Laughter in Ancient Rome (57 page)

88.
Seneca,
Ep.
27.5–7: “Habebat ad pedes hos [servos], a quibus subinde cum peteret versus quos referret, saepe in medio verbo excidebat. Suasit illi Satellius Quadratus, stultorum divitum arrosor et, quod sequitur, arrisor et, quod duobus his adiunctum est, derisor, ut grammaticos haberet analectas.” Satellius’ quip (that he should have “scholars to gather up the bits”) appears to work by pushing further the idea of the commodification of knowledge and its relation to the slave economy:
analecta
was the title of the slave whose job it was to pick up crumbs around the dinner table, here imagined as scholars picking up the dropped crumbs of the host’s quotations. Roller 2001, 148–49, briefly discusses the passage, linking the three terms rather differently. Similar connections underlie a clever (but usually overlooked) pun in Juvenal 5. This poem sends up a dysfunctional dinner party where a client puts up with the humiliation of his status, to the scorn of the satirist. Toward the end, we learn what scraps the client is to be served, in contrast to the lavish food of his host. They include
semesum leporem
—or “half-eaten hare,” as the commentaries explain (from
lepus, leporis
). But, of course, that
leporem
could also come from a word we noted in the last chapter among the vocabulary of joking: that is
lepos, leporis
(wit or joking). So on the client’s menu may be half-eaten hare, but it could also be a half-eaten joke. A nice illustration of the overlap between laughter and hierarchical banquets!

89.
Athenaeus,
Deipnosophistae
6.234c–262a; sympathetically discussed by Whitmarsh 2000, with reference to the wider Greek (prose) tradition of parasites and flatters.

90.
6.248d–f.

91.
6.252d.

92.
6.249e.

93.
Green 2006, 1–47, is a clear introduction to the work (though Green’s interests focus on Diodorus’ account of the fifth century BCE); Stylianou 1998, 1–139 (specifically on the early fourth century BCE), has greater detail.

94.
Diodorus Siculus 34/5.2.8–9. Sources for the Sicilian slave revolts and brief discussion can be found conveniently in Shaw 2001.

95.
Suetonius,
Tib.
57.2.

96.
Nat. D.
1.93: “Latino verbo utens scurram Atticum fuisse dicebat.” The passage has caused critics considerable trouble (see, for example, Dyck 2003, 177), but the basic point (often missed) is that it almost certainly exposes an untranslatable difference between the Greek and the Roman idiom of laughter (while paradoxically seeing Socrates in distinctively Roman terms). I say
almost certainly
because (as Stephen Halliwell reminds me) if Zeno was addressing an audience including Romans (such as Cicero), he may have adjusted his vocabulary accordingly.

97.
Fraenkel 1922 (pinpointed in Fraenkel 2007, xiii).

98.
Corbett 1986 collects many of the wide-ranging citations, but he struggles (probably fruitlessly, as I shall suggest) to impose any clear explanatory structure on the sometimes bafflingly varied usages of the word
scurra
(and his efforts certainly did not impress Don Fowler: “It is almost a model of how not to go about an investigation of this kind” [1987, 90]). By far the sharpest discussions I know are Barton 1993, for which the
scurra
is part of the repertoire of elite antitypes in Rome; Habinek 2005, 182–85, stressing the
scurra
as a category of anxiety.

99.
See, for example, Plautus,
Trin.
199–211;
Curc.
296–97 (assuming the
servi
of the
scurrae
are like their masters);
Most.
15–16.

100.
SHA,
Heliog.
33.7; Corbett 1986, 73.

101.
On this view, the wide range of usages of the term reflects the range of boundaries that could be laid, in different places, between the proper and improper practice of laughter at Rome—hardly now recoverable.

102.
Palmer 1989 and M. Roberts 1993 give useful overviews of these poems.

103.
Conybeare 2002, 197–98, explains how critics have tried to get rid of the word
iocantur,
which has an impeccable manuscript tradition.

104.
Conybeare 2002.

7. BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL—ESPECIALLY MONKEYS AND ASSES

1.
Macrobius,
Sat.
2.5.

2.
Sat.
2.5.9.

3.
Julia’s jokes are the subject of Long 2000 (especially the Macrobian context) and Richlin 1992b (with a discussion of her life). The text signals, without explicitly mentioning, Julia’s fate: the account is tied to her “thirty-eighth year” (2.5.2), that is 2 BCE, the year of her exile to Pandateria. The different phases of her exile, in conditions of varying severity, are reviewed by Fantham 2006, 89–91.

4.
Carter 1992, 190.

5.
I am referring here not just to moments when a woman laughs (or women laugh) at a man (or men) but when she laughs, in a gendered role, as a woman, at a man (which is what, in its powerful and positive valuation, the giggle signifies). Halliwell’s prostitutes (2008, 491) and most uses of κιχλίζειν do not quite match this, though Theocritus,
Id.
11.77–78 (girls giggling at the unfortunate Polyphemus), comes close; in Latin, Horace,
Carm.
1.9.22, is rather further away.

6.
Carter 1992, 189 (she continues on 190: “To reproduce this giggle, a man must identify with a woman rather than with another man and perceive some aspects of male desire as foolish”).

7.
Ars am.
3.279–90 (“Quis credat? Discunt etiam ridere puellae,” 281). Martial,
Epigram.
2.41, explicitly looks over his shoulder at Ovid (the Paelignian poet) in ridiculing Maximina, a girl with three black teeth: “Ride si sapis, o puella, ride / Paelignus, puto, dixerat poeta.” The quotation “Ride . . .” is probably a loose allusion to this passage of
Ars Amatoria
rather than taken from a lost Ovidian poem; see Cristante 1990; C. Williams 2004, 150–51.

8.
Gibson 2003, 211, lists various passages in Latin where
lacuna
is used for other types of “bodily hollows.” Martial,
Epigram.
7.25.6, uses
gelasinus
(a transliteration from the Greek) for “dimple.” But in general, dimples are not major players in Roman literary culture.

9.
Gibson 2003, 212.

10.
I follow the reading and punctuation of Gibson 2003, 60 (with 212–13)—“est quae perverso distorqueat ora cachinno; / risu concussa est altera, flere putes; / illa sonat raucum quiddam atque inamabile: ridet / ut rudet a scabra turpis asella mola” (ll. 287–90)—though none of the uncertainties affect the main point of my argument here.

11.
Critchley 2002, 29. Critchley’s observations in this section (25–38) have influenced some of the main themes of this chapter, in particular his stress on the role of humor at and across the boundaries between the human and the animal (“Humour explores what it means to be human by moving back and forth across the frontier that separates humanity from animality, thereby making it unstable,” 29). As I hope to show, Roman writing strikingly foreshadows this major point.

12.
Ars am.
3.283.

13.
Lucretius 6.1195; Suetonius,
Claud.
30.

14.
Met.
1.640 (where
rictus
is a convincing emendation for the manuscript
ripas
), 1.741. This is a repeated image in the poem: see, for example, 2.481 (the beautiful face of Callisto deformed by a
lato rictu
on her transformation into a bear), 13.568 (Hecuba on the cusp of transformation into a dog “rictuque in verba parato latravit”). The thirteenth-century pseudo-Ovidian
De Vetula
picks up the animality of the
rictus:
“Rictus ei, non risus inest, et sacrificari / Deberet certe potius quam sacrificare” (2.148–49); a
rictus
belongs to the sacrificial animal, not the human sacrificer. See also Miller 2010, 15, 150.

15.
The poem is discussed as a literary play on the traditions of
flagitatio
by Fraenkel 1961; Selden 2007, 524–27. Goldberg 2000; 2005, 108–13, stress its comic legacy.

16.
Translators and critics differ on the precise point of comparison between the dog and the woman. Most take it, as I have, to refer to the facial distortion; a few stress instead the sound of yelping, taking
os
as “mouth” rather than “face”: “with the noisome yap of a Gallic hound,” as Selden renders it (2007, 525). For the
rictus
of dogs and possible points of comparison with human laughter, see Lucretius 5.1063–66; Plautus,
Capt.
485–86; Apuleius,
Apol.
6 (discussed by Tilg 2008, 113–15).

17.
For this popular usage—eliding the different species and subspecies, the tailed and the tailless, the chimps, baboons, gorillas, and other simians —I must apologize to primatologists. Scientists (modern and ancient) identify a wide variety of different characteristics and crucial distinctions. In particular, monkeys and apes belong to different scientific families (apes being hominoids; monkeys being either Cercopithecidae, Cebidae, or Callitrichidae). But these technical distinctions do not significantly impact on day-to-day debates and representations.

18.
The title of this section is borrowed from Connors 2004; it was too good to miss (and is not wholly unparalleled in antiquity: see n. 24).

19.
Athenaeus,
Deipnosophistae
14.613d.

20.
See pp. 46–47 for “laughing” primates (and “laughing” rats).

21.
Connors 2004 is the most up-to-date and sophisticated study of Roman ideas of apes (summing up, on 179, their perennial fascination: “Our human shape is replicated in them but also [from one point of view] distorted: wild, hairy, they meet our gaze across an unbridgeable divide between human and animal, nature and culture”). McDermott 1935; 1936; 1938 are still useful points of reference. All these provide an important background to the rest of this section. For “ape lore” in later periods and the cultural construction of modern primatology, see Janson 1952; Haraway 1989; De Waal 2001. Although chimpanzees’ tea parties may be a thing of the past, the use of primates higher up the cultural food chain is alive and well: see, e.g., Self 1997, a satiric novel in which human beings have been changed into chimpanzees.