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Did the Romans Laugh?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Mary Beard
Mary Beard*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University
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Abstract

Laughter is one of the most difficult and intriguing historical subjects, one that defies firm conclusion or systematization. Beginning with Dion Cassius’s first-person account of laughter in the Colosseum in 192 CE, this article explores some of the heuristic challenges of writing about the laughter of the past—particularly that of classical antiquity. It attempts to undermine some of the false certainties that surround the idea of a “ classical theory of laughter” (which originated during the Renaissance) and argues that ideas about laughter in ancient Greece and Rome were much more diverse than one usually imagines. Important patterns in the discursive use of laughter in ancient Rome can nonetheless be observed. This article also examines the way laughter was used to mediate political power and autocracy in addition to how laughter operated on the boundary between animals and humans. It concludes with a reflection on the extent to which we can still share in the laughter of the Romans and under what conditions.

Type
The Romans and Laughter
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 581 - 596
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012

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Footnotes

*

This article is a slightly edited version of the Marc Bloch lecture I gave in Paris in June 2012. I am very grateful to all who made that occasion possible (especially Jacques Revel, Jean-Frédéric Schaub, François Weil, and the staff of the EHESS), the editors of Annales HSS (especially Etienne Anheim) for making this publication possible, and friends who helped in many ways (HuetValérie, OutalebNora, John and ScheidÉvelyne). I am currently preparing a book-length study of Roman laughter based on the Sather Lectures (University of California, Berkeley) of 2008.

References

1. Thomas, Keith, “ The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” Times Literary Supplement, January 21, 1977, p. 77 (author’s emphasis).Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 77.

3. Cassius, Dion, Roman History 72.18.Google Scholar

4. Herodian, History of the Roman Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius to the Accession of Gordian 3.1.15.

5. Cassius, Dion, Roman History 72.21. The full ancient account of these proceedings is found in 72. 18–21.Google Scholar

6. “ I wonder if the smile has not been invented in the Middle Ages,” writes Jacques Le Goff in “ Âge, Rire au Moyen,” in Un autre Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1352 Google Scholar; echoed by Trumble, Angus, A Brief History of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 89.Google Scholar

7. “ Very Funny: An Interview With Simon Critchley,” by Dillon, Brian, Cabinet 17 (2005): 79 Google Scholar, summarizing the views of others. The interview is available online, accessed September 7, 2012: http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/17/dillon.php .

8. See Halliwell, Stephen, Greek Laughter: A Study in Cultural Psychology From Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: rCambridge University Press, 2008), 521 and 533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. For another view of laughter as “ part of the game” of totalitarianism, see Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 27–28.Google Scholar

10. For example, see: Hopkins, Keith, Death and Renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dunkle, Roger, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (New York: Longman, 2008), 241.Google Scholar

11. This is the main point of Beard, Mary, “ Rituel, texte, temps : les Parilia romains,” in Essais sur le rituel, eds. Blondeau, Anne-Marie and Schipper, Kristofer (Louvain: Peeters, 1988), 1:15–29 Google Scholar. Similarly, and with specific reference to Ovid, see Scheid, John, “ Myth, Cult and Reality in Ovid’s Fasti ,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 38 (1992): 118–31 Google Scholar. It is also the underlying theme of many essays in Barchiesi, Alessandro et al., eds., Rituals in Ink (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004). A key anthropological text, which underlies some of this work on antiquity, is Dan Sperber, Le symbolisme en général (Paris: Hermann, 1974).Google Scholar

12. The complexities of Dion’s account are well explored by Hekster, Oliver, Commodus: An Emperor at the Crossroads (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 2002), 154–55.Google Scholar

13. The basic modern texts include: Hobbes, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Tönnies, Ferdinand, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1969; originally published in 1640), especially p. 42;Google Scholar Bergson, Henri, Le rire : essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1900)Google Scholar; and Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Pelican Books, 1960; repr. 1976)Google Scholar, originally published in German in 1905. The major nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories are usefully summarized by Minois, Georges, Histoire du rire et de la dérision (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 469–507.Google Scholar

14. [Aristotle], Problems 35.2.964b (on feet) and 35.6-7.965a (on the impossibility of self-tickling; lips and armpits). Joubert, Laurent identifies the skin between the toes as the prime site of tickling in Traité du ris, contenant son essance, ses causes etc. (Paris: N. Chesneau, 1579), 205–6.Google Scholar

15. This basic point is also underlined throughout Goff’s, Jacques Le introduction to an important special issue on various historical aspects of laughter: “ Une enquête sur le rire,” Annales HSS 52 (1997): 449–55.Google Scholar

16. Georges Minois’s chapter heading “ Fini de rire : la grande offensive politicoreligieuse du sérieux (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)” is typical, although the precise dates of the highpoint and death of laughter varies considerably from historian to historian): see Minois, , Histoire du rire, 287 Google Scholar. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been minutely discussed, imitated, and criticized across the humanities, in literary as well as historical studies: in particular, see the French translation L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). It is an allusive and self-contradictory book, as even its admirers concede: see Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 10.Google Scholar

17. Quotation from Fairer, David W., English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 (London: Longman, 2003), 2 Google Scholar. Other notable, recent contributions to the understanding of the British culture of laughter in the eighteenth century include: Gatrell, Vic, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006); Dickie, Simon, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 Google Scholar). The case of France overlaps in broad terms with this, though with significantly different coordinates: for example, see Baecque, Antoine de, Les Éclats du rire. La culture des rieurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2000).Google Scholar

18. Chartier, Roger, “ La fête en question : retour sur un colloque” and “ Des fêtes de l’Ancien Régime à la fête révolutionnaire : problèmes de lecture,” in La fête en question, eds. Gürttler, Karin R. and Sarfati-Arnaud, Monique (Montreal: University of Montreal Press, 1979), 1–4 and 35–56 Google Scholar; Chartier, , “ Discipline et invention : la fête,” Diogène 110 (1980): 51–71 Google Scholar, reprinted in Chartier, Roger, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 23–44.Google Scholar

19. A conventional overview of the little that is known of this festival can be found in Scullard, Howard H., Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 205–7 Google Scholar. In a tradition that, to be fair, dates well before Bakhtin, modern writers have tended to wildly exaggerate the carnivalesque aspects (or, les orgies, according to Minois, Histoire du rire, 65). The stress on “ reversal” is found in its most extreme form in Versnel, Hendrik S., Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 2, Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 136–227 Google Scholar. Note, however, that the common modern claims that the masters actually served the slaves is supported by even less evidence in ancient texts than the idea of shared eating: see Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.7.36 and 1.11.1. For the paternalistic aspect, see Pliny the Younger, Letters 2.17.24.

20. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 6.3.7.

21. For example, see Aristotle: On the Parts of Animals 3.10.672b-673a; Poetics 5.1449b; and Rhetoric 2.1.1389a. For a commentary, see Halliwell, Greek Laughter, 307-31. For a famous critique of the incoherence of Aristotle’s Poetics, see George Steiner, “ Tragedy, Pure and Simple,” in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. Silk, Michael S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 545.Google Scholar

22. Eco, Umberto , The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983)Google Scholar, originally published in Italian in 1981.

23. Skinner, Quentin , “ Response: Why Is Laughter Almost Non-Existent in Ancient Greek Sculpture?” Cogito 8 (2008); 22.Google Scholar

24. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 4.8.1128a-b. This passage has prompted very different reactions from critics: subtle and sophisticated for Halliwell, Stephen , Greek Laughter: A Study in Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially pp. 307–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; muddled (“ it slides from tautology to tautology” ) for Goldhill, Simon , Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Aristotle, Parts of Animals 3.10.673a.

26. David, Isagoge 204.14-16.

27. The most interesting engagement with Hobbes and “ the classical theory of laughter” is Skinner, Quentin , “ Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 142–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A version of this theme was given as the Marc Bloch lecture in 2001: “ La philosophie et le rire,” accessed September 7, 2012, http://cmb.ehess.fr/54 . But even Skinner tends to give “ the classical theory” as a theory too much weight in its own right.

28. Cicero, On the Orator 2.281.

29. Ibid., 2.217.

31. This topic has been endlessly discussed. Daniel Ménager traces the history of these controversies from antiquity to the Renaissance in La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: PUF, 1995), 7-41. See also: Brun, Jacques Le , “ Jésus-Christ n’a jamais ri : analyse d’un raisonnement théologique,” Homo religiosus : autour de Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 431–37 Google Scholar; Goff, Jacques Le , “ Jésus a-t-il ri ?” L’Histoire 158 (1992): 72–74 Google Scholar (a useful popular account); and Pagels, Elaine H. and King, Karen L. , Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 109–11 Google Scholar, 115, 120, with comment on p. 128 (an alternative tradition in which Jesus does laugh).

30. Porphyry, Isagoge 4. See also: Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 5.10.58; Clement, Paedagogus 2.5.46. The fact that, in the second century CE, Lucian (Vitarum Auctio, 26) explicitly associates this claim with Peripatetic philosophy does not necessarily mean that it originated with Aristotle or his immediate successors.

32. Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 2.1.11–12.

33. Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Commodus 15.

34. Suetonius, Life of Caligula 24.

35. Ibid., 27; Seneca, De Ira 2.33.

36. Briefly summarized by Goff, Jacques Le , “ Rire au Moyen Âge,” 1347–48.Google Scholar

37. Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.20.

38. For example, see Augustus’s other jokes (collected in ibid., 2.4); and the well-known bantering exchange told by Cassius Dion of the emperor Hadrian and an ordinary woman (Cassius Dion, Roman History 69.6.3).

39. For example, see Darwin, Charles , The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), 131–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The classic article in modern anthropology is Douglas, Mary , “ Do Dogs Laugh? A Cross-Cultural Approach to Body Symbolism,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 15 (1971), 387–390 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; reprinted in Douglas, Mary , Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1975), 165–69.Google Scholar

40. [Lucian], Lucius 15. Although the story is transmitted with the works of Lucian, it is almost certainly not by him.

41. Apuleius, Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) 10.13–17.

42. Lucian, Piscator 36.

43. Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.281–90.

44. The best Greek text is by Dawe, Roger D. , ed., Philogelos (Munich: Saur, 2000).Google Scholar

45. Freud, Jokes, 148; Murdoch, Iris , The Sea, The Sea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), 168–69 Google Scholar. The Roman joke is also told of an earlier Republican magistrate: see Maximus, Valerius , Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 9.14, ext. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. The performance took place in late 2008 and was widely reported in the British press: accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ0RB38fUeU .

47. Philogelos 22.