Laughter in Ancient Rome (21 page)

Quintilian’s discussion of Cicero and laughter enriches this picture. He lays out a similar comparison between Demosthenes (whom “many people think had no capacity for raising laughter in a judge” or even that he firmly wanted nothing to do with it) and Cicero (“whom many think had no moderation in it”). Quintilian himself is rather more charitable on both counts. Demosthenes did not actively dislike jokes, he insists, but was simply not very good at them. As for Cicero (“whether I judge correctly on this, or whether I am swayed by my inordinate passion for this outstanding orator”), he displayed a wonderful
urbanitas
(wit or urbanity), and “both in his everyday conversations and in his debates in court and cross-examination of witnesses, he uttered more witty remarks [
facete
] than anyone else.” In fact, Quintilian suggests, Cicero probably did not actually coin some of the rather vulgar sayings often attributed to him.
¹³

Nonetheless, on several occasions in the lengthy discussion that follows, Quintilian finds himself wondering whether certain Ciceronian bons mots were not quite appropriate for a gentleman orator. As we shall see, two antitypes of joker—the vulgar opposites of the cultured wit—stalk discussions of the rhetoric of laughter: the mime actor, or
mimus
(who has a large part to play in chapter 7), and the
scurra
(a curious amalgam of jester, scrounger, and man-about-town, who features in this and the next chapter). Quintilian concedes that some of Cicero’s tactics for raising a laugh were uncomfortably close to those of the
mimus
or the
scurra.
And he was not the only one to have those qualms. One well-known story, found both in Macrobius and in one of the declamations of the elder Seneca, explicitly pits Cicero in a contest of wits against Decimus Laberius, a writer of mimes (when an encounter in the cramped seats at some spectacle or play leads to a competitive exchange of gibes).
¹⁴
Macrobius also treats it as common knowledge that Cicero’s enemies used to call him a
consularis scurra
(“a
scurra
of consular rank”).
¹⁵
In fact, another possibility is that Cato exclaimed in Latin, “What a
scurra
we have for a consul!” There is no Greek equivalent of the word
scurra,
and Plutarch might reasonably have resorted to
geloios
as a rough translation.
¹⁶

In seeking to explain Cicero’s dubious reputation in this area, Quintilian partly casts the blame on his secretary Tiro, “or whoever it was who published the three volumes on this subject.” The “subject” he is referring to is wit or jesting, and this trio of books appears to have been a collection of Cicero’s
bona dicta
(jokes), not all of which were quite up to scratch. For the problem with jokebooks throughout history is that they are often padded out with some decidedly feeble, or risky, specimens. “If only,” Quintilian continues, “he had been more sparing in the number of jokes [
dicta
] he included and shown more judgment in selecting than eagerness in collecting them. It would not have exposed Cicero so much to his critics.”
¹⁷
We know little of this multivolume compendium of wit and wisdom, but it was not the only such publication of the great orator’s bons mots. In a surviving letter of 46 BCE, Cicero writes to thank his friend Gaius Trebonius, who had just sent him, as a gift, a book containing a collection of his own witticisms. A perfect present for a narcissist, one might say. But here also there was perhaps a problem with the selection, or lack of it (“Whatever I’ve said seems to you to be
facetum
[witty],” Cicero writes, “but it might not seem the same to others”). Luckily, Trebonius must have had a gift for packaging the quips: “As
you
tell them, they become
venustissima
[ever so smart],” Cicero writes in ironically grateful mode. “In fact, readers will almost have used up all their laughter before they get to me.”
¹⁸

It is presumably these long-lost collections that lie behind the “jokes of Cicero,” the series of “one-liners” we find assembled on a more modest scale in Macrobius and in Quintilian himself. My own particular favorite is his nice swipe at the apparently diminutive husband of his daughter, Tullia: “Seeing his son-in-law Lentulus, a short chap, kitted out with a long sword, he said. ‘Who tied my son-in-law to his sword?’”
¹⁹
But we should also note another variant on the
sero
joke among these, suggesting that the pun between “too late” or “a bit late” and “late in the day” was something of a classic. It is one of the gags that Cicero made in Pompey’s camp during the civil war. When he first arrived at the camp, after all his vacillations, people said to him, “You’ve got here a bit late [
sero
]”—perhaps the equivalent of a sardonic “Better late than never.” “I’ve not come at a late hour [
sero
],” he retorted. “I don’t see anything ready for dinner yet [
nihil hic paratum
].”
²⁰
Indeed, Cicero’s
dicta,
or
facetiae
(as they came more often to be called), were a staple of Renaissance wit and learning and regularly find a place in jokebooks and other such compendia at least up to the eighteenth century.
²¹
It is only the modern world that has tended to forget that Cicero was such a “laughter lover.”

Not that it is likely that Cicero really coined all these jokes ascribed to him. Quintilian was not merely being protective of his hero in suggesting that he had been credited with some feeble specimens that he had never uttered. In a letter written from Cilicia (where he was the provincial governor) in 50 BCE, Cicero complains that “everybody’s
dicta
are ascribed to me” and jokingly ticks off his correspondent—whose name, appropriately, was Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus (
eutrapelos
means “witty” in Greek)—for not making a stand on Cicero’s behalf and denying his authorship of the weak imposters; at the same time he flatters himself (or pretends to flatter himself) that his authentic witticisms were stamped with his individual style. “Don’t you protest?” he writes. “After all, I was hoping that I had left such a distinctive brand of quips that they could be recognized in and of themselves.”
²²

The truth is, of course, that “great men” attract, as much as they utter, bons mots and that jokes migrate among them (nicely demonstrated by the very same gag being attributed to Cicero by Quintilian and to Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, by Macrobius).
²³
But whether they were authentic or not, the important point is that in antiquity, Cicero was known for his jokes as well as his speeches and treatises, and he had a decidedly edgy reputation for laughter.

CONTROLLING LAUGHTER?

Despite the air of gravitas that has become Cicero’s modern hallmark, some particular aspects of his laughter, wit, and “humor” (a term we cannot resist, though it is treacherous to apply to the ancient world) have remained on the scholarly agenda.
²⁴
Recently, for example, Gregory Hutchinson and others have explored how Cicero’s
Letters
exploit jocularity, badinage, and the culture of shared laughter in constructing epistolary relationships. Laughter and joking in the
Letters,
as Hutchinson points out, are generally treated as companionable, rather than aggressive, and are often a marker that “the addressee is especially trusted, or especially akin in mind”; when Atticus is away, Cicero writes to him that he has no one with whom he can “joke freely.”
²⁵

But an even more influential strand of discussion has concerned the role of humorous invective in Ciceronian speeches and its implications for social and cultural control. Amy Richlin’s important study
The Garden of Priapus,
first published in 1983, laid much of the groundwork for this—arguing (in a way that is now taken for granted) that the sexual humor in Roman satire, epigram, lampoon, and invective was closely related to hierarchies of power. On Richlin’s model, when Cicero ridicules the sexual behavior of his opponents (casting them on the wrong side of the boundaries that lay between proper, normative Roman maleness and a variety of transgressive antitypes—the pathic, the “softy,” the
cinaedus,
the
mollis
), he is using wit and laughter as one weapon in the struggle for dominance.
²⁶
This is humor founded not on goodwill but on aggression. It is a classic case of a type of joking that Freud labeled tendentious (as opposed to innocent)—in which, as he put it, “by making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him—to which the third person [that is, in Ciceronian oratory, the audience], who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter.”
²⁷

A decade after Richlin’s study appeared, Antony Corbeill, in
Controlling Laughter,
developed these ideas at length, with a primary focus on Cicero’s speeches and a wider range of targets in mind, from the sexual effeminacy that was one of Richlin’s main concerns to all kinds of bodily peculiarities—such as gout or disfiguring swellings or even “funny” names. For Corbeill, Cicero’s use of laughter at his opponents, whether in the courtroom, the senate, or the assembly, was a powerful mechanism of both exclusion (for it served to isolate the enemy and present him as beyond the social pale) and persuasion (for it united the laughing audience in the affirmation of their shared “ethical standards”). To put it even more strongly, aggressive communal laughter at the deviant, or rather at the man Cicero chose to present as such, was a means of “simultaneously creating and enforcing the community’s ethical values. Jokes become a means of ordering social realities.” One instructive instance of this is Cicero’s attack on Vatinius in 56 BCE, a speech that seems to revel in mocking the grotesque appearance (bull neck, bulging eyes, and nasty swellings, or
strumae
) of its target while correlating Vatinius’ physical ugliness with his moral and political failings. As the audience joins together in laughter, so Corbeill’s logic goes, “Cicero becomes the society’s moral spokesperson, inveighing against the outrage Vatinius embodies.”
²⁸

This has been an extremely influential approach. In fact, most historians of Roman public life and public speaking would now regard Cicero’s use of laughter both as a powerful means of attack and as an equally powerful mechanism for reinforcing, or constructing, social norms.
²⁹
It is also an overwhelmingly aggressive (and frankly not very funny) approach to oratorical laughter, which I hope to nuance—or supplement—in the rest of this chapter. I am not looking to overturn it. I have no doubt whatsoever that laughter in the Roman Forum, courtroom, or Senate house could act to isolate the deviant while reaffirming shared social values, nor do I have any doubt that Roman laughter could sometimes be, in Quintilian’s words, “not far from derision.”
³⁰
But there was much more to it than that, which has not recently received the attention it deserves.

My focus will be on Cicero’s discussion of the use of laughter in public speaking, its benefits and—more especially—its risks. I shall concentrate not on his speeches but on the central chapters of the second book of his essay
On the Orator,
which (even if not quite the “mini treatise” on laughter that it is sometimes cracked up to be
³¹
) is nevertheless the most substantial, sustained, and challenging discussion of laughter, in any of its aspects, to have survived from the ancient world—a fact that is all too easy to forget in our hunt for the lost views of Aristotle (pp. 29–31).

It is in
On the Orator,
more than in any other of his surviving works,
³²
that Cicero offers both theoretical analysis and concrete examples of what was most likely to rouse a Roman audience to laughter, how laughter could be provoked, and with what consequence for speaker, listeners, or the butt of the joke. The truth is that when we read his speeches, we are usually second-guessing what was funny, when exactly the audience would have laughed—and how enthusiastically. It is one thing to talk generally about the humorous invective of the speech against Vatinius; it is quite another to judge which precise passages would have provoked the most hilarity (were all those physical oddities equally funny?) or how the words might have been delivered in order to do that. But just as Terence’s
hahahae
enabled us to pinpoint a precise moment of laughter, the discussion in
On the Orator
gives explicit information (at least as Cicero saw it) on particular outbursts of laughter, even occasionally calibrating its intensity, and reflects on some of the major principles that guide a Roman orator in exploiting jocularity and laughter. It is a discussion that faces questions of laughter itself—its causes and effects—head on.