Laughter in Ancient Rome (49 page)

40.
Gatrell 2006, 161.

41.
For a brief introduction to the festival and a review of the literary evidence, see D’Agostino 1969; Scullard 1981; Graf 1992, 14–21 (on the etiology and the ritual).

42.
Frazer 1913, 306–411; Nietzsche 1986 [1878], 213; Nietzsche 2002 [1886], 114. M. A. Bernstein 1992, 34–35, emphasizes the underlying pessimism of Nietzsche’s account. Frazer was predictably most concerned with drawing a connection between the “Saturnalian king” and his motley crew of dead, divine, and priestly kings. This connection was, he believed, supported by the puzzling
Acts of Saint Dasius,
which claims (in what is probably a Christian fantasy) that the Saturnalian king in a military garrison on the Danube c. 300 CE was killed at the end of his thirty-day “rule.” See Cumont 1897; Musurillo 1972, 272–75; Versnel 1993, 210–27.

43.
Bakhtin 1968, quotations on 7, 138, 70, 14. Bakhtin’s stronger claim of a literally unbroken continuity between the Saturnalia and medieval carnival (8) has generally been viewed more suspiciously (Nauta 2002, 180).

44.
Versnel 1993, 136–227, reflects many of these claims (from a partially Bakhtinian perspective); “exuberant gorgings . . .” is his phrase (147), echoed in Minois 2000 (“les orgies des saturnales,” 65). See also Bettini 1991, 99–115; Champlin 2003, 150–51 (at the Saturnalia “within the miniature republic of the household, slaves might act as magistrates and judges,” 150); Dolansky 2011 (495: “Normative codes of behavior were reversed, with masters waiting upon slaves who enjoyed the right to drink to excess and chide their masters”).

45.
There is no firm evidence for the precise dating of the
Apocolocyntosis.
Nauta (1987, 78–84) lays out the arguments and inferences (such as they are) that might point to a specifically Saturnalian date as an introduction to his Saturnalian reading of the text (focusing on laughter and the inversion of norms). Branham 2005 discusses at length Bakhtin’s stress on “Menippean satire”—the genre of the
Apocolocyntosis.

46.
Gowers 2005, 60, puts both
Sat.
2.3 (Damasippus) and
Sat.
2.7 (Davus) in a Saturnalian frame (“The topsy-turvy festival of the Saturnalia . . . allows two speakers . . . freedom of speech . . . to remove the smug mask Horace manufactured in Book 1”). Sharland 2010, 261–316, is a particularly hard-line Bakhtinian reading of the Saturnalia and a hard-line Saturnalian reading of
Sat.
2.7. See, e.g., 266: “True to the customs of the Carnival, and its predecessor the Saturnalia, a lowly character (in this case, Davus) has been elevated to the position of ‘king’ figure, and is allowed to ‘reign’ temporarily’; 268: “Through its inversions and reversals, Carnival (and Saturnalia) characteristically juxtaposed opposites, matched incompatibles, and joined odd couples.”

47.
The classic discussion of comedy as an inversionary Saturnalian genre is Segal 1968 (e.g., 8–9, 32–33), though its inspiration is more Frazer (8) than Bakhtin; the position is reiterated in Segal 2001, 149 (in which Bakhtin has a walk-on part on 8). For other carnivalesque readings, see, for example, Bettini 1981, 9–24; Gowers 1993, 69–74 (a more subtle connection between the textual banquets of Plautine comedy, carnivalesque consumption, and the Saturnalia). Other students of Roman comedy have been dubious about a carnivalesque or Bakhtinian reading, or about some aspects of it: for example, Manuwald 2011, 149; McCarthy 2000, 17–18, esp. n. 26 (deploying Bakhtinian theory but questioning its social “optimism”).

48.
Part of the Saturnalian spirit is captured in the illustration accompanying the month of December in the fourth-century CE Calendar of Philocalus, which shows a man, wearing tunic and cape, standing beside a gaming table—with some game (of the edible sort) hanging up behind him. Stern 1953, 283–86, with
planches
13 and 19.2.

49.
There was feasting and drinking, yes, but no evidence of gross bingeing in the style of carnival. Not surprisingly, it is hard from the scanty material we have to get a clear idea of levels of consumption: Seneca,
Ep.
18 (a curmudgeonly letter on how far the philosophical elite should join in the Saturnalia), talks vaguely of
luxuria
and of dining
hilarius
(in a jollier fashion); Aulus Gellius 2.24.3 refers to sumptuary laws covering the occasion (but sumptuary legislation is no guide to levels of real excess); SHA,
Alex. Sev.
37.6 suggests that this particularly mean emperor splashed out on just a pheasant for Saturnalia. Gowers 1993, 69–74 stresses the consumption of pork as a carnival dish. Exactly how drunk Cato’s slaves would have got on the rations he prescribed for the Saturnalia (
Agr.
57) is anyone’s guess. Assuming the text is correct, he suggests that the most generous ration for a month’s wine amounted to just under a liter a day per head. Additionally, slaves should be allowed an extra ten liters on the Saturnalia and Compitalia (separately or combined is unclear). Ten liters of modern-strength wine consumed on a single day would indeed suggest Bakhtinian excess, but we are probably dealing with wine of lower strength, and it might not have amounted to much more than double rations if consumed over the duration of both festivals.

50.
Apoc
4.3; the emperor’s dying words are reported as “O dear I think I’ve shat [
concacavi
] myself.”

51.
Of course, the
Saturnalia
is a self-consciously elite work, full of wit, upper-class jokes, and ludic learning, embedded in one version of the academic culture of the fifth century CE. But its wit is in fact not so different from the style of Saturnalian wit we find elsewhere. For references to riddles and puns, see
AL
286; Aulus Gellius 18.2, 18.13.

52.
Macrobius,
Sat.
1.12.7, 1.24.23.

53.
Seneca,
Ep.
47.14, contra Champlin 2003, 150, which relies on almost certainly faulty modern punctuation. Contra Versnel 1993, 149, Dio 60.19 refers to slaves adopting not the “roles of their masters” but the “
clothes
of their masters.”

54.
Tacitus,
Ann.
13.15; discussed by Champlin (2003, 150–53) in the context of his wider claims that there was a “Saturnalian style” to the reign as a whole. Tacitus certainly is suggesting that having Nero on the throne was like being ruled by “Saturnalicius rex.”

55.
Accius
apud
Macrobius,
Sat.
1.7.36–37 (=
ROL
2, Accius,
Annales
2–7): the masters prepare the meal, but it is eaten together; Macrobius,
Sat.
1.11.1; SHA,
Verus
7.5 (slaves and masters eating together, at Saturnalia and other festivals); Macrobius,
Sat.
1.7.26 (
licentia
). Note also the slogan on the Calendar of Philocalus (see n. 48), “Now, slave, you can play/gamble with your master.” Bakhtin and many modern accounts tend to use the ideas of inversion and equality interchangeably, but in fact they represent two crucially different forms of festal transgression.

56.
Pliny’s famous account of not spoiling his household’s fun at the Saturnalia (
Ep.
2.17.24) oozes paternalism. (A casual reference of his to the Saturnalia in
Ep.
8.7 no doubt reflects traditions of Saturnalian free speech, but I am not convinced that it should be seen in quite the inversionary terms that Marchesi 2008, 102–17, imagines.)

57.
Fairer 2003, 2.

58.
See above, n. 28. Chesterfield’s advice is often assumed (by, e.g., Morreall 1983, 87) to be fairly typical of eighteenth-century preoccupations with the control of laughter. True, it is not unparalleled; see, for example, the advice of Pitt senior to his son (W. S. Taylor and Pringle 1838–40, vol. 1, 79). But as Gatrell (2006, 163–65, 170, 176) makes clear, Chesterfield’s published views were extreme and, in any case, represented an insistence on the control of laughter that can be found at other periods. Chesterfield was also more complicated than he is given credit for—a renowned wit, of (by the standards of the day) grotesque appearance, and celebrated prankster (see Dickie 2011, 87).

59.
Thomas 1977. His tactic (as his choice of words indicates: “lingers,” “among the common people,” “continued in villages,” etc.) is to reconcile the differences by implying that more isolated regions or those below the elite took longer to adopt the new protocols.

60.
A phrase supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria but as historically perilous as Lord Chesterfield’s advice, for even more reasons: it is not clear that Victoria ever said this or—if she did—in response to what. Vasey 1875 is a truly thoroughgoing, much less well-known, and sometimes hilarious agelastic treatise. “The conclusion is unavoidable, that the absurd habit of laughing is entirely occasioned by the unnatural and false associations which have been forced upon us in early life” (58) gives a flavor.

61.
This theme runs throughout Chartier 1987.

62.
Much recent work on eighteenth-century laughter and other forms of “sensibility” is alert to this nexus of complexity. In addition to Gatrell 2006 and Dickie 2011, Klein 1994 is an illuminating study. There are, of course, subtle variations on these generalizations. As Ruth Scurr alerted me, the laughter of the French revolutionaries was defined as more innocent than the contrived and vicious laughter of the royal court (see, for example, Leon 2009, 74–99). Some modern celebrations of the relaxation of comic censorship in print and onstage might seem to point in the opposite direction, but the celebration of the freedom of public expression of coarseness is different from the celebration of increasing coarseness itself.

63.
Fam.
9.15. This is, in fact, a more puzzling passage than my quotations suggest. If the text as we have it is broadly correct (which it may well not be), Cicero included his home region of Latium among the foreign influences. But as Shackleton Bailey (1977, 350) asks, “How can Cicero of Arpinum equate Latium with
peregrinitas
?” The overall sense is clear, though the details are irrecoverable. As we shall see in the next chapter, Cicero’s rhetorical treatises are more equivocal about the propriety of old-fashioned
festivitas.

64.
Livy 7.2; Horace,
Epist.
2.1.139–55. The passage of Livy—which offers a brief, multistage account of the origins and development of dramatic festivals at Rome—has been intensely debated (on its meaning, sources, and reliability); for a review, see Oakley 1997, 40–58. In the third stage, the performers are said to give up uttering crude compositions akin to
Fescenninus versus
(presumably the jesting banter characteristic of Livy’s second stage). Horace’s genealogy envisages the rustics bantering until the
Fescennina licentia
became so nasty that it had to be controlled by law. For the disputed etymology of
Fescennine
—from the name of an Etruscan town or from
fascinum
—see Oakley 1997, 59–60.