Laughter in Ancient Rome (37 page)

The implication of this stress on undiluted wine remains puzzling, but it is a marked link between
The Metamorphoses
and those other stories of uncontrollable or deathly laughter. In a characteristically clever literary or cultural parody, Apuleius is complicating the simplest form of the anecdote of the donkey diet—by speaking through the “voice” of the animal but also by prizing apart the different viewpoints on the story and on the laughter so often prompted by the confusion between human and beast. The characters in this novel laugh at the donkey eating like a human being; the readers laugh because they know that the donkey is actually human anyway. Laughter can be shared even when we are laughing “at” different things; there is a tricky relationship, Apuleius reminds us, between laughter within and outside the text.

That is only one brief episode in Apuleius’ sometimes frustrating and delightfully complicated novel, which has attracted an enormous amount of recent critical attention. Some of this attention stems from the influence of Jack Winkler’s classic study of the novel,
Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass,”
which appeared in 1985. Winkler brilliantly focused on the narratological complexities of the text and on the hermeneutic games it revels in playing with the reader and with the slippery voice of the narrator. As his title (which has become something of a mantra in the field of classics) signals, there is a shifting and uncertain relationship between the role of the narrator as author (
auctor
) and the role of the narrator as character in the book (
actor
). It is sometimes rather too easy to forget that Winkler was not the first critic to stress the sophistication of Apuleius’ text (against those who deemed it appallingly messy and inconsistent).
¹¹⁶
But
Auctor & Actor
did kick-start a new wave of Apuleian scholarship, which celebrated the cleverness and intricacies of the novel and its artful engagement with earlier literature.

This sophistication extends to the use of laughter within the text. In the short version of the story ascribed to Lucian, laughter appears as a simple diagnostic consistent with the standard ancient position that only humans could laugh. That is to say, Lucius laughs before his transformation from human shape but never as an ass. As soon as he has been turned into an ass, in fact, the narrator remarks that his laugh has turned into a bray (
onkēthmos
).
¹¹⁷
In Apuleius’ novel, laughter (largely by others, at the donkey) is woven throughout the plot, and the question of who is laughing at whom—and why—is one part of the hermeneutic riddling of the text. I want to conclude this chapter by looking harder at the most striking role for laughter in the structure of the novel, the festival of the god Risus (Laughter), in which Lucius is a reluctant participant immediately before his accidental transformation into an animal. This is the original context for the words
auctor et actor,
and in that context we find a rather different sense for the now famous phrase.
¹¹⁸

The basic plot of the episode is again fairly simple, though this time it is found in Apuleius alone. It starts one night early in the novel, when Lucius, still in his human form, is at a drunken dinner with relatives in the town where he is staying (Hypata in Thessaly). They happen to mention that on the next day they will be celebrating one of their annual festivals,
sollemnis dies.
¹¹⁹
It is a nice pun on the Latin
sollemnis
(both “regular established ritual” and “solemn” in our sense). For the god to be honored is Laughter, who will be propitiated with an appropriately “merry and jolly ritual.”

That festival, however, almost instantly seems to be forgotten, as the story takes a different turn. For things start to go very wrong after dinner, when Lucius gets back to the house where he is staying—only to discover three men trying to break in. He ends up killing the lot. In the morning he is arrested for murder and taken to the forum to be tried. The puzzling thing is that every one of the spectators is laughing
¹²⁰
—and there are so many of them that the case has to be transferred to the theater. There Lucius makes a speech in his defense, fearing the worst, until finally the magistrates insist that he uncover the corpses of the three men he has killed, to take stock of his crime. When he eventually does so, he discovers that they are not corpses at all but three wineskins that he gashed to pieces in his drunken state, thinking they were robbers.
¹²¹
Laughter breaks out even more, and so fiercely that some of the audience, doubled up, have to “press on their stomachs to ease the pain.”

Lucius is perplexed and upset, and it does not assuage him very much then to be told by the magistrates that this is the festival of Laughter—which always blossoms with some new ingenuity. In this case, that ingenuity had been the joke on Lucius and his mock trial. In order to escape further laughter (“which I myself had created”
¹²²
), he goes off to the baths before meeting up with the slave girl—who within a few pages will have accidentally contrived his metamorphosis into a donkey.

It is a memorable episode, and it so caught the imagination of Federico Fellini that he transposed a version of it into his film adaptation of Petronius’
Satyricon.
It has also caught the imagination of generations of classicists, who have tried to explain what this strange festival is all about and what it is doing in Apuleius’ plot. There have been a number of overoptimistic attempts to suggest that it has definite links to real religious rituals and a real god of laughter (for which there is no reliable evidence at all) or, rather more plausibly, to link the proceedings evoked here to more general structures of ancient religious thought and practice (notably the scapegoat ritual—with Lucius playing the part of the scapegoat
¹²³
). Others have seen it in more specifically textual terms, as a meta-literary device pointing to the comic genre of the novel as a whole, and recently it has been argued that the episode is based on a Roman mime.
¹²⁴

This (literary) festival of Risus has, however, even more important implications for our understanding of how ancient laughter works, both inside and outside this novel. Several critics have pointed to the parallels (or reversals) between this gelastic episode, which immediately precedes Lucius’ transformation into a donkey, and the gelastic episode we have just examined, with the cooks and their master, which immediately precedes his return to human form. In both instances, Lucius is the object of laughter, but whereas at the festival of Risus he is ashamed and humiliated, at the dinner he feels increasingly pleased by the laughter that greets him.
¹²⁵
Apuleius is surely exploiting the role of laughter in marking that fragile boundary between man and beast.

Beyond this, the episode also points to the ambiguities of laughter more generally. That is partly a question of terminology (for the reader, one of the jokes of the festival of Risus is the foregrounding of
cachinnare
as much as
ridere
¹²⁶
) and partly the old conundrum of how we explain laughter’s causes (the narrative of the ritual proceedings is built around Lucius’ puzzlement at what the laughter is all about). But it is the slogan
auctor et actor
—which Winkler used to highlight the edgy relationship in the novel between Lucius as narrator and Lucius as character in the plot—that offers the sharpest reflection on laughter (sharper even than Winkler acknowledged). For here we find a particularly memorable summing-up of that recurrent theme in ancient reflections of laughter: the ambivalence between laughter’s producer and laughter’s butt.

The phrase is used by the magistrates of Hypata when they reassure Lucius that his whole ordeal has been part of the festival of Risus. After they have explained their annual celebration of divine Laughter, they insist that Lucius is now under the god’s protection: “That god will accompany the man who is
auctorem et actorem suum,
lovingly and with his blessing, everywhere he goes, and he will never let you feel grief in your heart, and he will constantly brighten your expression with serene pleasure.”
¹²⁷

What do these magistrates mean by “the god accompanying his [
suum,
that is ‘his own’]
auctorem et actorem
”? They are certainly not referring to Winkler’s idea of the tricky relationship between narrator and character or between “the authorization of a text’s meaning and the credibility of ego-narrative.”
¹²⁸
However insightful his reading is—and, of course, this optimistic prophecy uttered just before Lucius is miserably transformed into an ass is just one example of what he had in mind—the magistrates’ words in their original context mean something quite different. Alexander Kirichenko, in arguing for the link between this episode and mime, has focused particularly on the word
actorem.
That, for him, is precisely what Lucius was in this scene: a mime actor.
¹²⁹
But we should not overlook the explicit link (underlined by
suum
) to Laughter itself, divine or not: Lucius is being cast as the producer and agent of Laughter. In other words, through the voice of the magistrates, explaining to this man-about-to-be-ass the nature of this pseudogod, we find again a lesson about the dual aspect of laughter and the close connection between its active producer (
auctor
) and its vehicle, agent, or, as we would say, butt (
actor
).
¹³⁰

As the words of Lucius himself underline, when he reflects shortly afterward on the laughter “which I myself had created” (
quem ipse fabricaveram
), there is a fine line between the person who makes you laugh and the one you laugh at. Lucius is both.

CHAPTER 8

The Laughter Lover

An egghead [
scholastikos
] and a bald man and a barber were making a journey together and camping out in a lonely place. They arranged for each of them to stay awake in turn for four hours and guard the luggage. When it fell to the barber to keep watch first, wanting to pass the time, he shaved the head of the
scholastikos
and, when his shift was done, woke him up. The
scholastikos
rubbed his head as he came to and found himself hairless. “What a right idiot the barber is,” he said. “He’s gone all wrong and woken up the bald man instead of me.”
¹

This is number 56 in the ancient collection of some 265 jokes that goes under the title
Philogelos,
or “Laughter lover.”
²
Written in decidedly unstylish Greek, the collection is usually dated to the later Roman Empire (the fourth or fifth century CE is the favorite guess) and includes a wide range of gags—from jokes about ridiculous misers (“Heard the one about the mean old man who made himself the heir in his own will?”) to quips on bad breath (“How does a man with bad breath commit suicide? He puts a bag over his head and asphyxiates himself!”) and comic warnings about cheap honey (“I wouldn’t even be selling it, the salesman eventually admitted, if that mouse hadn’t gone and died in it”).
³

The joke about the egghead, the bald man, and the barber is one of the longest in the collection and gives some of the most detailed narrative context (the journey, the risks to the luggage, the boredom of keeping watch, and so on). In it we meet again one of the favorite figures of fun at Rome: the baldy (pp. 51, 132–33, 146). And we are introduced for the first time to another major character in the repertoire of ancient joking, the
scholastikos
(provisionally translated “egghead”), who takes the lead in almost half the jokes in the
Philogelos.
His place here, in a trio with the barber and the baldy, echoes all those modern gags that start with similar threesomes: “An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman went into bar . . .” It is an echo that probably helps to explain why the joke is a favorite with many modern readers of the
Philogelos:
it really does seem to slip easily into that particular comic convention of our era.
⁴
But not all readers since antiquity have been so amused. Samuel Johnson, publishing one of the earliest English translations of a selection of these gags, struggled to make sense of the punch line here and blamed the manuscript copyists for the obscurity.
⁵