Laughter in Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  As the whole thing was taken for a bit of amusement, his master Antigenes, enchanted by the hocus-pocus, used to introduce Eunus (for that was the charlatan’s name) at his dinner parties and question him about his kingship and how he would treat each of those present. And when he gave a full account without any hesitation . . . laughter used to overtake the guests, and some of them, picking up some tasty morsels from the table, would present them to him, interjecting that when he became king, he should remember the kindness. But it turned out that his charlatanism really did result in kingship, and he made recompense in earnest for what he had received in jest [en gelōti] at the banquets.94

  That is to say, in the carnage that really did follow, Eunus did not kill those who had fed him at the table.

  This is a marvelously dense passage, which exploits and enmeshes many of the issues we have been exploring in this chapter: dining, hierarchy, joking, subverted reality, truth and falsehood, autocracy and power. It involves a slave who is treated as a jester and fed by the diners in return for his jokes. Yet the jokes turn out not to be mere fiction (“jokes as lies,” as Quintilian would have seen it; pp. 125–26); they are the real plans of a slave who is claiming the status of king and patron for himself. In fact, in his role as king, he goes on to respect the patronage relationships of the dinner (joking as they may have been)—sparing the lives of those who had in their turn respected the patronage relationship by feeding him tidbits. Almost all the cultural norms of dining, patronage, and jocularity come together in this apparently simple story.

  THE SCURRA

  More than anything else, the shadow of the Roman scurra has stalked the pages of this book. We have seen how he represented a disreputable form of joking: vulgar, imitative, unspontaneous—though at the same time almost guaranteed to raise a laugh. We have also seen how accusations of scurrilitas could be used in the infighting among the Roman elite. To his enemies, Cicero was “a scurra of a consul,” while he could criticize the jokes of others as far too like the quips of a scurra. There was something (as we might say) lippy or in-your-face about the scurra; in Roman terms, it was his dicacitas (lippiness) that made the emperor Vespasian appear scurrilis (like a scurra). Another good example of this style of banter (and its dangerous consequences) is found in Suetonius’ story of the pointed gibe of a scurra against the stinginess of the emperor Tiberius. The man called out to the corpse in a passing funeral to ask it to take a message to the dead emperor Augustus that the legacies he had left to the Roman people had not been paid. He got his comeuppance: Tiberius ordered him to be put to death, but not before he had been given his money, so he could take the message to the underworld that the dues had been paid.95

  There was also something that was—or was thought to be—characteristically Roman about the scurra. At least, the word was seen to be more or less untranslatable into Greek, even in antiquity. I have already suggested that it may have underlain the Greek geloios in Plutarch’s version of Cato’s quip about Cicero (see pp. 102–3). Even more strikingly, when Zeno of Sidon was talking of Socrates and wanted, presumably, to call attention to his subversive repartee, he called him “an Athenian scurra”—using, as Cicero (to whom we owe the reference) says, “the Latin word.”96 There was nothing in Greek, we may imagine, that would quite capture it. The marked “Romanness” of the word was part of the reason, no doubt, that Eduard Fraenkel adopted the term Skurrilität to refer to some distinctively Plautine (that is, non-Greek) elements in Plautus.97

  But can we get closer than this to the character, identity, or social role of the scurra? That has always proved difficult.98 We can detect all kinds of overlaps between scurrae and the so-called parasites of Greek and Roman comedy. It is hard, for example, not to be struck by the ready-made jokebooks of Gelasimus, which seem to fit very closely with some of the complaints of Cicero and Quintilian about the wit of the scurra: namely, that it was prepared in advance and that its targets were a whole class rather than an individual. Yet Gelasimus is never called scurra—while others in Plautus, sometimes rather smart urban types, sometimes meddling busybodies, are,99 and so is the jester Sarmentus in Horace’s Satire. Certainly the more or less standard translation of scurra as “buffoon” captures no more than part of the meaning of some of its usages.

  The fact is that if we examine carefully all the people designated by this term in ancient literature, we find an apparently baffling range, from the urban flaneurs of Roman comedy through jokers and jesters in a narrower sense to Socrates or even members of the Praetorian Guard. In fact, according to the Augustan History, that jocular emperor Elagabalus himself was eventually murdered by scurrae. It is tempting to see this as a wonderfully appropriate end (a “scurrile” emperor killed by scurrae), but the standard assumption is that the reference here is to soldiers of the guard (with scurra used to reflect their city base, or “urbanity,” in contrast to those troops stationed through the empire).100

  So did the meaning of the term change over time, as Philip Corbett wondered in his essay on the scurra? Was there a move from an amateur to a professional sense of the term, or vice versa? Did the role of scurra as a social category change over the course of Roman history? Were there in fact several very different social phenomena that, for whatever reason, were lumped together under the single designation scurra? These are not necessarily stupid questions, but they probably miss the main point of scurrilitas. For not unlike parasite in Damon’s analysis, it was hardly a simple referential term. It was, rather, a category within the imaginative economy and social policing of Roman laughter: the constructed, and shifting, antitype to the elite male jokester; the jesting transgressor of elite male values of jesting—symbiotically tied to, incomprehensible without, and always (as Cicero knew, to his cost) liable to merge with its opposite. Scurra, in other words, was a (negative) value judgment on the practices of laughter rather than a descriptor, a cultural constructor (and mirror) of the jocularity of the Roman elite.101

  Or so it seems from the elite texts we have. But did the term look different from the point of view of those who did not have a stake in the elite culture of Roman laughter? Were there contexts in which it could be positively revalued, even worn as a (subversive) badge of pride? I have already regretted that we have no view of “parasites” except through the eyes of those ancient writers committed to despise them. The same is broadly true for the scurra—except for one precious glimpse from the fourth century CE and its religious conflicts. The glimpse in question comes from Prudentius’ horribly gruesome cycle of poems The Crowns of Martyrdom, where we find the scurra reappropriated in a very different, Christian context.102

  The second poem of the collection tells, in almost six hundred lines, the story of the martyrdom of Saint Laurence, who was roasted to death, slowly, on a gridiron in 258 CE. In a famous moment that became almost the slogan of this martyrdom (ll. 401–4), Laurence asked to be turned over just before his death, as one side was already cooked (hence, in part, his later role as the patron saint of chefs). Prudentius gives a detailed, vivid, and (presumably) highly embroidered, if not fictional, verse account of the clash between the saint and his elite pagan prosecutor. It starts with the pagan Roman demanding the wealth of the Christian church, which he believes is being concealed and not “rendered unto Caesar” (ll. 94–98). Begging for a delay, to bring out “all the precious things that Christ has” (ll. 123–24), Laurence tricks his prosecutor and parades before him the poor and the sick of Rome, as the treasures of the church. This does not go down well, and Laurence soon finds himself on the gridiron.

  The style of this encounter is distinctive. Laurence is a clever, shifty, and witty character who teases the prosecutor dreadfully, and laughter plays a major role in this. Confronted with the sick and the poor as the treasures of the church, the prosecutor says, “We’re being laughed at [ridemur]” (l. 313). He goes on to explode, “You rascal, do you think you are getting away with weaving together such great tricks with mimic mockery [cavillo mimico] while
you act out your tale like a scurra? Did it seem to match your urbanitas to treat me with jokes [ludicris]? Have I been sold off to the cacklers as a bit of festival entertainment?” (ll. 317–22). At the very end of the poem, we find that those worshiping the saint not only beg him for help and tell his story but also pick up Laurence’s style and “joke” (iocantur).103

  Urbanitas, cavillatio, a scurra, and mimicry. All the old Roman terminology of jesting is on display—a testimony to its cultural longevity. In a powerful recent analysis of the poem, Catherine Conybeare focused on its jocularity, which she saw in terms of gender: that is, in terms of a conflict between the masculinity of the aggressive prosecutor and the effeminacy of a subversively witty saint.104 But there is an even more straightforward point to be made about laughter here. For this poem of martyrdom replays that symbiotic relationship between elite Roman and jester, subverting it within a new context. The Christian writer has appropriated and revalued the role of the scurra, as the joking, jesting hero of the tale: the martyr as scurra has become the symbiotic antitype of his pagan persecutor.

  Who knows if centuries earlier, long before the conflicts between “pagan” and Christian, scurrilitas was something in which those outside the corridors of power took pride?

  CHAPTER 7

  Between Human and Animal—Especially Monkeys and Asses

  This book has so far featured rather few Roman women. We have glimpsed the image of the laughing prostitute (pp. 3, 80). And we have seen Augustus’ daughter, Julia, as the butt of her father’s good-humored banter about gray hair and baldness (pp. 132–33). According to Roman tradition, Julia was not merely on the receiving end of jokes. Alongside the anecdote about her hair plucking, Macrobius’ Saturnalia includes a number of memorable quips that she was said to have made herself, several engaging transgressively with the moral policy of her father’s regime.1 One of the favorites for modern scholars has been her calculating approach to adultery (flagitia, “disgraceful behavior,” as it is called here) and illegitimate births: “When those who knew of her disgraceful behavior were amazed how her sons looked like her husband Agrippa even though she gave her body for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to enjoy, she said, ‘I never take on a passenger unless the ship’s hold is full.’”2

  This idea that the emperor’s daughter exploited her legitimate pregnancies (when “the ship’s hold is full”) as an opportunity for sleeping around might be read as an outright attack on Augustus’ moral legislation. Or it might be seen as banter in the risqué style of some of the emperor’s own joking encounters (see p. 131). Either way, its apparently blithe self-confidence is dramatically undercut—for those who know the full story—by the fact that Julia ended up exiled for her adulteries and died a lonely death in the same year as her father.3

  One thing that we almost entirely miss in Rome is the tradition of subversive female laughter—what we call giggling—that is a distinctive strand in modern Western culture and can be glimpsed as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer. Although in the first chapter of this book I semiseriously call Dio’s stifled outburst in the Colosseum “giggles,” for us that form of laughter, including its cultural and literary construction, is almost exclusively associated with women and “girls”; in its strongest form, it is, in Angela Carter’s words, “the innocent glee with which women humiliate men.”4 If there was any such well-established, female alternative gelastic tradition in Roman culture, there is little reflection of it in surviving literature.5 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, because despite its significance in women’s popular culture, until recently it was a form of laughter that tended to exist outside the dominant orthodoxy, hardly figuring in male literary or cultural traditions for centuries, except to be ridiculed itself (“giggling schoolgirls”). It is not—as Carter observed of Alison’s outburst at the expense of her cuckolded husband in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale”—“a sound which is heard very often in literature.”6

  For the most part, women’s laughter is carefully policed in the literary representations of the Roman world. It does not seem to represent, as a specifically gendered form, much of a threat to male egos or to male traditions of laughter and joking, or at least the rules and regulations, implicit or explicit, were intended to ensure that it did not. As on so many topics, the reflections of Ovid are notably smart here. For in the third book of the Art of Love—his mock instructional poem on how to catch (and keep) a partner—he parodies the norms of female laughter, in the process exposing some of the cultural fault lines in Roman gelastic conventions. He also introduces what will be the main theme of this chapter: the boundary between humans and animals, which laughter helps both to establish and to challenge. It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with the misogynistic structures of ancient thought that the laughter of women leads “naturally” on to the braying and roaring of the animal kingdom.

  After two books of advice to young men—on where to hang out to make your catch (races and triumphal processions are hot spots), on being sure to remember her birthday, on playing a little hard to get, and so on—in the third book, the narrator turns to a different group of pupils. Love’s mock (and mocking) “schoolmaster” now proceeds to give instructions to the female of the species. A couple of hundred lines are devoted to the care of the body, the style of the hair, and disguising your less attractive features, but then Ovid changes gear slightly. A warning to women not to laugh if they have unattractive teeth (black, too big, or crooked) launches some more general lessons in laughter. “Who would believe it?” he asks. “Girls even learn how to laugh.”7

  Well, believe it or not, he goes on to run through the main points on the syllabus of laughter. “Let the mouth,” he urges, “open only so far. And keep those lacunae on each side small.” Lacuna usually means “a gap” or “a hole”—but here, and only here in surviving Latin literature, it is presumably being used for what we would call a dimple.8 How a girl could ever control her dimples is, of course, hard to imagine. But there is more complicated advice to come: “They should make sure that the bottom of the lips covers the top of the teeth, and they should not strain their sides by laughing continually but make a nice little feminine sound.”

  There is a good deal of characteristic Ovidian wit in this passage. Part of the joke rests on the idea that laughter could ever be the subject of instruction. “You’ll never believe this,” the artful teacher says. And of course we don’t—but we are given the lessons all the same. Some, like the dimple regime, are more or less impossible to carry out. Others are close to incomprehensible. Commentators and translators have struggled for generations to make practical sense of “Et summos dentes ima labella tegant.” “Make sure the bottom of the lips covers the top of the teeth” is certainly one possible way of rendering it; so too is “Make sure the lower lips cover the top teeth.” But what could either possibly mean? “As often” one commentator despairs, “. . . Ovid’s virtuoso technical display reads well, but is hard to pin down.”9 But is that not exactly Ovid’s point? It is laughable to suggest, he is hinting to his readership, that you could ever learn to control the physicality of laughter. You could never follow these spuriously technical instructions; that’s the joke.

  Ovid concludes his advice with some warning examples of how a girl might get her laughter wrong, and this takes us almost directly to the animal kingdom. “There’s one kind of girl,” he writes, “who distorts her face with a frightful guffaw; there’s another who you’d think was crying, when she is actually creased with laughing. Then there’s one that makes a harsh noise without any charm—laughing like an ugly donkey brays as she goes round the rough millstone.”10 That comparison between woman and donkey is particularly marked in the original Latin: in a prominent play on words (“ridet / ut rudet”), the girl ridet (laughs) like the donkey rudet (brays).

  That pun points us to one of the great paradoxes of laughter for Roman writers, as for later theorists. On the one hand, laughter could be seen as a defining property of the human species. Yet on the oth
er hand, it was in laughing, in the noise produced and the facial and bodily contortions of the laugher, that human beings most closely resembled animals. The awkward point was, quite simply, that the very attribute that defined the human’s humanity simultaneously made him or her one of the beasts—a braying ass, for example. Or as Simon Critchley summed it up, writing of humor rather than laughter itself, “If humour is human, then it also, curiously, marks the limit of the human.”11

  Roman writing often highlights that paradox. In Ovid’s literary lessons in laughter, it is underlined not only by the pun on ridet and rudet. When, a little earlier, the poet advises the girl that she should “let the mouth open only so far,” the word used for the gap between the lips opened up in laughter is rictus: “sint modici rictus.”12 That is a word with two principal referents: the open mouth of the human laugh and the gaping jaws of an animal. And when it refers to a laugh, it almost always suggests a contortion of the face bordering on the bestial. In Lucretius it is the grimace of death, in Suetonius the foaming mouth (spumante rictu) of the deformed emperor Claudius.13 But it is Ovid in the Metamorphoses who exploits the word most systematically and cleverly. We have already seen (pp. 136–37) how laughter marks the power relations between gods and humans in the poem. Rictus is often a marker of the change of status between human and animal, which is one of the poem’s main motifs. When Io, for example, is turned into a heifer, one of the signs of the transformation is that she now has a rictus rather than a mouth, and the rictus contracts (contrahitur rictus) when she changes back into a human.14

  Catullus exploits a similar idea when in poem 42 (“Adeste hendecasyllabi”) he focuses on the laughter of a woman who has some drafts of his poetry and refuses to give them back. Addressed to the poet’s verses themselves, it is a complicated poem cast in deceptively simple terms that draw on the traditions of invective, of popular Roman rough justice, and, as has more recently been argued, of Roman comedy.15 It also has a lot say about laughter as such. The girl who has her hands on the writing tablets (a “foul tart,” putida moecha) thinks Catullus himself a “joke” (iocum), but he turns the tables on her by attacking the laughter as well as the laugher. She laughs, he writes, moleste ac mimice: that is, “annoyingly” and, in one literal sense, “in the style of a mime actress”—a word that, as we shall see (p. 171), is more complicated than this translation implies and goes right to the heart of one important aspect of Roman laughter culture. But more than that, she laughs “with the face of a Gallic hound,” catuli ore Gallicani. Part of the joke must rest on the obvious pun (catuli/Catulli), but the image in general serves to undermine the humanity of the human laugher: the open mouth, distorted face, and no doubt bared teeth turn the woman into a beast.16