Laughter in Ancient Rome (53 page)

21.
It was Petrarch in the fourteenth century who established Cicero as a jester for the humanists (
Rerum memorandarum Lib.
2.37, 2.39, 2.68), with further discussion in Bowen 1998.

22.
Fam.
7.32.1–2 (SB 113). The name (or perhaps it is the nickname) of the correspondent points to the artful wit of this letter, which is as much a joke itself as a comment on the treatment of Cicero’s
bona dicta;
see further Hutchinson 1998, 173–74; Fitzgerald 2000, 97; Krostenko 2001, 223 (which gives the passage a rather different stress—that Cicero is happy to be credited with the jokes of others, provided they are good ones). Note Cicero’s claim elsewhere that Caesar would be able to recognize which quips were bona fide Ciceronian:
Fam.
9.16.3–4 (SB 190).

23.
Quintilian,
Inst.
6.3.77; Macrobius,
Sat.
2.4.16 (Vatinius, in order to show that he had recovered from his gout, boasted that he was now walking two miles a day [in Macrobius, only one]. The retort is: “Yes, I’m not surprised; the days are getting a bit longer”). The slippage and migration of jokes is discussed by Laurence and Paterson 1999, 191–94.

24.
Among studies earlier than those I discuss here, note Haury 1955 (focused particularly on irony); Geffcken 1973 (on comic aspects of
Pro Caelio
), now with Leigh 2004; Saint-Denis 1965, 111–61 (focusing especially on
Pro Caelio, In Verrem,
and
De oratore
).

25.
Att.
1.18.1 (SB 18)—he can neither joke nor sigh. Hutchinson 1998, 172–99 (quotes on 177); see also Griffin 1995.

26.
Richlin 1992a. For the rhetoric of invective and the main coordinates of sexual humor, see 57–104.

27.
Freud 1960 [1905], 132–62 (quote on 147); Richlin 1992a, 59–60.

28.
Corbeill 1996 (quotes on 5, 6, 53); on the persuasive or reassuring function of jokes and laughter, see also Richlin 1992a, 60 (again drawing on, and developing, a Freudian perspective).

29.
Reflected in, for example, Connolly 2007, 61–62; Vasaly 2013, 148–49. Another important strand of work, with a strongly linguistic emphasis, is found in Krostenko 2001 (though his focus on “social performance” offers in many ways a complementary approach to the construction of identity through wit, laughter, and their terminologies). It is important to stress that what sets this “new orthodoxy” apart from some apparently similar earlier approaches (focusing on derision and humorous invective) is the constructive social function (one sense of
controlling
in Corbeill’s title) it ascribes to laughter.

30.
Inst.
6.3.7.

31.
The expression of Fantham 2004, 186.

32.
In particular, shorter sections in
Orat.
87–90 and
Off.
1.103–4.

33.
Guérin 2011, 151, rightly refers to the provocation of laughter as “une zone de risque”; for Richlin 1992a, 13, it is the use of obscenity rather than the ambivalence of laughter that makes courtroom joking a risky proposition.

34.
The first certain reference to
De Oratore
is in a letter to Atticus of November 55 (when the work is finished enough to suggest that Atticus copy it),
Att.
4.13.2 (SB 87).

35.
All recent work on this text is underpinned by the five-volume commentary of Harm Pinkster and others, which appeared between 1981 and 2008 (the relevant volume for the discussion of laughter in book 2 is Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989), and it can be assumed to be a major reference point in what follows. This edition has largely replaced the earlier commentary of A. S. Wilkins, published between 1879 and 1892 (the relevant volume being Wilkins 1890). The best up-to-date translation, with introduction, is May and Wisse 2001; Fantham 2004 is an illuminating guide to the text and its literary, cultural, and historical significance.

36.
At
De or.
1.28, the participants agree to “imitate Socrates as he appears in the
Phaedrus
of Plato” and to sit down under a plane tree for their discussion; see Fantham 2004, 49–77. Although they are, in our terms, oratorical experts, they are keen to distinguish themselves from professional Greek experts (e.g.,
De or.
1.104).

37.
May and Wisse, 2001, 14–15, succinctly introduces the characters; Fantham 2004, 26–48, discusses Crassus and Antonius in detail. Cicero adopts the Platonic device of setting his dialogue just before the death of the lead character (Socrates in Plato’s
Phaedo
and
Crito
); here all the characters but one (Cotta) were dead by the end of 87 BCE. The year 91 BCE might be seen a loaded choice: only the year before, Crassus, as censor, had expelled the
Latini magistri
(Latin teachers of rhetoric) from Rome (
De or.
3.93; Suetonius,
Rhet.
1).

38.
Fam.
1.9.23 (SB 20). Aristotle’s dialogues are almost entirely lost, but they certainly featured much less cut and thrust, and longer expository speeches by the participants. Cicero may also have had in mind Aristotelian content as well as form.

39.
See, e.g., R. E. Jones 1939, 319–20; Dugan 2005, 76.

40.
In addition to the works already cited, notable recent interventions, often with a particular focus on the section on laughter, include Gunderson 2000, 187–222 (“Love”); Krostenko 2001, 202–32; Dugan 2005, 75–171; Guérin 2011.

41.
De or.
2.216–90. In addition to the commentaries noted above, Monaco 1974 offers a text, an Italian translation, and extensive notes on this section of the work alone; Graf 1997, 29–32, offers a succinct discussion.

42.
De or.
2.234. This image is taken up again at the end of the section (2.290).

43.
De or.
2.217, 2.231, 2.239.

44.
De or.
2.216.

45.
De or.
2.235.

46.
Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 188–204; Rabbie 2007, 212–15 (a revised, less “speculative,” English version). The earlier tradition is represented by Grant 1924, 71–87, 100–131 (drawing on Arndt 1904). To be fair, it did admit a few Ciceronian additions to or deviations from Greek precedents (“Sed iam abscedere videtur Cicero a fontibus Graecis ac suum tenere cursum,” Arndt 1904, 36, in relation to
De or.
2.268.), but the default position was that everything went back to a lost Greek source unless there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The old view is still assumed in some popular writing on the subject (such as Morreall 1983, 16) and is more or less revived wholesale by Watson 2012, 215–23, in yet another attempt to pin the
Tractatus Coislinianus
(see above, p. 31) to Aristotle.

47.
De or.
2.217; see also 2.288. These Greek books do not survive; see p. 34.

48.
De or,
2.216 (
suavis
), 2.236 (
locus . . . et regio
)—though Corbeill 1996, 21–22, nuances the parallels between Aristotelian and Ciceronian terminology.

49.
There is an unresolved controversy (conveniently summarized by Fantham 2004, 163–64) around the availability in antiquity of some of the works of Aristotle, and so to which ones Cicero could have had direct access.

50.
Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 188–89.

51.
As argued, for example, by Monaco 1974, 29, in relation to the Memmius story of
De or.
2.283.

52.
De or.
2.2.

53.
See p. 54 for the textual confusion between
locus
and
iocus.

54.
These
veteres
could be in theory either Greek or Roman (as Pinkster, Leeman, and Rabbie 1989, 214, makes clear). But the strongly Latin character of the terms makes the latter much more likely, although no doubt versed in Greek theory.

55.
It is an even smarter exchange than it might appear. As A. S. Wilkins 1890, 113, and Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 216, clearly document, “bark” (
latrare
) was a word used for shrill speakers. Krostenko 2001, 214–15, points to Cicero’s use of the word
venustus
for “spur-of-the-moment” humor of this kind.

56.
Guérin 2011, 271–303, discusses these two antitypes in detail, though suggesting an oversystematic, rigid distinction between the two (the
scurra
is the antitype of oratorical
dicacitas,
the
mimus
of oratorical
cavillatio
). Grant 1924, 88–96, offers a convenient collection of sources. See further above, pp. 152–55, 167–70.

57.
The Latin is hard to pin down: “In re est item ridiculum, quod ex quadam depravata imitatione sumi solet; ut idem Crassus: ‘Per tuam nobilitatem, per vestram familiam.’ Quid aliud fuit, in quo contio rideret, nisi illa vultus et vocis imitatio? ‘Per tuas statuas,’ vero cum dixit, et extento bracchio paulum etiam de gestu addidit, vehementius risimus.” I follow Monaco 1974, 124, here in seeing this as laughter generated by the mimicry (
depravata imitatione
), with the imitation of the statue (
extento bracchio
) prompting the most raucous chuckles. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 248, argues that the joke rests on the unexpected addition (
aprosdokēton
) of “per tuas statuas” after “per tuam nobilitatem, per vestram familiam” and that the extended arm is a reference to the position of a man taking an oath. But this interpretation hardly delivers on the mimicry that Cicero emphasizes. See further, p. 119.

58.
De or.
2.216;
Off.
1.108. Dugan 2005, 105, puts the strongest recent case for seeing Cicero’s choice of Strabo (“whose public persona and oratorical style provoked suspicions that were similar to those which he himself incited”) as significant.