Laughter in Ancient Rome (48 page)

4.
Plutarch,
Mor.
633c (=
Quaest. conviv.
2.1.9). Cicero,
De or.
2.246, likewise puts a joke against a
luscus
(a man blind in one eye) in the category of the “scurrilous”; predictably, the emperor Elagabalus (SHA,
Heliog.
29.3) enjoyed making a joke of all kinds of people with bodily “peculiarities,” from the fat to the bald and the
lusci
(see p. 77). Plutarch’s protocols might suggest that the joking songs of Caesar’s soldiers (Suet.,
Iul.
51) should be seen as relatively good humored.

5.
Dio Chrysostom,
Or.
32.1 (ἐπειδὴ παίζοντες ἀεὶ διατελεῖτε καὶ οὐ προσέχοντες καὶ παιδιᾶς μὲν καὶ ἡδονῆς καὶ γέλωτος, ὡς εἰπεῖν, οὐδέποτε ἀπορεῖτε), 32.56 (“as if you’d been hitting the bottle”—ἐοίκατε κραιπαλῶσιν).

6.
Tacitus,
Germ.
19. This passage already hints at some of the complexities in understanding the sense of the apparently simple word
ridet,
which I will explore in more detail. “Laughs off”—in the sense of “takes as a joke”—seems attractive here and accords with the phrase that follows (
nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur,
“and to corrupt or be corrupted is not put down to ‘the times we live in’”). But as many recent critics have emphasized (for example, Richlin 1992a), “ridicule” in traditional Roman culture could be a powerful weapon against deviance. My hunch is that Tacitus is being (as often) even smarter than he seems and is querying not merely contemporary Roman corruption but some of the most traditional mechanisms (here ridicule) through which Rome had policed its morality. (But see above, pp. 105–8, 120–23, on the tendency of modern scholarship to overemphasize the aggressive, policing functions of Roman laughter.)

7.
Twain 1889, 28–29.

8.
Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 259.

9.
Murgia 1991, esp. 184–93.

10.
Inst.
6.3.100, the Latin text of D. A. Russell in the Loeb Classical Library (similar to that printed in the Teubner text, ed. L. Radermacher).

11.
“Hopelessly ungrammatical” because
mentiri
is a deponent verb, used in the passive voice, whereas
mentis
is an active form. There is a little more logic to some of these changes than I have perhaps made it appear:
mentis,
for example, might be a (not unparalleled) manuscript conflation of an original
me
[
n
]
ex te metiris.

12.
Murgia 1991, 184–87, includes further and fuller arguments for his changes.

13.
The impossible
obicientibus arbore
demands some change. Murgia would reasonably claim that it is easier to see how his version (
barbare
) rather than the more usual
obicienti atrociora
could have been corrupted into the garbled text of the manuscript (
arbore
). But he has not convinced other textual critics (for example Russell, whose Loeb text of 2001 notes but does not follow Murgia). Murgia’s emendation of the main joke entails other changes to earlier sentences. The phrase “Umis quoque uti belle datur” introduces the story in the manuscripts of Quintilian.
Umis
makes no sense whatsoever. It is usually emended to “Contumeliis quoque . . .” (“Insults also can be neatly used”—“I suppose this emendation must be right,” Winterbottom 1970, 112); Murgia suggests “Verbis quoque . . .” (“Words/quips also can be neatly used”).

14.
Fontaine 2010.

15.
On one occasion, for example, he claims that Varro (
Ling.
9.106) already in the first century BCE was working from a faulty text of Plautus that had missed the joke (Fontaine 2010, 29); if so, there are interesting implications for the transmission of jokes within the Roman world itself. But it may not be so. Even assuming that Fontaine’s reading is the correct version of what Plautus wrote, Varro’s text—as Fontaine concedes—may have been “fixed” by a later editor to bring it into line with what by then had become the standard reading.

16.
Rud.
527–28; Fontaine 2010, 121–23. He goes on to suggest a pun elsewhere in the play on the word
algor
(cold), as if it were a verbal form meaning “to gather seaweed.” Sharrock 2011 discusses this particular suggestion and Fontaine’s overall approach.

17.
The telling phrase of C. W. Marshall, on the jacket of Fontaine 2010.

18.
In arguing in this way, I am not unaware of the strand of research (stretching back to Darwin 1872) that claims there are natural physiological facial expressions of emotion—a strand that some art historians have recently exploited. David Freedberg, for example, has drawn on the research of Paul Ekman and others to argue for clearly identifiable expressions in works of art (see Freedberg 2007), yet as he himself admits, problems and controversies remain, and it is certainly not enough to assert, as he does (33–34), “A comparison of the terrible images shown on Al-Jazeera of Margaret Hassan immediately prior to her execution in 2004 and earlier photographs of her smiling leaves one with no doubt at all about the possibility of identifying constants of emotional expression. The fear and the cheerfulness are instantly and indisputably identifiable as such.” Here I would stress only that, even if we were to accept a “natural” relationship between expression and emotion, an artistic representation is a very different matter—while in any case, laughter is not itself an emotion or even necessarily the product of emotion (or, as Parvulescu 2010, esp. 6–9, would have it, “a passion”).

19.
Quotations from Stewart 2008; Goldhill 2008; Cohen 2008; R. D. Griffith 2008.

20.
For example, M. Robertson 1975, vol. 1, 101–2, and Trumble 2004, 14–15, see it as a form of animation; Giuliani 1986, 105–6, combines animation with beauty (at the start of a more complex discussion that includes the Gorgon’s “grimace,” 105–12); Yalouris 1986 canvasses the idea of aristocratic contentment. On smiling in general, see above, pp. 73–76.

21.
The best survey of these debates is Halliwell 2008, 530–52, which also discusses ancient descriptions (including some of the Roman period) of art that refer to laughs and smiles (notably several in [the older and younger] Philostratus’ ecphrases of painting: e.g., Philostratus mai.,
Imag.
1.19.6, 2.2.2, 2.2.5; Philostratus min.,
Imag.
2.2, 2.3). The theoretical implications of the Gorgon’s expression are central to Cixous 1976 (see above, pp. 36–37).

22.
Trumble 2004, l–liii; quotation from Wallace Collection 1928, 128. Schneider 2004 discusses medieval images of laughter, including the famous sculpture of the Last Judgment at Bamberg Cathedral, with Jesus between the Blessed and the Damned. This account makes clear what a fine line there is between the ecstatic smiles of the Blessed and the grimaces of the Damned. The
Mona Lisa
offers another puzzle, debated by Freud, John Ruskin, Bernard Berenson, and many others; reviewed by Trumble 2004, 22–29. So too, as Le Goff points out (1997, 48–49), do images of the story of Isaac. Though laughter is fundamental to that story (and the name
Isaac
means “laughter”), “if one looks at representations . . . one finds no attempt to represent the laughter.”

23.
J. R. Clarke 2007.

24.
J. R. Clarke 2007, 53–57. It is tempting to link this (as Clarke does) with the laughter headlined by Petronius,
Sat.
29, even though the coordinates are rather different. There a man falls down in astonishment at seeing a lifelike painting of a dog at the entrance to Trimalchio’s house, and his friends laugh at him (not at the dog!); the passage is minutely analyzed by Plaza 2000, 94–103. As a further example of a funny double take, Clarke offers (52) the story of the contest in illusionism between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius (Pliny,
HN
35.65–66); though laughter is not explicitly mentioned here, it does link with another story of Zeuxis, which I discuss on pp. 72–73.

25.
The idea of laughter as apotropaic is a major theme in Clarke’s book (esp. 63–81). In my view (see, e.g., Beard 2007, 248, and above, p. 146), this term explains much less than many scholars like to think and raises more problems than it solves. Do we really imagine that the entranceway to the bijou House of the Tragic Poet was a place of liminality haunted by the evil eye?

26.
Ling 2009, 510.

27.
Thomas 1977, 77 (my italics). Likewise Le Goff 1997, 40 (“Attitudes to laughter, the ways in which it is practised, its objects and its forms are not constant but changing. . . . As a cultural and social phenomenon, laughter must have a history”); Gatrell 2006, 5 (“Studying laughter can take us to the heart of a generation’s shifting attitudes, sensibilities and anxieties”).

28.
Chesterfield 1774, vol. 1, 328 (letter of 9 March 1748); reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 72.

29.
He references in particular the French version of Elias 1978—whose original German text,
Über den Prozess der Zivilisation
(1939), had not yet been translated into English. It is no coincidence that one of Elias’s essays, left unfinished and unpublished at his death, was on laughter; it is discussed by Parvulescu 2010, 24–26.

30.
All quotations from Thomas 1977.

31.
Bakhtin 1968.

32.
Pan’kov 2001.

33.
Le Goff 1997, 51, rightly stresses that Bakhtin was only the most famous of a large group of Soviet scholars working on laughter in the mid-twentieth century; see also (in German translation) Lichačëv and Pančenko 1991.

34.
Even some of Bakhtin’s warmest admirers concede this. See, for example, Stallybrass and White 1986, 10: “It is difficult to disentangle the generous but willed idealism from the descriptively accurate in passages like these. Bakhtin constantly shifts between prescriptive and descriptive categories in his work.”

35.
Gatrell 2006, 178 (chapter title).

36.
This chronology is sketched in the first chapter of Bakhtin 1968, 59–144; quotations on 72, 107, 119.

37.
Burke 1988, 85 (reviewing four books heavily dependent on Bakhtinian analysis, including Stallybrass and White 1986, and briefly surveying the reception of Bakhtin in the West). For the enthusiastic adoption of Bakhtin by some critics of classical literature and art, see, for example, Moellendorff 1995; Branham 2002; J. R. Clarke 2007, 7–9; and below, nn. 46–47.

38.
Pan’kov 2001, 47.

39.
Critiques (or critical developments) of aspects of Bakhtin’s treatment of carnival run into thousands. I have found particularly useful Davis 1975, 97–123, and Stallybrass and White 1986, esp. 6–19 (on the simultaneously radical and conservative aspects of carnival), with Chartier 1987 (on the discourse of nostalgia in the culture of carnival); Le Roy Ladurie 1979 (on carnival’s violence); M. A. Bernstein 1992, 34–58 (on its potential savagery, with important reflections on earlier, Nietzschean models of carnival and their ambivalence); J. C. Scott 1990, 72, 172–82 (stressing the
apparent
acquiescence of the people in the elite script of carnival); Greenblatt 2007, 77–104 (on the relationship between Rabelais’s text and “real” laughter); Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2014, 121–24 (from a classical starting point).