by Mary Beard
77. Wallace-Hadrill 2008 (lamps: 390–91); Spawforth 2012 (cultural comportment: 36–58).
78. Halliwell 2008, 343–46, 351–71 (with 332–34, clearly summarizes the evidence and impact—including Beckett 1938, 168). McGrath (1997, vol. 1, 101–6; vol. 2, 52–57, 58–61) offers useful discussions of several of Rubens’s versions of Democritus. For Heraclitus, see Halliwell 2008, 346–51.
79. De or. 2.235. He assumes Democritus’ expertise in laughter, not necessarily that Democritus is known as a laugher.
80. “Laughing Mouth” (Γελασῖνος) is Aelian’s term (VH 4.20); Halliwell 2008, 351, 369 (for “patron saint”); Juvenal 10.33–34; see also Horace, Epist. 2.1.194–96.
81. Hippocrates, [Ep.] 10–23 (with text and translation in W. D. Smith 1990). Hankinson 2000 and Halliwell 2008, 360–63, offer clear introductions.
82. [Ep.] 10.1 (ὁ δὲ πάντα γελᾷ).
83. [Ep.] 17.5 (ἐγὼ δὲ ἕνα γελῶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον).
84. The only reference to laughter in a (possibly) authentic surviving fragment of Democritus is 68B107a DK, which states that one should not laugh at the misfortune of others. The earliest explicit reference to Democritus being a renowned laugher himself (rather than an expert) is Horace, Epist. 2.1.194–96.
85. Plutarch, Lyc. 25 (statue); Agis and Cleom. 30 (shrine); Halliwell 2008, 44–49, offers a brief survey of the evidence for Spartan laughter.
86. Plutarch, Lyc. 12, 14.
87. Plutarch, Mor. 217c = Apophthegmata Lac., Androcleidas.
88. A temptation not resisted by David 1989.
89. The Roman-period reconstruction of (and investment in) primitive Sparta is a theme in Spawforth 2012 (e.g., on the traditions of the sussitia, 86–100). In part, this tradition was no doubt the Spartans’ own way of claiming a distinctive identity (happy to provide theme-park reenactments of primitive rituals); in part, it was a literary/discursive phenomenon, as writers of Roman date created a distinctive vision of the Spartan past.
90. Cordero 2000, 228, reviews the possibilities. They suggest that the tradition may go back to the third century, but “rien ne le prouve.”
91. Plutarch, Lyc. 25, cites the Hellenistic historian Sosibios (Jacoby, FGrHist 595F19).
92. Chesterfield 1774, vol. 1, 262–63 (letter of 3 April 1747).
93. Cicero, De or. 2.217, sums it up; Plautus, Pers. 392–95, is a comic version of the hierarchy.
94. Plutarch, Mor. 854c = Comp. Ar. & Men. 4. The cultural complexity is nicely signaled by the fact that Plutarch here not only Hellenizes a Roman term to talk about the Greek dramatist Menander but goes on to compare Menander’s “salt” to the salt of the sea from which Aphrodite was born. The reference at Plato, Symp. 177b, is almost certainly literally to salt rather to than wit.
5. THE ORATOR
1. Quintilian, Inst. 6.3.47–49. The force of the pun relies on the particular similarity between quoque and the vocative case of coquus (coque), so “I will vote for you too” is heard as “I will vote for you, cook,” jokingly rubbing in the man’s humble origins. The second pun was at the expense of a man who had been flogged in his youth by his father: the father was constantissimus (completely steadfast), the son varius (“vacillating” or “multicolored,” i.e., black and blue).
2. Quintilian, Inst. 6.3.49. The background and outcome of the trial are discussed by Mitchell 1991, 198–201; Riggsby 1999, 112–19; Steel 2005, 116–31. In pondering this pun, I have canvassed other possible linguistic resonances (with sericus, meaning “silk,” sero, “to bolt or bar,” and sero, “to join or contrive”) but without finding any plausible or pointed result.
3. Rawson 1975, xv; Simon Goldhill, interviewed by an Australian newspaper (The Australian, 24 September 2008) about his ideal ancient dinner party companions, chose Sappho, Hypatia, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and Phryne, as “that would be more fun than Augustus, Caesar, Jesus, St Paul and Cicero.” I am not so sure.
4. Brugnola 1896 is a nice monument to Cicero “the jokester,” very much in the ancient tradition.
5. Plutarch, Cic. 1 (chickpea), 24 (self-importance), 27 (jokes—ἕνεκα τοῦ γελοίου). Against the man with ugly daughters, he quoted a line of some tragic drama (“It was against the will of Phoebus Apollo that he sired children”). The joke against Faustus Sulla (son of the dictator) rested on a double entendre. He had fallen into debt and issued notices (προέγραψε) advertising his property for sale; Cicero quipped that he preferred the son’s notices to the father’s (Sulla senior had issued notices with lists of those to be put to death—the word προγράφω, or proscribo in Latin, refers to both kinds of notice).
6. Plutarch, Cic. 38.
7. Though written in the form of a speech, this was never actually delivered and most likely was always intended for written circulation only; Ramsey 2003, 155–59.
8. Cicero, Phil. 2.39–40.
9. The possibility (or difficulty) of laughter in times of trouble is a common theme in Cicero’s letters: Att. 7.5.5 (SB 128); Fam. 2.4.1 (SB 48), 2.12.1 (SB 95), 2.16.7 (SB 154), 15.18.1 (SB 213).
10. Comp. Dem. & Cic. 1.
11. Comp. Dem. & Cic. 1 (also quoted at Plutarch, Cat. Min. 21); on possible senses of λαμπρός, see Krostenko 2001, 67–68.
12. “Funny”: Rabbie 2007, 207; “comedian”: Krostenko 2001, 224. Dugan 2005, 108, offers “amusing.” The Loeb Classical Library version of Cat. Min. 21 runs “What a droll fellow our consul is,” and of Comp. Dem. & Cic. 1, “What a funny man we have for a consul.”
13. Inst. 6.3.1–5.
14. Macrobius, Sat. 2.3.10, 7.3.8; Seneca, Controv. 7.3.9. The repartee starts with a gibe by Cicero against Laberius, who had just been given equestrian rank by Caesar and was trying to take his seat in the designated equestrian area—when everyone sat close together so as not to let him in. Cicero quips, “I would have let you in except that I am cramped in my seat” (the implication being that elite rows had become full of any riffraff promoted by Caesar). Laberius retorts, “How strange, given that you usually sit on two seats” (a dig at Cicero’s vacillations of support between Caesar and Pompey). Seneca makes the parallel absolutely explicit: “Both men speak very wittily, but neither man has any sense of boundary in this area.”
15. Sat. 2.1.12 (a phrase here ascribed to Vatinius); with Cicero, Fam. 9.20.1 (SB 193), implying that his friend Paetus had called Cicero scurra veles (a “light-armed scurra,” “the scurra of the troop”), presumably in friendly banter.
16. Other, in my view less likely, suggestions for Cato’s original words include facetus or lepidus (Leeman 1963, 61, 398n100; Krostenko 2001, 225); the quip would then point to the “overaestheticized” implications of those terms, incompatible with the masculine traditions of public speaking and office holding.
17. Inst. 6.3.5. Macrobius, Sat. 2.1.12 notes that some people suspected that Tiro himself had made up some of the jokes.
18. Fam. 15.21.2 (SB 207).
19. Macrobius, Sat. 2.3.3.
20. Macrobius, Sat. 2.3.7. This is a subtler pun than it at first seems, as Ingo Gildenhard has helped me appreciate, playing on the conflict between military preparations and those for a dinner party (see Brugnola 1896, 33–34). As I have translated it, the joke consists in Cicero displacing the life and death issues of civil war by turning to the trivial business of when you should arrive at a dinner party, but the military reading surely remains latent, with nihil . . . paratum also referring to the general lack of preparation of the Pompeians (“Look who’s talking: the state of preparation in this camp is pathetic”). Corbeill’s reading (1996, 186) produces a more frigidus point: “You’ve arrived late in the day” . . . “But not too late, as you have nothing ready.”
21. It was Petrarch in the fourteenth century who established Cicero as a jester for the humanists (Rerum memorandarum Lib. 2.37, 2.39, 2.68), with further discussion in Bowen 1998.
22. Fam. 7.32.1–2 (SB 113). The name (or perhaps it is the nickname) of
the correspondent points to the artful wit of this letter, which is as much a joke itself as a comment on the treatment of Cicero’s bona dicta; see further Hutchinson 1998, 173–74; Fitzgerald 2000, 97; Krostenko 2001, 223 (which gives the passage a rather different stress—that Cicero is happy to be credited with the jokes of others, provided they are good ones). Note Cicero’s claim elsewhere that Caesar would be able to recognize which quips were bona fide Ciceronian: Fam. 9.16.3–4 (SB 190).
23. Quintilian, Inst. 6.3.77; Macrobius, Sat. 2.4.16 (Vatinius, in order to show that he had recovered from his gout, boasted that he was now walking two miles a day [in Macrobius, only one]. The retort is: “Yes, I’m not surprised; the days are getting a bit longer”). The slippage and migration of jokes is discussed by Laurence and Paterson 1999, 191–94.
24. Among studies earlier than those I discuss here, note Haury 1955 (focused particularly on irony); Geffcken 1973 (on comic aspects of Pro Caelio), now with Leigh 2004; Saint-Denis 1965, 111–61 (focusing especially on Pro Caelio, In Verrem, and De oratore).
25. Att. 1.18.1 (SB 18)—he can neither joke nor sigh. Hutchinson 1998, 172–99 (quotes on 177); see also Griffin 1995.
26. Richlin 1992a. For the rhetoric of invective and the main coordinates of sexual humor, see 57–104.
27. Freud 1960 [1905], 132–62 (quote on 147); Richlin 1992a, 59–60.
28. Corbeill 1996 (quotes on 5, 6, 53); on the persuasive or reassuring function of jokes and laughter, see also Richlin 1992a, 60 (again drawing on, and developing, a Freudian perspective).
29. Reflected in, for example, Connolly 2007, 61–62; Vasaly 2013, 148–49. Another important strand of work, with a strongly linguistic emphasis, is found in Krostenko 2001 (though his focus on “social performance” offers in many ways a complementary approach to the construction of identity through wit, laughter, and their terminologies). It is important to stress that what sets this “new orthodoxy” apart from some apparently similar earlier approaches (focusing on derision and humorous invective) is the constructive social function (one sense of controlling in Corbeill’s title) it ascribes to laughter.
30. Inst. 6.3.7.
31. The expression of Fantham 2004, 186.
32. In particular, shorter sections in Orat. 87–90 and Off. 1.103–4.
33. Guérin 2011, 151, rightly refers to the provocation of laughter as “une zone de risque”; for Richlin 1992a, 13, it is the use of obscenity rather than the ambivalence of laughter that makes courtroom joking a risky proposition.
34. The first certain reference to De Oratore is in a letter to Atticus of November 55 (when the work is finished enough to suggest that Atticus copy it), Att. 4.13.2 (SB 87).
35. All recent work on this text is underpinned by the five-volume commentary of Harm Pinkster and others, which appeared between 1981 and 2008 (the relevant volume for the discussion of laughter in book 2 is Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989), and it can be assumed to be a major reference point in what follows. This edition has largely replaced the earlier commentary of A. S. Wilkins, published between 1879 and 1892 (the relevant volume being Wilkins 1890). The best up-to-date translation, with introduction, is May and Wisse 2001; Fantham 2004 is an illuminating guide to the text and its literary, cultural, and historical significance.
36. At De or. 1.28, the participants agree to “imitate Socrates as he appears in the Phaedrus of Plato” and to sit down under a plane tree for their discussion; see Fantham 2004, 49–77. Although they are, in our terms, oratorical experts, they are keen to distinguish themselves from professional Greek experts (e.g., De or. 1.104).
37. May and Wisse, 2001, 14–15, succinctly introduces the characters; Fantham 2004, 26–48, discusses Crassus and Antonius in detail. Cicero adopts the Platonic device of setting his dialogue just before the death of the lead character (Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo and Crito); here all the characters but one (Cotta) were dead by the end of 87 BCE. The year 91 BCE might be seen a loaded choice: only the year before, Crassus, as censor, had expelled the Latini magistri (Latin teachers of rhetoric) from Rome (De or. 3.93; Suetonius, Rhet. 1).
38. Fam. 1.9.23 (SB 20). Aristotle’s dialogues are almost entirely lost, but they certainly featured much less cut and thrust, and longer expository speeches by the participants. Cicero may also have had in mind Aristotelian content as well as form.
39. See, e.g., R. E. Jones 1939, 319–20; Dugan 2005, 76.
40. In addition to the works already cited, notable recent interventions, often with a particular focus on the section on laughter, include Gunderson 2000, 187–222 (“Love”); Krostenko 2001, 202–32; Dugan 2005, 75–171; Guérin 2011.
41. De or. 2.216–90. In addition to the commentaries noted above, Monaco 1974 offers a text, an Italian translation, and extensive notes on this section of the work alone; Graf 1997, 29–32, offers a succinct discussion.
42. De or. 2.234. This image is taken up again at the end of the section (2.290).
43. De or. 2.217, 2.231, 2.239.
44. De or. 2.216.
45. De or. 2.235.
46. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 188–204; Rabbie 2007, 212–15 (a revised, less “speculative,” English version). The earlier tradition is represented by Grant 1924, 71–87, 100–131 (drawing on Arndt 1904). To be fair, it did admit a few Ciceronian additions to or deviations from Greek precedents (“Sed iam abscedere videtur Cicero a fontibus Graecis ac suum tenere cursum,” Arndt 1904, 36, in relation to De or. 2.268.), but the default position was that everything went back to a lost Greek source unless there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The old view is still assumed in some popular writing on the subject (such as Morreall 1983, 16) and is more or less revived wholesale by Watson 2012, 215–23, in yet another attempt to pin the Tractatus Coislinianus (see above, p. 31) to Aristotle.
47. De or. 2.217; see also 2.288. These Greek books do not survive; see p. 34.
48. De or, 2.216 (suavis), 2.236 (locus . . . et regio)—though Corbeill 1996, 21–22, nuances the parallels between Aristotelian and Ciceronian terminology.
49. There is an unresolved controversy (conveniently summarized by Fantham 2004, 163–64) around the availability in antiquity of some of the works of Aristotle, and so to which ones Cicero could have had direct access.
50. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 188–89.
51. As argued, for example, by Monaco 1974, 29, in relation to the Memmius story of De or. 2.283.
52. De or. 2.2.
53. See p. 54 for the textual confusion between locus and iocus.
54. These veteres could be in theory either Greek or Roman (as Pinkster, Leeman, and Rabbie 1989, 214, makes clear). But the strongly Latin character of the terms makes the latter much more likely, although no doubt versed in Greek theory.
55. It is an even smarter exchange than it might appear. As A. S. Wilkins 1890, 113, and Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 216, clearly document, “bark” (latrare) was a word used for shrill speakers. Krostenko 2001, 214–15, points to Cicero’s use of the word venustus for “spur-of-the-moment” humor of this kind.
56. Guérin 2011, 271–303, discusses these two antitypes in detail, though suggesting an oversystematic, rigid distinction between the two (the scurra is the antitype of oratorical dicacitas, the mimus of oratorical cavillatio). Grant 1924, 88–96, offers a convenient collection of sources. See further above, pp. 152–55, 167–70.
57. The Latin is hard to pin down: “In re est item ridiculum, quod ex quadam depravata imitatione sumi solet; ut idem Crassus: ‘Per tuam nobilitatem, per vestram familiam.’ Quid aliud fuit, in quo contio rideret, nisi illa vultus et vocis imitatio? ‘Per tuas statuas,’ vero cum dixit, et extento bracchio paulum etiam de gestu addidit, vehementius risimus.” I follow Monaco 1974, 124, here in seeing this as laughter generated by the mimicry (depravata imitatione), with the imitation of the statue (extento bracchio) prompting the most raucous chuckles. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 248, argues that the joke rests on the unexpected addition (ap
rosdokēton) of “per tuas statuas” after “per tuam nobilitatem, per vestram familiam” and that the extended arm is a reference to the position of a man taking an oath. But this interpretation hardly delivers on the mimicry that Cicero emphasizes. See further, p. 119.
58. De or. 2.216; Off. 1.108. Dugan 2005, 105, puts the strongest recent case for seeing Cicero’s choice of Strabo (“whose public persona and oratorical style provoked suspicions that were similar to those which he himself incited”) as significant.
59. Zinn 1960, 43.
60. Fam. 7.32.2 (SB 113).
61. Ingo Gildenhard has suggested to me that the name is significant: at the very least there is something a bit joking in having the disquisition on joking delivered by a man whose name means “squinter.” And just suppose we were to imagine that “Strabo” was a stock comic character; then we might also imagine a running metaliterary joke in the criticism of mime.
62. De or. 2.218 (“leve nomen habet utraque res”).
63. Or. 87.
64. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 189, followed by Fantham 2004, 189.
65. Inevitably, the influence of earlier Greek terminology has been sought here. Kroll 1913, 87, for example, sees the Peripatetic terms charis/gelōs behind facetiae/dicacitas (though in this case even Grant [1924, 103–18] is unconvinced and finds no exact Greek equivalent for the pairing).
66. De or. 2.251 (ridicula/faceta), 2.260 (frigida/salsa), 2.222 (bona dicta / salsa).
67. Grant 1924, 100–131, while acknowledging the difficulties, attempts a series of systematic definitions; likewise Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 183–88 (“Einige Differenzierung zwischen dem Gebrauch der verschiedenen Termini ist . . . möglich, wobei aber Grant . . . manchmal zu weit gegangen ist,” 183), and Guérin 2011, 145–303. Krostenko 2001 offers a highly technical sociolinguistic study of many of these key terms, emphasizing their mutability. Ramage 1973 attempts to track ideas of urbanitas throughout Roman history. Fitzgerald 1995, 87–113, is the clearest introduction to the issues.
68. Krostenko 2001, 207–14.