Laughter in Ancient Rome (38 page)

There are jokes that still seem bad to us,
frigidi,
as the Romans might have said (see pp. 56, 132). In exploring the
Philogelos
in greater detail, I shall have cause to wonder once more just how much ingenuity is required, or legitimate, in getting (or forcing) ancient gags to provoke a modern chuckle. But I shall also look at some basic questions about this collection. Who might have compiled it, and when? What was it for, and what are the jokes
about
? There can be no doubt that the jokes in the
Philogelos
were intended to make readers or listeners laugh; that is clear from the title alone—“Laughter lover.” But what can such a collection of jokes, or of laughter themes, tell us about the society that produced or transmitted them, its priorities, anxieties, and concerns? What role did the
Philogelos
play in the “laughterhood” of Rome? More than that, what was the purpose (and the history) of a jokebook of this kind? I shall argue that in classical antiquity, the jokebook was characteristically, if not exclusively, Roman. And at the end, I will come close to suggesting—though I will stop just short—that the joke as we understand it was a Roman invention.

CONSTRUCTING THE “LAUGHTER LOVER”

The text of the
Philogelos
—funny, intriguing, sometimes disappointing—is more complicated than it might at first seem. The fact is that the book we know as the “Laughter lover” never existed in the ancient world, certainly not in the form in which we now read it. Our printed texts go back to half a dozen or so medieval and later manuscripts, which preserve a series of overlapping but not identical jokes. Most of these are shared among several manuscripts (and the title
Philogelos
is included in several), but no two of them have exactly the same selection. The most complete manuscript version, dating to the eleventh century, is found as part of a much longer anthology of ancient and biblical literature (including popular tales and fables). It contains 260 of the
Philogelos
jokes, although there are several instances where the same joke, almost word for word, appears twice. The shortest and earliest version, in a tenth-century manuscript, forms the final element of a larger collection of “light literature”
⁶
(including a Greek translation of an Arabic version of a group of Indian fables). The end of this manuscript is lost. There would once certainly have been more jokes, but only seven survive. The first of these occurs in no other manuscript of the collection; the remaining six are found in others—but in a completely different order. This pattern of survival, loss, disruption, and repetition explains my intentional vagueness (“some 265”) about the total number of jokes we are dealing with.
⁷

The modern printed
Philogelos
is constructed by amalgamating these different manuscript versions. In a sense, we could say that of all classical literature that has “survived”: each play of Euripides, each book of Tacitus is a modern scholarly reconstruction from the different, sometimes contradictory manuscript versions that have come down to us. But the
Philogelos
is a particularly extreme case of that. Despite great scholarly expertise and ingenuity in trying to understand and see behind the many-stranded manuscript tradition that confronts us, we have no clear idea what the original archetype was like. The one thing of which we can be most confident is that it was not identical to our printed text. We do not even know whether it is appropriate to think in terms of a single archetype for a collection of jokes—which, like traditional collections of recipes, gardening tips, or workout routines, might always exist in multiple, slightly different versions (even if they claim to go back to some semimythical originator or compiler, such as Mrs. Beeton, the Roman Apicius, or, for that matter, Jane Fonda).

There is at least one hint that the versions of “the
Philogelos
” were even more diverse than they might appear. At one point in his
Histories
(
Chiliades
), the twelfth-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes quotes a joke that he attributes to the “Laughter lover”; it is a punning quip about a sick man trying to get rid of an unwelcome guest.
⁸
Not only is this not found in any of the surviving manuscripts (or in modern printed editions), but Tzetzes treats
Philogelos,
or “Laughter lover,” not as the title of the collection but as its author: as he puts it, “Philogelos wrote this somewhere in his book.” Maybe Tzetzes was simply confused or misremembering.
⁹
Or maybe there was another collection of jokes in circulation whose author or compiler went under the name of Philogelos. After all, “Laughter lover” would be an entirely appropriate pen name for a man behind a book of gags.
¹⁰

But to complicate the picture even more, we find other names firmly associated with the
Philogelos,
whether as authors or anthologizers. Our most complete manuscript ascribes the collection to “Hierokles and Philagrios, the
grammatikos
” (maybe “grammarian,” maybe “teacher,” maybe “scholar”); some others, which include smaller selections of jokes, name only “Hierokles.” We have no idea who these men were—despite some desperate modern attempts, on the basis of no evidence at all apart from the name, to pin the collection onto some (probably humorless) fifth-century CE pagan philosopher from Alexandria.
¹¹
The Byzantine dictionary-cum-encyclopedia known as the
Suda
(a repository of recondite information as revealing, and misleading, as Pliny’s
Natural History
) offers a very different story. There we read that the
Philogelos
was the work of one Philistion—the name, as we have seen (p. 169), of a famous early imperial mime writer and possibly the pen name (or stage name) of many more. The
Suda
adds the tantalizing detail that the book was dedicated to a man named Koureus or to a man from Kourion in Cyprus or was the kind of book you would take to the barbershop (
koureus
)—the lumpy Greek and uncertain manuscript readings are more or less compatible with each translation.
¹²
We have no idea which of these is correct or how to interpret the information (there is no sign of any such dedication in any of the surviving manuscripts, so is the
Suda
referring to another work of the same name?). If it were the case that a barbershop is mentioned, that might link the
Philogelos
to that hot spot of ancient popular culture: the place where ordinary men went to get shaved and trimmed and have a chuckle.
¹³

The most economical way of resolving all this conflicting evidence is to imagine a fluid tradition underlying the collection—one that grows and develops while parading different authors and popular gurus as its founding fathers. The
Philogelos,
in other words, was not a single authored work but a generic title for a set of texts with strong similarities but no fixed archetype or orthodoxy; it was a fluid tradition, constantly adjusted and adapted, shortened or expanded, in new versions and compilations.

The contours of geography and chronology within the collection certainly suggest a mixed origin. For the jokes refer to a wide range of places and cultures across the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. We meet characters from the Greek-speaking cities of Abdera, Kyme, and Sidon, but there are also passing references to Rome, the river Rhine, and Sicily.
¹⁴
Of the only four personal names mentioned—deities and mythical heroes apart—two are Greek (“Drakontides” and “Demeas,” a name common in Greek comedy) and two are Roman (“Scribonia” and “Lollianus”).
¹⁵
And although the jokes are transmitted in Greek, several of the gags are set against an explicitly Roman cultural background, from currency (denarii) to the ceremonies celebrating the thousandth anniversary of Rome itself.
¹⁶

The anniversary joke provides the only precisely datable reference in the
Philogelos.
(“A
scholastikos,
at the festival that took place in Rome at the millennium [21 April 248 CE], saw a defeated athlete in tears and wanted to cheer him up. ‘Don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘At the next millennial games, you’ll be the winner.’”)
¹⁷
But it is generally thought, on the basis of the language, that the text as we have it is a couple of centuries later than that—although there are also jokes in our collection that go back considerably earlier than the third century CE or at least point to earlier characters and events.
¹⁸
Some of them are found, in a more or less identical form, in Plutarch, who wrote at the turn of the first and second centuries CE. For example, one notable joke in the
Philogelos
about a chatty barber (“A witty guy was asked by a chatty barber, ‘How would you like me to cut your hair?’ ‘In silence’ came the reply”) crops up in Plutarch’s
Sayings of Kings and Commanders,
where it is ascribed to the fifth-century BCE king Archelaus of Macedon,
¹⁹
and Plutarch uses another—about (not) lending a scraper in a bathhouse to people who may have turned up without one—to illustrate a usefully jocular method of refusing those who ask you for favors.
²⁰

Behind a few of the other gags, we can even detect a veiled reference to famous characters of the late Roman Republic or early empire. “Scribonia,” whose opulent tomb is the subject of one joke (it was in “a very unhealthy place”), may perhaps be the first wife of the emperor Augustus.
²¹
But there can be no doubt that a story about the notoriously philistine Mummius, who destroyed the city of Corinth in 146 BCE, underlies another of the jokes, even though it has been anonymized (under the rubric of a generic egghead): “A
scholastikos
taking some old master paintings from Corinth and loading them onto transport ships said to the captains, ‘If you lose these, I’ll want new ones to replace them.’”
²²
There is a hint of the original target in the mention of Corinth. But the hidden reference to Mummius is made absolutely clear from a parallel passage in Velleius Paterculus’
History of Rome,
where a version of exactly the same quip is quoted to illustrate the general’s proverbial boorishness. No one who knew the first thing about antiques would think that you could possibly replace them on a deal of “new for old.”
²³
How any of these earlier jokes found their way into the
Philogelos
in this diluted form—by way of lost literary sources or that convenient scholarly standby “oral tradition”?—we can only speculate.

The search for an original text, an original author, and even an originary date (beyond a vague “Roman”) for the
Philogelos
is almost certainly futile. We can, however, detect some basic principles of order, classification, and structure that underpin our collection and define its overall form. First, almost all the jokes concern a type of subject, not a named individual: the egghead, the man from Abdera, the witty guy, the man (or occasionally woman) with bad breath, the cowardly boxer, and so on. In most of them, the very first word identifies the type in question (
scholastikos, Abderitēs,
or whatever) and introduces a joke of usually no more than a few lines (sometimes less). The equivalent modern idiom would probably be “Heard the one about the Abderite?”

The main manuscripts divide the jokes up, fairly systematically, according to these types, as do the modern printed texts (while adding to the end, for want of anywhere else for them to go, a small collection of stragglers from divergent manuscripts, so disrupting the basic scheme
²⁴
). The first 103 in our text have as their hero or antihero the
scholastikos
—a word that has proved a challenge for translators and interpreters. There is almost certainly a connection between this figure and a stock character from the ancient comic stage (in fact, the only
scholastikos
to be given a personal name in the
Philogelos
is the very “stagy” Demeas). But according to Plutarch, the young Cicero too—on his return to Rome after study in Greece—was teased for being a “Greek and
scholastikos
.” So is it “absent-minded professor,” “numbskull,” or (as I have been using, with some hesitation) “egghead”? None of these quite gets it.
²⁵