Laughter in Ancient Rome (14 page)

Diachronic histories of laughter regularly tell of the taming of the crude, the bawdy, the cruel and lusty. They may look back in nostalgia to a time when laughter was more honestly earthy (as Roger Chartier observed of contemporary discussions of medieval carnival, they always sited the truly carnivalesque some time in the past
⁶¹
). Or they may take pride in the growing refinement that has outlawed the crudity of earlier forms of laughter or spared some innocent victims of ridicule. So far as I have been able to discover, there is no culture in the world that claims to laugh more coarsely or more cruelly than its predecessors.
Earthy
is only ever a retrospective designation. The modern history of laughter, in other words, is always bound up with a judgment (whether good or ill) on social and cultural progress.
⁶²

Much the same was true in ancient Rome. Admittedly, there are no ancient narrative accounts of the history of Roman laughter. But the contrast between the controlled, sophisticated, or mild laughter of
now
and the earthy, fearless, or crude laughter of the past is a striking theme in Roman writing. The details differ from author to author, the precise argument (and moral) of some of the passages concerned is hard to follow, not to say deeply controversial, and the idea of a chronological development correlates in sometimes complicated and contradictory ways with ideas of foreign influence. But the basic message that ancient writers tried to convey is clear: if you go back far enough in Roman time, you find a culture of ribald, jocular laughter that has—for better or worse—been lost or is on the point of being so.

Cicero, for example, could write nostalgically in a letter of 46 BCE of his affection for “native witticisms,” now so overlaid by foreign traditions “that there is hardly a trace of old-style wit to be seen.” It is only in his friend Paetus (to whom the letter is flatteringly addressed) that he can now “spot any likeness of the ancient native jocularity [
festivitas
].”
⁶³
Both Livy and Horace refer back to the rough, caustic traditions of rustic Latin jesting and to the abusive, ribald—and frankly mysterious—“Fescennine verses,” or
Fescennina licentia
, much enjoyed, Horace claims, by “farmers of yore” (
agricolae prisci
).
⁶⁴
In fact, as Emily Gowers suggests, Horace’s famous “Journey to Brundisium” in
Satires
1.5 can be read not simply as the travelogue of an uncomfortable trip south from Rome or a pointed commentary on the politics of the 30s BCE but as a journey into the history of Roman laughter and satire: the central episode takes us back to its deepest roots, staging a comic duel between a pair of scurrilous, grotesque, jesting clowns, Sarmentus and Messius Cicirrus. Horace’s own style of laughter is much more up-to-date and refined than that: the poet, as Ellen Oliensis rightly insists, “takes care to locate himself very definitely in the audience, far above the satiric boxing ring.”
⁶⁵

The idea of a native Italic tradition of jocularity—“la causticité des vieux Latins”
⁶⁶
—has been appealing to modern scholars. It has been seen as a powerful factor in the development of the distinctive tradition of Latin satire, and the lingering traces of the “Fescennine” spirit have been sought out in all kinds of places where they sometimes do, and sometimes do not, belong.
⁶⁷
But whether this Roman reconstruction accurately reflects the historical reality of the shifts and developments of Roman laughter (whatever exactly we mean by the term) is as hard to disentangle as any narrative of any history of laughter anywhere or at any time. In part it presumably does; in part it cannot. But which parts?

In exploring the case studies that are the focus of the second half of this book, I shall be alert to signs of historical change and shall keep an eye out for the perspective of ancient authors themselves on the history of Roman laughter. But for what are now—I trust—obvious reasons, I shall not set out to tell a diachronic story of how laughter changed at Rome over the centuries. I have no doubt that there were all kinds of differences in the “laughterhood” of Rome between the campfire world of the small, early settlement by the Tiber in (say) the seventh century BCE and the multicultural metropolis of Augustan Rome in the first century. And again, I am sure that the culture of laughter in the “pagan” empire was different, in crucial respects, from that of its Christian successor. I am, however, far from sure how confidently we can describe (still less account for) those changes or whether we have sufficient evidence, particularly for the earlier period, to make a useful attempt. My focus in what follows is broadly, and intentionally, synchronic, concentrating for the most part on the Roman world from the second century BCE to the second century CE.
⁶⁸

But first we need to ask what exactly the culture of Roman laughter might mean, what its basic coordinates are, and how far it can be distinguished from Greek laughter.

CHAPTER 4

Roman Laughter in Latin and Greek

LAUGHING IN LATIN

The study of Roman laughter is in some ways an impossible project. That is partly what makes it so intriguing, so special, so enlightening, and so worthwhile. As I hope I have made clear already (perhaps too clear for the tastes of some readers), the laughter of the past is always likely to frustrate our most determined efforts to systematize and control it. Anyone who—with a straight face—claims to be able to offer a clear account of why or how or when Romans laughed is bound to be oversimplifying. But in the inevitable confusion (in the mess left in laughter’s wake), we still learn a lot about ancient Rome and about how laughter in the past might have operated differently. This is a subject (like many, to be honest, in ancient history) in which the process of trying to understand can be as important and illuminating as the end result.

But process isn’t everything, and we should not entirely accept defeat before we begin. Whatever the tricky problems that I have been enjoying so far, there are also some striking and relatively straightforward observations to be made about how laughter works in the Latin language and in Latin literature. In fact, to investigate Roman laughter is to engage with some of the most basic and familiar words in Latin (those that even the rawest beginner is likely to have encountered), as well as some rather more recondite vocabulary. It also involves exploring some of the less-trodden byways of Latin literature, as well as throwing fresh light on some of the most canonical Latin texts we have.

One of most important of these observations concerns the Latin vocabulary of laughter. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there is just one word in Latin for “laughing.” In modern English, we are used to a range of subtly nuanced (even if elusive) terms for
laugh:
from
chuckle
and
chortle
through
giggle, titter,
and
snigger
to
howl
and
guffaw
—not to mention such related words as
grin, beam, smile,
and
smirk
. Ancient Greek too has a wide range of laughter vocabulary, from the standard
gelan
and its compounds through variants such as
kanchazein
(a more robust form) and
sairein
(e.g., Commodus’ grin; see p. 6) to the delightfully onomatopoeic
kichlizein
(not far from our
giggle
) or
meidian
(often translated as “smile”). In Latin we are dealing, for the most part, with just the word
ridere,
its compounds (
adridere, deridere, irridere,
and so on), and its various cognates as adjectives and nouns (
risus,
“laughter”;
ridiculus,
“laughable”). All of these signal some form of audible, physical reaction or gesture broadly and recognizably akin to laughter as we know it. Dictionary definitions and some modern critics try to calibrate these variants precisely, from
deridere,
for example, signaling derision to
irridere
ridicule or laughing at. Yet the terms are almost certainly much less fixed, referentially, than such definitions imply.
¹

The confidence with which it is often assumed, for example, that
adridere
always refers to supportive laughter or, pejoratively, flattery, is quite misplaced. True, sometimes it does: Ovid tells his learner lover to make a good impression by joining in the laughter (
adride
) whenever his would-be girlfriend laughs; the hallmark of comic toadies is “to offend no one and be a total yes-man” (
adridere omnibus
); and Horace uses the word in the context of sympathetic laughter.
²
But it is certainly not always so supportive, as phrases such as “laughing savagely” (
saevum adridens
) make absolutely clear.
³
In fact, in another passage of Terence’s
Eunuch,
Gnatho exploits the potential double entendre of the word when he reflects on his life as a scrounger and his relationship with the (rather dim) guys who are his meal tickets: “I don’t set out to make them laugh at me, but actually
eis adrideo
and compliment their wit at the same time.” The joke here turns on the possible slippage in the phrase
eis adrideo
between “I flatter them” and “I laugh at them.” Is Gnatho merely toeing the subservient line, or is he hinting to the audience that he has the upper hand in dealing with the likes of Thraso? Who, in other words, is laughing at whom? The ambivalence is half-seen and half-missed by one late antique commentator, who wrote simply that Terence had used “
arrideo
instead of
irrideo
.”
⁴

Some modern critics have been even more confident than this in suggesting which Latin word should be used where, even inserting the “correct” term where necessary. One glaring case concerns the text of an epigram of Martial. The poem is a squib addressed to one Calliodorus, who fancies himself a great jester and so dinner party guest, and according to the manuscript tradition includes the phrase
omnibus adrides.
The most recent editor, with staggering self-confidence, has simply replaced this with
omnis irrides.
Why? Because, he explains, “
adrides must
mean either ‘you smile at approvingly’ . . . or ‘you please.’ . . . Neither fits Calliodorus. . . . The word for his activity can
only
be
irrides
.”
⁵
Such rewriting is the price you have to pay if you want to preserve neat linguistic boundaries.

Beyond
ridere
and its linguistic family, there are few Latin alternatives. Occasionally, words such as
renidere
(shine out) do metaphorical duty for some shades of laughter or facial expression (
renidere
is, more or less, “to beam”).
⁶
Rictus
can refer (unflatteringly) to the open mouth or gaping jaws that are inevitably part of the laughing process, as well as to the bared teeth of an animal.
⁷
Elsewhere,
cachinnare
or (more commonly) the noun
cachinnus
can be used for a particularly raucous form of laughter or for what we might call “(a) cackle.” As one late Roman grammarian, Nonius Marcellus, put it, it had been used to signify “not just laughter [
risus
] but a stronger sound.”
⁸
The words have a catchy onomatopoeic ring but again are harder to pin down than dictionary definitions imply and prove resistant to the very precise classification that we might like to impose on them.

It is true that a contrast between
cachinnare
and (mere)
ridere
is sometimes more or less spelled out. Cicero, for example, at one point in his broadside against Verres, the infamous governor of Sicily, turns to attack Verres’ nasty sidekick Apronius, for humiliating a supposedly upstanding member of the Sicilian elite; Cicero pictures a banquet at which “his fellow guests laughed [
ridere
], Apronius himself cackled [
cachinnare
].”
⁹
Likewise, in what was effectively his manifesto poem, the satirist Persius was clearly trying to outdo his predecessor Horace in describing his own reaction to the folly of the world as
cachinnare,
not Horace’s gentler
ridere.
¹⁰