Laughter in Ancient Rome (26 page)

It was not so for Quintilian. In a more extreme version of the traditional ancient concerns about the truth of rhetoric, he starts his section on “laughter raising” with a worry about falsehood in joking: “What brings the greatest difficulty to the subject is, first of all, that a joke [
dictum ridiculum
] is usually untrue.” Although he does not often return directly to this problem, it hovers over the discussion—as when he states that “everything that is obviously made up produces laughter.”
¹⁰⁶

This is a concern that we find elsewhere in Roman discussions of laughter in very different literary genres. One of the most memorable versions of this theme of truth versus falsehood in the production of laughter is in fact to be found in the
Fables
of Phaedrus, written in the first half of the first century CE. It is the story of a competition in front of an audience between a
scurra,
“well known for his urban wit” (
notus urbano sale
), and a peasant (
rusticus
)—as to who could do the best imitation of a pig. The
scurra
had started the show on the first day, winning loud applause for his pig noises, but the peasant challenged him to a second round on the very next day. An even bigger crowd turned up, determined to deride (
derisuros
). The
scurra
repeated his performance of the previous day, to great applause. Then the peasant came forward, pretending that he had a real pig concealed underneath his clothes—which in fact he did. He tweaked the animal’s ear to make it (really) squeal, but the audience still preferred the
scurra
’s version, voting it a much better imitation of a pig than the real pig. As they threw the peasant off the stage, he produced the animal to prove to the audience what a mistake they had made.
¹⁰⁷

It’s a dense story, made all the more complicated by the layers of simulation and dissimulation involved (even the peasant is pretending to be pretending). But the simple idea that the
scurra,
the professional jokester, could please the audience with his imitation noise better than the peasant could with his real pig is just what Quintilian would have been worried about.

SERO?

I started this chapter with a play on words that Quintilian much admired. Cicero—who had been pressed to specify at Milo’s trial when Clodius had died—replied with a single (hilarious) word:
sero
(late/too late). Why did Quintilian find this response such a good joke? I am far from clear that I have the final answer to that. But the discussions of oratorical laughter in both
On the Orator
and the
Handbook
do bring us a little closer to understanding its impact on Quintilian. Various factors made this a quip of which one might especially approve. It was spontaneous and unprepared. It was a response rather than an unprovoked attack. It applied only to Clodius, rather than being a class action.

No less important, for Quintilian at least, it was true . . . unlike some of the instances of laughter and joking in the Roman imperial court that we will explore in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 6

From Emperor to Jester

LAUGHTER AND POWER

The opening pages of this book featured an encounter between an emperor and a senator in the Colosseum, with laughter—in some form—on both sides: the senator and writer, Dio Cassius, chewing on his laurel leaf to disguise the fact that he was cracking up; the emperor, Commodus, reportedly grinning in a triumphant and threatening fashion. We have also briefly glimpsed some revealing stories of the laughter and two-edged jocularity of the emperor Elagabalus (see p. 77), who was on the throne some thirty years after Commodus, from 218 to 222 CE, gleefully recounted in his fantastical biography—more fantasy than real life, it is usually reckoned.

In what is, to my knowledge, the first recorded use of the whoopee cushion in world history, his
Life
explains how Elagabalus raised a laugh as his guests were literally deflated at dinner—and his pranks are said to have included the display of hilarious lineups of eight bald or one-eyed or deaf or gouty men. In the theater, his laughter drowned out that of the rest of the audience. Other tales from the same, flagrantly unreliable source recount how he “used also in fact to joke with his slaves, even ordering them to bring him a thousand pounds in weight of spiders’ webs and offering a reward,” or how “when his friends became drunk, he used often to lock them up, and suddenly in the night he would send in lions and leopards and bears—tame ones—so that when they woke up at daybreak, or worse, during the night, they would find lions and leopards and bears in the room with them. And many of them died from it.”
¹

The extravagant fantasies in the
Augustan History
are often more historically revealing than they appear—not simply inventions but absurd magnifications of traditional Roman concerns. We might see some of these stories of Elagabalus as inverted reflections of the anxieties that Quintilian expressed over the truth and falsehood of jokes and laughter. A chilling consequence of Roman autocracy is imagined here as the capacity of the tyrant to make his jokes come (horribly and unexpectedly) true: the tigers and so on were harmless, but the guests died anyway.
²

It is a truism that the practice of laughter is closely bound up with power and its differentials (what social practice isn’t?). The interesting question—which this chapter tries to broach—is, in what particular ways was laughter related to Roman power? We start with emperors and autocrats and move (via masters and slaves, and an extraordinarily jocular account of a chilling audience with the emperor Caligula) to reflect on the place of the joker or jester at Rome—both inside and outside the imperial court, both as a cultural stereotype and (insofar as we can glimpse it) as a character in day-to-day social reality. Several topics that we touched on in the last chapter appear again, in particular the idea of that declasse antitype to the elite orator, the
scurra,
who is the tricky, shifting subject of the final section of this chapter. My aim is to put laughter back into our image of the imperial court and its penumbra and to highlight the part that jokers played in Roman elite culture; it turns out to be a much larger and more significant one than we tend to acknowledge.

EMPERORS GOOD AND BAD

Roman autocracy was embedded in the culture of laughter and the joke—in a pattern that stretched back well before the reign of the first emperor, Augustus.
³
It may not now be the best-known “fact” about the brutal dictator Sulla, who held brief and bloody control of the city in the 80s BCE, but in antiquity, like a number of Hellenistic tyrants and monarchs (see pp. 151, 207), he had the reputation of being an enthusiastic laughter lover. It was presumably not by chance that he was associated with precisely those jokesters whose style of jesting Cicero and Quintilian urged the orator to avoid. “He was so fond of mime actors and clowns, being very much a laughter lover,” wrote the historian Nicolaus of Damascus in the late first century BCE, “that he gave them many tracts of public land. A clear proof of the pleasure he took in these things are the satyric comedies that he wrote himself in his native language [Latin].”
⁴
Plutarch too picked up the tradition, explaining that the dictator “loved a joke” (
philoskōmmōn
) and at dinner was completely transformed from the austere character that he was at other times. Even just before his death (caused, in Plutarch’s lurid story, by a ghastly ulceration that turned his flesh to worms), he was carousing with comics, mime actors, and impersonators.
⁵

Some of the associations between autocrat and laughter are easily predictable. The basic Roman rule (which we meet again in its direct descendant, the medieval tradition of the
rex facetus
⁶
) was that good and wise rulers made jokes in a benevolent way, never used laughter to humiliate, and tolerated wisecracks at their own expense. Bad rulers and tyrants, on the other hand, would violently suppress even the most innocent banter while using laughter and joking as weapons against their enemies. Anecdotes about imperial laughter illustrate these axioms time and again. Whether they are literally true or not we cannot tell, and the fact that there are examples of jokes apparently migrating from one prominent jokester to another (see pp. 105, 253n23) strongly suggests that we are dealing with cultural stereotype or traditional tales rather than fact. But they point to the bigger truth—a political lesson as much as an urban myth—that laughter helped to characterize both good and bad rulers.
⁷

Dio neatly sums up one side of this in discussing Vespasian: the emperor’s
civilitas
(that ideal quality of treating his people as fellow citizens, not subjects) was demonstrated by the fact that “he joked like one of the people [
dēmotikōs
] and was happy to take jokes at his own expense, and if any of the kind of slogans that are often anonymously addressed to emperors were posted up, leveling insults at him, he would post up a reply in the same vein, without being at all bothered by it.”
⁸
Of course,
civilitas
was always something of a veneer (there was no real equality between citizens and the emperor, and especially not between the emperor and the ordinary, nonelite citizens who are often instrumental in these jokes). But it was nevertheless an important veneer in those intricate games of imperial power whose ground rules had been established under the emperor Augustus. And it is around Augustus that a large number of these anecdotes—of jokes tolerated or enjoyed—cluster.

Many of the stories of his bons mots and banter that Macrobius collected show Augustus joking with his subordinates (when, for example, someone was hesitating to offer him a petition and kept putting out and withdrawing his hand, the emperor said, “Do you think you are giving a penny [
as
] to an elephant?”
⁹
). But they also show him tolerating the quips that were aimed against him. As Macrobius has one of the characters in his
Saturnalia
remark, “In the case of Augustus, I am usually more amazed by the jokes he put up with than those he put out” (I am attempting here to capture something of the play between
pertulit,
“put up with,” and
protulit,
“put out” or “uttered”). And he goes on to cite a number of examples, including a very famous joke, which we shall discover (see p. 214) has had a long afterlife, through Sigmund Freud down to Iris Murdoch, as well as a prehistory stretching back into the Roman Republic. “A barbed joke [
iocus asper
] made by some provincial became well known. There had come to Rome a man who looked very like the emperor, and he had attracted the attention of everyone. Augustus ordered the man to be brought to him, and once he had taken a look, he asked, ‘Tell me, young man, was your mother ever at Rome?’ ‘No,’ he said. But not content with leaving it at that, he added, ‘But my father was, often.’” Augustus, in other words, was the kind of man who could take a joke about that bedrock of Roman patriarchal power—his own paternity.
¹⁰

But not all the jokers were humble types. We occasionally find similar tolerance displayed toward the jocularity of the upper echelons of Roman society. In one intriguing cause celebre of the early second century CE, jokes were used in the Senate as a vehicle for safe criticism. The story, found in a letter of Pliny, is for us a refreshing antidote to the usual image of senatorial solemnity—though Pliny himself was not amused. He was discussing the obvious, and in his view disastrous, consequence of introducing secret voting papers in senatorial elections: “I told you,” he writes to his correspondent, “that you should be worried that secret ballot might lead to abuse. Well, it’s already happened.” Someone, he explains, at the last election had scrawled jokes (
iocularia
) and even obscenities on some ballot papers and on one had written the names of the supporters, not of the candidates; it was all intended, we might guess, as a ribald comment on the pointlessness of such procedures under autocratic rule. The loyal senators huffed and puffed and urged the ruling emperor, Trajan, to punish the culprit, who wisely lay low and was never found. The implication of Pliny’s letter is that Trajan turned a blind eye and took no action.
¹¹
If some of the more starchy observers, Pliny included, were disappointed, others would surely have congratulated the emperor on his display of
civilitas.