Laughter in Ancient Rome (17 page)

Once more, the details of the argument focus on exactly what the Latin author wrote and how accurately the medieval manuscripts, on which we rely, reflect that. The main issue comes down to the origin and direction of the “laughter” and depends on the difference of just a few letters. The crux is this. In the poem’s final couplet, was Virgil thinking of the
risus
of the baby, directed either to his
parenti
(singular, dative case, presumably his mother
⁵²
) or to his
parentes
(plural, accusative case, meaning mother
and
father)? Or did he mean that the
risus
of the
parentes
(here a nominative case) was directed at the baby? And what hangs on this? The argument is technical and ultimately, let me warn you, inconclusive—and it involves Latin words that to the innocent eye are identical (or almost so), even if they point to significantly different interpretations. But it is also very instructive and well worth pursuing in all its intricacy. For it puts laughter right back into the heart of a debate about one of the most classic of all classical texts while exposing the pitfalls of not reflecting carefully enough on the linguistic rules and cultural protocols of Roman laughter.

All the main surviving manuscripts run:

    Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem

(matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses);

incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes,

nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est.

Literally, this means “Begin, little boy, to recognize your mother with
risus
(to your mother ten months [of pregnancy] have brought long distress); begin, little boy: he on whom his parents have not
risere,
no god thinks worthy of his dinner table, no goddess worthy of her bed.” The idea (frankly “enigmatic” as it is
⁵³
) must be that the starry, divine future of the child depends on his parents’ warmth for him now, reflected in their
risus
toward him.

But most modern editors of the poem have thought this so enigmatic, not to say unconvincing, that they have chosen to adjust the text in order to change the nature of the interaction described. Instead of having the parents (
parentes
) direct their
risus
toward the baby (
cui
), they have the baby (
qui
substituted for
cui
) directing his
risus
toward his parent—that is, his mother (
parenti
). On this reading, the interaction of the final two lines runs as follows:

    Incipe, parve puer: qui non risere parenti,

nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est.

Or, “Begin, little boy: those who have not
risere
on their parent, no god thinks worthy of his dinner table, no goddess worthy of her bed.” In other words, it is what the baby himself does that paves the way for his future greatness.

There are some strong reasons for making these changes. In general, the revised text seems to make better sense. For one thing, the phrase “Begin, little boy” seems to demand some action on the part of the baby, not—as our manuscript reading would have it—on the part of the parents. For another, the idea that the entirely “natural” response (
risus
) of the parents to their child should be prophetic of his future seems hard to fathom. What is more, although there is no direct support for it in any of the manuscripts of Virgil, this does seem to be much closer to the text that Quintilian had in front of him just a century or so after Virgil wrote—as we know, because he refers to this particular passage in discussing a tricky point of Roman grammar.
⁵⁴

But whether these changes are correct or not (and I doubt that we shall ever firmly settle this), the questions here also turn the spotlight on to laughter—or more precisely, on to what difference thinking harder about laughter might make to our understanding of the text. For critics of these lines tend to fall back on a series of overconfident assumptions about the linguistic and social rules that governed Roman
risus
—and on all kinds of claims about what
ridere
and
risus
can (or
must
) mean. This is a place where we find many false certainties about Roman laughter on show.

So, for example, there is an alternative and less drastic emendation in line 62—which retains the idea that it is the
risus
of the baby but changes just one letter of the manuscript version. It replaces
cui
with
qui
but keeps the plural
parentes
found in the manuscripts, to read “qui non risere parentes.” Assuming that
parentes
is in the accusative case, this would mean “those who have not
risere
at their parents.” It is, at the very least, an economical solution, but it has often been rejected on the grounds that “
rideo
with the accusative can
only
mean ‘laugh at’ or ‘mock’” (and so would suggest, ludicrously, that the baby here was ridiculing his parents). In fact, that is simply false; as the most careful critics have conceded, there are numerous examples in Latin of
ridere
being used with an accusative object in an entirely favorable sense.
⁵⁵

From a different angle, many scholars have seized on Pliny’s statement that human children do not laugh until they are forty days old—except for Zoroaster, who laughed (
risisse
) from the moment he was born. In this way, they argue, through his hints at supernaturally precocious laughter, Virgil is claiming divine status for the child. Maybe. But the fact is, we have no idea how old Virgil’s baby is meant to be, we have no idea how widespread in the Roman world Pliny’s factoid about the chronology of laughter was, nor does the closest parallel passage (as we shall shortly see) provide any justification for that religious interpretation.
⁵⁶
There have also been firm (and conflicting) views expressed on whose
risus
is meant earlier, in line 60 (
risu cognoscere matrem,
or “to recognize your mother with
risus
”). Must this be the
risus
of the baby, in recognition of his mother? Or could it be her
risus,
which allows the baby to recognize her?
⁵⁷
The Latin is, of course, consistent with either (or indeed both simultaneously).

Perhaps more important, though, underlying almost all recent interpretations of these lines we can detect a decidedly sentimental tinge. Even one of the most hardheaded Latinists, Robin Nisbet, suggests that the scene’s “humanity” (whatever he means by that) is a good indication that “a real baby is meant” rather than some abstract symbol of peace and prosperity, and some critics, even when they are not arguing for a prophetically Christian reading of the text, evoke a scene that is frankly closer to an image of the adoring Virgin Mary and baby Jesus than to anything we know from pagan Rome.
⁵⁸
This sometimes chocolate-box tone is underpinned by what has become the standard translation of
risus
and
ridere
here, “smile” rather than “laugh”: “Begin, little boy, to recognize your mother with a
smile
.”
⁵⁹
It conjures up a picture of the loving smiles that bind mother and son and resonate powerfully in our understanding of babies and parenthood. How misleading is this?

So far I have avoided this issue, by keeping largely to the Latin terms. But not only should “smile” never be the translation of first resort for
ridere;
in this case there is also a clear suggestion in one of Virgil’s closest predecessors for this scene that a vocalized laugh is definitely meant. Virgil most likely drew and adapted this scene from Catullus, who in his wedding hymn for Manlius Torquatus imagines the future appearance of Torquatus junior, a baby sitting on his mother’s lap, stretching out his hands to his father, and “sweetly laughing to him with his little lips half open” (
dulce rideat ad patrem / semihiante labello
).
⁶⁰
This is not the curved lips of a silent smile; it is a laugh, and that is what we should think of in the Virgilian scene too.

It is perhaps easier for those not so embedded in the traditions of Virgilian scholarship to see the wider possibilities here, and their different perspectives can be instructive. For modern theorists of literature and psychoanalysis who have reflected on the role of laughter as a metaphor of communication, this passage has had a particular importance, even if it has rarely been discussed at length. Georges Bataille, for example, referenced Virgil’s words in a famous essay on the subject. “Laughter,” he wrote, “is reducible, in general, to the laugh of recognition in the child—which the following line from Virgil calls to mind.”
⁶¹
Julia Kristeva, likewise, hinted at the scene described by Virgil when she theorized the crucial role of laughter in the relationship between mother and baby and in the baby’s growing sense of its own “self.”
⁶²
These ideas found an echo in the work of the cultural critic Marina Warner, who commented directly on the final lines of
Eclogue
4 in the course of a more general discussion of (in her words) “funniness.” She had no difficulty in translating Virgil’s
ridere
as “laugh” and in seeing a point to that laughter: “‘Learn, little boy, to know your mother through laughter.’ Did he [Virgil] mean the child’s laughter? Or the mother’s? Or, by omitting the possessive, did he want his readers to understand that recognition and laughter happen together at the very start of understanding, identity, and life itself?”
⁶³

This is a radically different type of reading from those I have just reviewed. Many classicists would, I suspect, be reluctant to follow Warner, still less Bataille or Kristeva, and this is not the place for a lengthy discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments.
⁶⁴
But at the very least, in interpreting this contested passage so differently and in their conviction that we are dealing with vocal laughter, they offer a powerful reminder of how dangerous it is to assume that we know how Latin
risus
worked—let alone to impose some version of “baby’s first smile” on the culture of ancient Rome.

ROMAN LAUGHTER IN GREEK

Roman laughter was not, however, merely laughter in
Latin
. So far in this chapter I have focused on Latin literature, but already by the second century BCE, Rome had a bilingual literary culture, in which laughter could be debated and discussed in both Latin and Greek.

In fact, both incidents of Roman laughter that I chose to discuss in the first chapter of this book are classic examples of this kind of linguistic and literary bilingualism. The first (pp. 1–8) describes an incident that took place in the Colosseum at Rome, in a fearful and funny standoff between the emperor Commodus and a group of the Roman political elite; it was taken from a history of Rome written in Greek by a Roman senator whose original home was in the Greek-speaking province of Bithynia, in what is now Turkey. The second (pp. 8–14) was taken from a Latin comedy originally performed in the second century BCE at (almost certainly) a religious festival in the city of Rome. But—in a form of literary syncretism long debated by scholars of Greco-Roman comedy—it was in fact a Romanized adaptation and conflation of two plays by the late fourth-century Athenian dramatist Menander. Neither of these survives beyond some fragmentary snatches recovered from Egyptian papyrus and excerpts quoted by later authors, but, from even the few passages we have, it is clear that some of the funny lines I discussed earlier go back, with adjustments, to one of Menander’s plays.

The question is not whether these two stories deserve their place in an exploration of Roman laughter. Of course they do: each in its different way unfolds within a Roman institutional framework, and each is told by a “Roman” writer (Dio a Roman senator, Terence probably an enfranchised ex-slave). But they raise the question of where we might want to draw the line. There is in particular a vast amount of surviving literature written in Greek in the period of the Roman Empire, when the Greek world was under Roman political and military control—from the satires of Lucian to the lectures of Dio Chrysostom and the boy-gets-girl novel (
Leucippe and Cleitophon
) by Achilles Tatius, not to mention the biographies and philosophy of Plutarch, the histories of Dio and Appian and Dionysius, or the wearisome hypochondria of Aelius Aristides and the interminable (fascinating to some) medical treatises of Galen. Does it all count as Roman? Does “Roman” laughter potentially include the laughter of the whole Roman Empire, from Spain to Syria? What is the difference between Greek and Roman laughter? I have already pointed to some mismatches in the vocabulary of laughing and jesting in the Latin and Greek languages. How far does that indicate significant cultural differences that we should be taking into account?