Laughter in Ancient Rome (15 page)

However, the word is not always so loaded, so aggressive, or so loud. It is the pleasant sound of laughter (
cachinni
), along with wine, wit, and a pretty girl, that sums up the atmosphere of a friendly party at the poet Catullus’ house; it is the laughter of disbelief (
cachinnasse
) with which, in Suetonius’ biography, Vespasian’s grandmother reacts to the unlikely omen that her grandson will become emperor; and it is the furtive giggles of servant girls (
furtim cachinnant
) laughing at their mistress behind her back.
¹¹
What is more, metaphorical usage too reflects that range.
Cachinnare
and
cachinni,
both verb and noun, are used to evoke the sound of water—from the pounding of the ocean to the gentle rippling of Lake Garda.
¹²
Cackles or giggles or ripples? We should always hesitate before assigning too rigid or precise a value to Latin terms for “laughing” or “laughter.”

LATIN SMILES?

So far I have not pointed to a word that corresponds to our own
smile.
I mean that curving of the lips that may, or may not, be a preliminary to a fully vocalized laugh—but is independently one of the most powerful signifying gestures in the modern Western world. From “Smile, please” to smiley faces, it underpins for us all kinds of human interaction, signaling warmth, greeting, wry amusement, disdain, affection, confidence, ambivalence, and much more. It is hard for us to imagine social life happening without it, yet it is hard to find a Latin equivalent.

In ancient Greek the position appears somewhat simpler. The word
meidiaō
may be much more distant from our
smile
than that standard translation implies. In Homer and other early writers,
meidiaō
can also be a sign of hostility, aggression, or superiority, and in general it seems to be treated as a gesture of the face as a whole rather than just the lips.
¹³
But as Halliwell shows, it does overlap in part with our usage, notably because unlike laughter, and like our “smiling,” it makes no noise (or as he more carefully puts it, “It is impossible . . . to show that
meid-
terms ever imply vocalisation”).
¹⁴
In Latin there is no specific term of that sort. When Virgil evoked the “smiling” gods of Homer, he often fell back on another compound of
ridere,
that is
subridere,
which technically means a “suppressed or muffled laugh,” even a “little laugh.”
¹⁵

Renidere
(to beam) can also, metaphorically, signal a silent facial expression that seems akin to a smile. This is how the poet Catullus has Egnatius famously reveal his urine-cleaned teeth: “Egnatius . . . renidet.” And Robert Kaster, in exploring the world and the text of Macrobius’
Saturnalia,
has not only translated the word as “smile” but also suggested that these “smiles” play a particular role in articulating the learned discussion that is staged in the dialogue. Phrases such as “Praetextatus smiled” (
Praetextatus renidens
) tend to greet an ignorant, out-of-place comment by some (usually inferior) participant in the discussion, and they invariably herald a pronouncement by an expert “which admits no contradiction.” Kaster is an acute observer of the structure of this late antique debate and of the hierarchies within it. But it is far less clear than he suggests that this “beaming” is a close match for our own category of grandly supercilious smiling—those “gestures of magnificent condescension,” as he puts it.
¹⁶

Other, more discursive, metaphorical uses of the word outside Macrobius—admittedly often centuries earlier than the
Saturnalia
—are varied but revealing. Catullus certainly likens the expression (
renidet
) to laughing, but Egnatius’ determined display of his white teeth is an absurd form of laughter (
risus ineptus
) and so is itself laughable. In Ovid,
renidens
is (twice) the expression of foolish optimism on the face of young Icarus, in Livy it is that of the boastful trickster, and Quintilian also uses it of a misplaced sign of pleasure (
intempestive renidentis
).
¹⁷
Repeatedly, as with the Greek
meidiaō,
the emphasis is on the facial expression as a whole (
hilaro vultu renidens, renidenti vultu, renidens vultu
¹⁸
), not specifically the lips—as is also once made explicit in Macrobius:
vultu renidens.
¹⁹
For the most part, the common defining feature of this gesture seems to be the facial “glow” (of confidence, whether well-placed or misplaced) rather than the oscular curve, or “smile” as we know it.
²⁰

So did the Romans smile? At the risk of falling into the trap of overconfident classification that I have been criticizing, my working hypothesis is “by and large, in our terms, no.” But that is not (simply) for linguistic reasons, and it needs to be argued rather carefully. The cultural significance of smiling may be reflected in, but is not wholly circumscribed by, language. Several modern European languages (English and Danish, for example—like ancient Greek) have separate word groups, from separate linguistic roots, that distinguish “smile” from “laugh.” Others (notably the Romance descendants of Latin) do not. Reflecting those Latin roots, modern French uses
sourire
for “smile,” just as Italian uses
sorridere
(both derived directly from
subridere;
respectively cognate with the French
rire
and the Italian
ridere
). Yet both of these modern cultures have an investment in the social significance of smiling, as distinct from laughter, no less intense than that of (for example) their modern Anglo-American counterparts.

Nonetheless, the linguistic patterns of Latin do seem to accord with other negative hints which suggest that smiling was not a major part (if a part at all) of Roman social semiotics. Only the most hard-line ethologists, neuroscientists, and their followers hold to the human universality of such facial gestures—whether in form, type, or meaning.
²¹
Crucially important for me is that we find in Roman literature none of those distinctions between smiling and laughing drawn by the likes of Lord Chesterfield (for whom a silent smile was a sign of decorum, in contrast to “loud peals of laughter”),
²²
and—whatever is going on in Macrobius—we see no clear evidence that smiling as such was a significant player in Roman social interactions in general. “Keep smiling!” and the like were sentiments unheard of in Rome, so far as I can tell, and as Christopher Jones has shown, two Romans meeting in the street were likely to greet each other with a kiss, where we would smile.
²³

Of course, arguments from silence are always perilous, especially when the process of spotting the smile is necessarily an interpretative one. But it is hard to resist the suggestion of Jacques Le Goff that (in the Latin West at least) smiling as we understand it was an invention of the Middle Ages.
²⁴
This is not to say that the Romans never curled up the edges of their mouths in a formation that would look to us much like a smile; of course they did. But such curling did not mean very much in the range of significant social and cultural gestures at Rome. Conversely, other gestures, which would mean little to us, were much more heavily freighted with significance: Caesar scratching his head with one finger, which would now indicate no more than an annoying itch, could give Cicero the hint that Caesar posed no danger to the Roman Republic.
²⁵

There is an important lesson in this. It has become standard practice when translating not only
subridere
but also
ridere
itself and its other cognates into English to use the word
smile
where it seems more natural to us than
laugh
(even some famous lines of Virgil have been the victim of this tendency; see pp. 84–85). This has a doubly misleading effect. It tends to give smiling a much bigger presence in Roman cultural language than it deserves—or ever had. And in offering an apparently “better” translation, it tends to erode the potential foreignness of Roman patterns of laughter, to make them look increasingly like our own. To be sure, we cannot absolutely prove that there was no strong and meaningful Roman tradition of smiling that lurked underneath the general rubric of
ridere.
We need to remain alert to that possibility. But we should also resist the easy temptation to reconstruct the Romans in our own image. So even where
laugh
may seem awkward, I shall use it as the first option in translating
ridere
and its compounds and cognates: that is not to say that even the English word
laugh
captures exactly what the Romans meant by
ridere,
but it is certainly less misleading than
smile.
And that awkwardness is, after all, part of the historical point.

JOKES AND JESTS

We are not simply dealing with the poverty in the Latin vocabulary of laughter compared with the richness of (say) Greek, or with a simple lack of cultural discrimination in classifying laughter’s various forms. We are dealing with a
different
richness of vocabulary and perhaps with a significantly different set of cultural priorities. For however few the Latin terms for laughter may be, the terms for what may provoke it—in the forms of jokes and witticisms—are legion. To list just some:
iocus, lepos, urbanitas, dicta, dicacitas, cavillatio, ridicula, sal, salsum, facetiae.
We can no more define the precise difference between
dicacitas
and
cavillatio
than we can define how exactly
chortle
differs from
chuckle.
But the contrast with the Greek range of vocabulary—which is overwhelming dominated by two words for joke,
geloion
and
skōmma
—is striking.
²⁶
Whatever the origin and history of these terms (on which see further chapter 5), their range and variety point to a Roman cultural concern with the
provocation
of laughter and with the relationship between the laugher and whoever prompted the laughter (both joker and butt).

Interestingly, Roman popular sayings also seem to reflect these priorities. Proverbs and slogans about laughter are common in modern English-speaking culture: “He who laughs last laughs longest,” “Laugh and the world laughs with you” (or, to quote a Yiddish proverb, “What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul”). Overwhelmingly, they treat laughter (and its effects) from the point of view of the person who laughs. Romans also sloganized laughter, but much more frequently these slogans stressed the role of the joker rather than the laugher (“It’s better to lose a friend than a jest,”
²⁷
“It’s easier for a wise man to stifle a flame within his burning mouth than keep his
bona dicta
[wit or quips] to himself”
²⁸
) or focused on the relationship between the laugher and the object of their laughter or on questions of who or what was an appropriate target for a jest (“Don’t laugh at the unfortunate”
²⁹
). To put this another way, where most modern theory, and popular interest, is firmly directed toward the laugher and to laughter’s internal coordinates, Roman discussions tended to look to the human beings who caused laughter, to the triangulation of joker, butt, and laugher—and (as we shall see in the next chapter) to the vulnerability of the joker, no less than of the person joked about.

LATIN LAUGHTER—OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

One of the pleasures of tracking down Roman laughter is that it leads to some extraordinary—surprising and even startling—works of Latin literature still somewhat off the beaten track, unfamiliar even to most professional classicists. We find all kinds of glimpses into Roman laughter in some unexpected places, and there is no shortage of them. They include long discussions that broach, directly or indirectly, the question of what makes people laugh, reflect on the protocols and ethics of laughing, or use laughter as a marker of other cultural values at Rome. No discussion of laughter is ever neutral.