Laughter in Ancient Rome Read online

  WHY DID DIO LAUGH?

  One tricky issue is how power operated on different sides of this laugh. The idea that Dio’s half-concealed outburst amounted to an act of subversion or resistance to Commodus’ tyranny is, of course, one compelling way of seeing it. And that would fit with the views of many modern theorists and critics who characterize laughter as an “unruly force” and “a site of popular resistance to totalitarianism.”13 In these terms, Dio’s laugh was a spontaneous and powerful weapon in the standoff between a vicious autocrat and an apparently supine Senate: not only because it was an expression of senatorial opposition but also because it acted more positively, to make Commodus seem ridiculous, to cut him down to size. As in the story of the Tarentines, it is impossible to exclude the element of derision: a person who prompts us to laugh is, by definition, laughable (or laugh-able, a term whose ambiguities will be a recurrent theme in this book14).

  But that is only part of the picture. For laughter, in its various guises, can be a weapon of the ruling power, as well as against it. And in this story the emperor himself was (as I have translated it) grinning, as he shook his own head while waving the ostrich’s at the frightened, bemused—or amused—senators. The word Dio uses is sesērōs (from the verb sesērenai), which means literally “parting the lips” (it is also used of “gaping” wounds) and can carry a friendly or more often, as presumably here, a threatening sense.15 No doubt the emperor’s gesture is to be distinguished from Dio’s simple “laugh” (which is what my translation aims to do, though possibly introducing misleading modern associations with the word grin). But this is nevertheless another of those words—of moving the lips and mouth—that make up the wide vocabulary of laughter and its cognates in ancient Greek.

  Roman power relations of all kinds were displayed, negotiated, manipulated, or contested with a laugh. For every laugh in the face of autocracy, there was another laugh by the powerful at the expense of the weak—or even laughter imposed upon the weak by the strong. That, in a sense, is one message of the sneer of Postumius at the Tarentines (“Laugh, laugh . . .”), and it is more obviously the moral of a chilling anecdote about one of Commodus’ predecessors, the emperor Caligula: he had forced a man to watch the execution of his own son in the morning, then invited him to dinner in the afternoon—and forced him to laugh and joke.16 Laughter, in other words, flourished amid the inequalities of the Roman social and geopolitical order.17

  Even trickier is the question of what exactly Dio was laughing at. Why did the display of the emperor brandishing the ostrich head have the senator reaching for his garland? We are not dealing with a joke here. Although the study of laughter and the study of jokes often go together (and the second part of this chapter looks at the relationship between some Roman laughter and some Latin verbal jokes), most laughter in most cultures has nothing to do with jokes at all. So was it, as Dio himself implies, that the sight of the emperor dressed up in the costume of an arena fighter (or rather dressed down, with bare feet and wearing just a tunic) and proudly decapitating an ungainly bird with the longest, and silliest, neck in the world could not help but appear ridiculous—whatever the menace that might lie behind it? Was it as if the emperor had turned himself into a parody of that heroic and mythical decapitator Perseus, brandishing his sword and the head of the Gorgon Medusa?18 Or was the laughter, as most recent commentators have imagined, produced by the terror of the occasion—what we would call a nervous laugh, and nothing to do with the potentially comic aspects of the display at all?19

  Laughter often produces these interpretative dilemmas. The most common response to any outburst of laughing is the question “What are you (or they) laughing at?” or rather “Why are you (or they) laughing?” (for, despite some powerful theories to the contrary, laughter is not always laughter at20). There is, of course, no definitive, right answer, least of all from the mouth of the laugher. In fact, any answer given is rarely an independent or objective explanation but almost always part of the debates, contestations, fears, paradoxes, hilarities, transgressions, or anxieties that produced the laughter in the first place. In this case, imagine that Dio had not managed to control himself but had been caught chortling by one of Commodus’ henchmen, who proceeded to challenge him as to why he was laughing. It is not hard to guess roughly what he might have said—something, perhaps, to do with a joke that his neighbor had just whispered in his ear, or with that bald man in the row behind (and certainly not to do with the antics of the emperor).21 Nor is it hard to guess how he might have presented the scene in the safety of his home later that evening: “Of course, I just laughed at him . . .” For if laughter is, or can be, political, so too are all those claims people make about having laughed—and the reasons they give (true or false) for doing so.

  These are certainly some of the factors at work in Dio’s account of this occasion in his History. It is such an appealing description, and it is so easy for us to empathize with what seems close to a very modern struggle to keep the “giggle” in, that we are liable to overlook its literary and political artifice and to imagine that we are (however remotely) eyewitnesses of a Roman laugh. But, of course, we are not. This is a carefully crafted analysis, chosen for excerption in a medieval digest (whose compiler no doubt found it a vivid and pointed tale of imperial transgression), originally written some two decades after the events it describes—a moment when it must have seemed wise for any writer to distance himself from the tyrant-emperor Commodus. And distance himself is exactly what Dio does by claiming to have laughed at the antics not from fear but at the sheer absurdity of the scene (“It was laughter rather than distress that took hold of us,” as he insists, against all those who would accuse him of nervous laughter). The very point of his account lies in the retrospective, and possibly tendentious, interpretation that it offers. To say “I found this funny” or, even better, “I had to conceal my laughter, else I would have been put to death” simultaneously indicts and ridicules the tyrant while casting the writer as a down-to-earth, genial observer not taken in by the ruler’s cruel but empty posturing.22 Which is no doubt just what Dio intended.

  HAHAHAE, 161 BCE

  My second instance of laughter was to be heard less than a mile away from the site of the Colosseum, more than four hundred years earlier, in 161 BCE. Laughter of a very different kind, it occurred on the stage of a Roman comedy, not in a spectacle played out under the eye of a threatening emperor but in the course of one of those festivals of fun, games, and worship of the gods that had been, in some form or other, a part of Roman urban culture as far back as we can trace it.23 This was not theater as we now know it, nor even, in our terms, a “stage.” In the second century BCE, there were still no permanent theater buildings in Rome; performances took place in the open air, in temporary wooden structures sometimes erected around the steps of a temple (most likely to provide a convenient block of seating for the audience—which cannot have amounted to more than a few thousand). In the case I shall be exploring, the theater was probably put up on the Capitoline Hill, around the temple of the Great Mother (Magna Mater).24

  It must have been a jolly and lighthearted atmosphere—perhaps even raucous. Roman comedies typically featured entangled boy-wants-girl intrigues and a series of more or less stock characters (the clever slave, the mean brothel keeper, the boastful but rather stupid soldier, and so on), each recognizable by its distinctive theatrical mask. As specialists have long insisted, most of the Roman comedy that survives has strong links with its Greek predecessors.25 I shall return to these in chapter 4; for the moment, I am concentrating on the Roman context. Whatever the laughter erupting from the audience, I shall focus first on a couple of instances of laughter between the actors onstage, written into the comic script. They introduce an even more subtle laughter narrative than Dio’s account of his giggle in the Colosseum and show how knowingly a Roman writer could exploit the tricky dilemmas of what a laugh could mean.

  These two cases of scripted laughter come from The Eunuch,
by Publius Terentius Afer (now usually known as Terence), which was first performed in 161 BCE. It has always been the most popular of Terence’s plays, was given an immediate second showing, and reputedly earned its author the unprecedented sum of eight thousand sesterces from the official sponsors.26 The memorable plot involves all the usual romantic intrigues but owes its extra punch to an outrageous scenario of disguise and cross-dressing—in which a lusty, love-sick young man (Chaerea) pretends to be a eunuch in order to get up close to the (slave) girl of his affections (Pamphila), who belongs to a courtesan called Thais. It is a marker of the almost unbridgeable gulf between ancient sexual politics and our own that the “happy ending” comes after Chaerea has used his eunuch disguise to rape Pamphila, as a prelude to the wedding bells that ring for them in the finale of the play.27 One version of the ancient production notes claims that the precise occasion of the play’s first performance was the Roman festival of the Megalesia, in honor of the Great Mother (hence the suggestion that the performance may well have taken place around the steps of her temple). If that is correct, then the context itself must have given the plot a curious piquancy. For the priests of the Great Mother, the so-called Galli, who lived in the temple precinct, were themselves eunuchs, reputedly self-castrated—as Roman writers loved to dwell on, and to decry—with a sharpened flint. Eunuchs and their look-alikes, in other words, would have been on view both inside and outside this drama.28

  At two points in the play, one of the characters, Gnatho (Gnasher), a typically ancient comic combination of jokester, sponger, and flatterer, erupts in a peal of laughter: hahahae. These are two of only a dozen or so occasions in which classical Latin literature explicitly represents the sound of laughter, and for that reason alone they are worth looking at carefully; we do not need, as we normally do, to infer laughter as part of a comic exchange, since we are explicitly told when and where it occurred. As another tale from the very front line of Roman laughter, it is well worth the effort to decode. The complexity; the multiple perspectives; the twists and turns among joker, recipient, and observers (on-and offstage); and the sheer difficulty in getting the joke are all part of the point.

  The scripted laughter is part of a series of exchanges between the sponger Gnatho and Thraso, a blustering soldier in the service of some unidentified Eastern monarch, who feature in one of the play’s intricate subplots (which may have been as difficult for some of the ancient audience to follow in detail as for us—indeed a bit of bafflement was all part of the fun). The soldier not only is Gnatho’s meal ticket but had also been the owner of Pamphila and is himself in love with Thais (in fact he had given young Pamphila to Thais as a love gift). In the scenes in question, Thraso is bragging about his various exploits to Gnatho, who (as the professional sponger’s role in life demands) plays the flatterer and laughs at the jokes, in the hope of free dinners in return—while the dramatist insinuates just how insincere his performance is.29 Their conversation is overheard by Parmeno, a bungling slave (whose master is, of course, also in love with Thais and is Thraso’s rival for her affections). Unseen and unheard by the others, he chips in the occasional aside.

  The bluff soldier starts by talking up his close relationship with his royal boss, who “trusted me with his whole army, and all his plans.” “Amazing” is Gnatho’s simultaneously unctuous and caustic reply (402–3). Thraso then goes on to boast of putting down one of his fellow officers, the commander of the elephants, who was jealous of his influence with the king: “Tell me, Strato,” he claims to have quipped, “are you so fierce because you’re in charge of the wild animals?” “What an amazingly smart and clever thing to say,” chimes in Gnatho with transparent insincerity (414–16). Another self-promoting story from Thraso follows. It’s the one about “how I scored a hit at a dinner party against a man from Rhodes”—and it’s the one that prompts the laughter:

  Thraso: This young Rhodian guy I’m telling you about was at a party with me. Actually I had a bird in tow. And he began to make a pitch for her and take the piss out of me. So I say to him, “Answer me this, smartass. Are you trying to pick up the tidbits, when you’re such a tasty morsel yourself?”

  Gnatho: hahahae

  Thraso: What’s the matter?

  Gnatho: Oh the wit of it! The cleverness! The neatness! Unbeatable! But hang on, did you make that joke up? I thought it was an old one.

  Thraso: Had you heard it before?

  Gnatho: Loads of times. It always goes down very well.

  Thraso: But it’s mine.

  Gnatho: I can’t help feeling sorry for the silly young reprobate, having that said to him.30

  Parmeno (out of earshot): God, you don’t deserve to get away with that.

  Gnatho: What did he do, tell me.

  Thraso: He was finished. Everyone who was there—they just died of laughter. And ever since they’ve had a lot of respect for me.

  Gnatho: And so they should. (422—33)31

  Less than a hundred lines later, there is another bout of laughter. Thraso has grown tired of waiting for Thais to come out of her house, so has decided to go off, leaving Gnatho to hang around for her. Parmeno this time speaks within earshot:

  Thraso: I’m off. (To Gnatho:) You stay and wait for her.

  Parmeno: Of course, it really isn’t proper for the commanding officer to be out walking in the street with his lady friend!

  Thraso: Why should I waste words on you? You’re just like your master!

  Gnatho: hahahae

  Thraso: What are you laughing at?

  Gnatho: At what you just said, and at that story about the guy from Rhodes—whenever I think about it. (494–98)32

  There can be no doubt whatsoever that this repeated hahahae is meant to indicate Gnatho laughing. For a start, Terence tells us so, with his “What are you laughing at?” (“Quid rides?” 497). What is more, ancient commentators on the play reiterate the point (“Here the sponger has also inserted the sound of laughter [risus]”33), and on several occasions Roman scholars in late antiquity refer in general terms to this way of representing laughter on the page (“Hahahae is the sound of joy and laughter [risus]”34). But even if we did not have these direct pointers, we would hardly mistake the sound. Unlike the barking of dogs, the grunting of pigs, or the croaking of frogs—which different languages render in bewilderingly different ways (“oink oink,” says the Anglo-American pig, “röf röf röf” or “uí uí” the Hungarian, “soch soch” the Welsh)—laughter in almost all world languages, and in entirely different linguistic families, is rendered as (or includes within its repertoire) some variant on ha ha, hee hee, or tee hee.35 Or, to quote Samuel Johnson’s typically pointed exaggeration, “Men have been wise in many different modes; but they have always laughed the same way.”36

  But why is Gnatho laughing? Identifying the sound of his laughter is one thing; as with Dio’s anecdote, understanding its cause is quite another.

  The first outburst follows Thraso’s story of the Rhodian, whose punch line I translated as “Answer me this, smartass. Are you trying to pick up the tidbits, when you’re such a tasty morsel yourself?” That was an attempt to give the line some point in modern terms. The Latin literally means “You are a hare: do you chase after delicacies?” (“Lepu’ tute’s, pulpamentum quaeris?” 426). So what was there in these words to cause Gnatho to crack up? Commentators both ancient and modern have disagreed about that (sometimes relying on different readings of the Latin text).37 But recent critics have usually followed the lead of the fourth-century commentary of Aelius Donatus in referring to the role of the hare as a delicacy on the Roman dinner table: “A hare, which is itself a delicacy, should not be seeking pulpamenta, which are tasty morsels of meat used as hors-d’oeuvres”; or as Donatus’ text more crisply glosses it (Eun. 426), “You are seeking in another what you have in yourself.”38 The implications are of course erotic, as the context makes clear: the young Rhodian is flirting with Thraso’s “bird” when he should be the object of erotic attention himsel
f. There is further support for this in another part of Donatus’ lengthy note (much less often quoted in modern scholarship), which collects evidence for the sexual overtones of the hare; it includes the view—wonderfully appropriate to the plot of The Eunuch—that the hare is an animal “of uncertain sex, now male, now female.”39

  Dissected in this clinical way, Thraso’s witticism may seem to lose whatever capacity to raise a laugh that it might once have had (following the iron rule, which goes back to antiquity itself, that a joke explained is a joke lost40). Yet the bare bones of the joke that are revealed could fit comfortably enough into several modern theories of joking technique, from Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to the numerous modern and ancient discussions that see incongruity (and/or its resolution) at the heart of what makes us laugh. So here the impossible, nonsensical incongruity from which the joke starts (the young Rhodian is not a hare) is economically resolved as we realize that the “hare” and the “delicacies” can have quite different referents in the erotic encounter of the dinner party, or, to put it in the terms of one leading current theory, the clash between the culinary and the erotic “script” is gradually resolved in favor of the latter.41

  Why on earth the resolution of incongruity, or whatever is supposedly going on within the Freudian unconscious, should cause that distinctive vocal and bodily response we know as laughing is a question that no modern theory—not even Freud’s—satisfactorily answers.42 But in this case, that problem is sidestepped, for we quickly suspect that it is not actually the joke that is making Gnatho laugh after all. Gnatho is laughing because he is a sponger, and the ancient cliché was that spongers flattered their patrons by laughing at their jokes, whether they were funny or, more likely, not. This hahahae is not a spontaneous reaction to a hilarious one-liner but a well-practiced response to his patron’s verbal posturing masquerading as a spontaneous reaction. Gnatho is laughing to please. This is another aspect of that complex relationship between laughter and power that I have already highlighted.