we now turn, in this chapter’s final section, starting with one episode that acts out in a more complicated way that scene of the donkey stealing human food.

MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF

The main lines of Apuleius’ plot are well known.
⁹⁹
The story is told through the mouth of Lucius, a well-born young man of Greek origin, who in the third of the novel’s eleven books is turned into a donkey (or ass).
¹⁰⁰
This was a mistaken transformation, needless to say. Lucius was trying out the magic potions of the mistress of the house in which he was a guest, with the help of her slave girl. His idea was to experiment with the ointment that would turn him into a bird—but the girl mixed up the jars, and he ended up as a donkey. Most of the novel is the story of Lucius’ adventures as an animal, or rather as a human being trapped in an animal’s body—an apt symbol of the (ludicrous) transgression of the dividing line between man and beast. In the last book, he is returned to human form under the auspices of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and the story ends with him being enrolled as an official of her consort Osiris by the god himself.
¹⁰¹

Almost certainly this plot was not wholly the creation of Apuleius. Another, much shorter and simpler version is preserved with the works of Lucian, under the title
Lucius,
or
The Ass,
but the precise relationship—chronological and otherwise—between it and Apuleius’ novel is not known.
¹⁰²
Nor is it certain how either of them related to another work, now lost but described by the Byzantine patriarch Photios in the ninth century as “Lucius of Patrai’s several books of
Metamorphoses
.”
¹⁰³
But whatever the exact relationship between these texts, and whatever the innovations of Apuleius may have been,
¹⁰⁴
there is one vivid incident found in both surviving versions of the story that is a strikingly close parallel for the tale of the donkey, the sight of whose eating and drinking is supposed to have killed off Chrysippus and Philemon.
¹⁰⁵

To follow Apuleius’ account (overall very similar to the shorter version), near the end of his adventures as an animal, Lucius the donkey came into the possession of two brothers, both slaves: one a confectioner, one a cook. Every evening they used to bring home the rich leftovers from their work and spread them out on their table for supper before going off to the baths to freshen up. And every evening, while they were away, the donkey would nip in to gobble up some of the delicacies, “for I was not so stupid or such a real ass that I would leave that delicious spread and dine on the horribly rough hay.”
¹⁰⁶
Eventually, as the donkey ate more and more of the best goodies, the brothers noticed the disappearances and suspected each other of stealing the food (in fact, one—presciently, in a way—accused the other of an “inhuman” crime
¹⁰⁷
). But soon enough they noticed that the donkey was getting fatter, though it was apparently not eating its hay. Suspicions aroused, they spied on him one evening and broke down in laughter when they saw what was going on—so loudly that their boss heard, came to take a peek, and split his sides too. In fact, he was so delighted with what he had seen that he invited the donkey to a proper dinner, with human food and drink and everyone reclining on couches in the standard human way. Here the animal played the part of the joking parasite—and was even referred to by the master as “my parasite.”
¹⁰⁸
The guests were consumed with laughter.

Like almost every story in Apuleius, this is much more complicated than it might at first sight appear. At this point in the narrative, the donkey is very close to his final retransformation back into his human form, and his human dietary indulgence here, as well as his role as
parasitus,
or even “friend” (
contubernalis, sodalis
), is partly to be read as moving toward that.
¹⁰⁹
This is also a sophisticated literary parody. As Régine May has shown, the pair of food workers in this story are carefully modeled on cooks as they appear in Plautus’ comedies, and they serve up decidedly Roman-style food. But whereas cooks in Plautus are characteristically those who pinch the nibbles, this pair is resolutely honest—and it is their donkey who is doing the thieving.
¹¹⁰

But my interest is in the links with the other donkey stories. It is obvious that the basic point of this extended gag is very similar to that of those other anecdotes: the ass that usurps food intended for human beings causes outrageous laughter. True, no one dies in the stories of the donkey and the food workers, but both versions stress the violence of the laughter provoked by the sight of the animal consuming the men’s food (the master in Apuleius, for example, laughed “till his belly hurt,”
adusque intestinorum dolorem;
the Greek account likewise refers repeatedly to the power of the laughter evoked
¹¹¹
). There is, however, a clear hint that the account of Apuleius is even more closely related to the point and the plot of those anecdotes of death by laughter. He knew some of those particular stories, or he was familiar with the popular joking theme of the “dining donkey,” of which they are the surviving traces—and he was directly exploiting it.
¹¹²

Broadly similar as they are, there is in fact one significant difference in detail between the two surviving versions of this episode in Lucius’ story.
¹¹³
In the shorter one, when the donkey is finally in company at the proper dinner table, someone suggests that he have a glass of wine—diluted (“‘This ass will drink some wine too, if someone will dilute it and give it to him.’ The master gave those orders, and I drank what was brought”).
¹¹⁴
In Apuleius, by contrast, we find exactly the same insistence on unmixed wine as in the stories of Chrysippus and Philemon. One of the guests at the donkey’s dinner party (a
scurrula,
a joker) says, “Give our friend here a drop of unmixed wine [
merum
].” The master agrees. “Supporting the suggestion, he said, ‘That’s not a stupid joke, you rascal, for likely as not this friend of ours is really keen on a glass of
mulsum
too.’”
Mulsum
was another form of unwatered wine, mixed only with honey—and that is what “our friend” the donkey was given.
¹¹⁵