Laughter in Ancient Rome (44 page)

Notes

PREFACE

1.
The poem is titled “Invocation of Laughter” (1909): “. . . O laugh out laugheringly / O, belaughable laughterhood—the laughter of laughering laughers . . .” This translation is from
www.russianpoetry.net
, a project of Northwestern University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. It is also featured in Parvulescu 2010, 1–4.

1. INTRODUCING ROMAN LAUGHTER

1.
Dio 73(72).18–21 gives a full account of these spectacles (20.2 notes the plans to fire into the crowd, in imitation of Hercules’ attack on the Stymphalian birds); Hopkins and Beard 2005, 106–18, describes the arrangement of the audience and conventions of the proceedings (including on this occasion).

2.
Herodian 1.15.

3.
Dio 73(72).21.

4.
On his name, see Roxan 1985, no. 133; Gowing 1990. Dio was probably a few years under forty at the time, hence my
young.

5.
Dio 73(72).23 (the timetable of composition); Millar 1964, 1–40.

6.
Dio 73(72).21.

7.
Carter 1992, 190. This essay is a wonderful attempt to redefine the “giggle” as a mechanism of female power (rather than as the trivializing laughter of “girls” and a sign of their powerlessness). See further p. 157.

8.
Anec. Graeca
1.271. The erotics of κιχλίζειν and its association with prostitutes are clear in the numerous examples collected in Halliwell 2008, 491. But it is a more complicated word (and sound) than is often acknowledged; see, for example, Herodas 7.123, which describes it as “louder than a horse”—hardly a “giggle” in our terms (despite the onomatopoeia). Jeffrey Henderson 1991, 147, points to other (erotic) associations.

9.
The Greek insistently repeats the words: κἂν συχνοὶ παραχρῆμα ἐπ’ αὐτῷ
γελάσαντες
ἀπηλλάγησαν τῷ ξίφει
(γέλως
γὰρ ἡμᾶς ἀλλ’ ου λύπη ἔλαβεν), εἰ μὴ δάφνης φύλλα, ἃ ἐκ τοῦ στεφάνου εἶχον, αὐτός τε διέτραγον καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους τοὺς πλησίον μου καθημένους διατραγεῖν ἔπεισα, ἵν’ εν τῇ τοῦ στόματος συνεχεῖ κινήσει τὸν τοῦ
γελᾶν
ἔλεγχον ἀποκρυψώμεθα (Dio 73[72].21.2). In alluding (with no details) to a story of laughter defying all attempts to restrain it, Aristotle (
Eth. Nic.
7.7, 1150b11) writes of people “bursting out in a flood of laughter” (τὸν γέλωτα ἀθρόον ἐκκαγχάζουσιν).

10.
Dio 9.39. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ account of the same incident (
Ant. Rom.
19.5) also features Tarentine laughter and shit, but it is the bad Greek, rather than the funny clothes, of the ambassadors that provokes the mirth. For a further example of Dio, as an eyewitness, using laughter as a response to the bathos of imperial power, see 74(73).16.

11.
Despite the brave optimism of J. R. Clarke (2003; 2007, 109–32), who attempts to exploit visual images to access the world of “ordinary” people’s laughter; see further above, pp. 57–59.

12.
Hopkins 1983, 17 (my italics).

13.
Critchley 2005, 79.

14.
It is hard to capture elegantly in English the potential slippage between something or someone who is laughable in the sense of “capable of raising a laugh” and something or someone who is laughable in the sense of “ridiculous.” Where it seems particularly important, I highlight the issue with a hyphen:
laugh-able.
The more pronounced ambiguity in the Latin
ridiculus
is discussed on pp. 102–3, 125.

15.
τὴν δὲ κεφαλὴν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σεσηρὼς ἐκίνησεν (Dio 73[72].21.2). The word is discussed by Halliwell 2008, 521, 533nn12–13.

16.
Suetonius,
Calig.
27; Seneca,
De ira
2.33; discussed on p. 134.

17.
These paragraphs touch on a view of laughter commonly associated with Mikhail Bakhtin; see further pp. 59–62. Critchley 2005 offers a brisk critique of Bakhtin, on which I draw here, and, in so doing, usefully headlines Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
(with its strident claims that totalitarianism offers no place for laughter) and Žižek’s (semiserious) arguments that Eastern-bloc totalitarianism was anyway itself always “a joke”; see especially Žižek 1989, 28–30. Semiserious or not, Žižek encourages us to think of a much more diverse engagement between laughter and political power.

18.
A wall painting from the Villa San Marco at Stabiae captures this scene (Barbet and Miniero 1999, vol. 1, 211–12; vol. 2, plate 12.4), and Dio’s reference to Hercules and the Stymphalian birds (see above, n. 1) suggests that the emperor’s antics were seen in mythic terms. But maybe we should not press this too far; the truth is that the canonical image of Perseus with the head of Medusa held high in one hand and sword in the other is in large part a creation of the Renaissance (with Benvenuto Cellini’s statue from the Piazza della Signoria in Florence a key inspiration).

19.
For example, Hopkins 1983, 16–17; Dunkle 2008, 241.

20.
We should be alert to (at least) two senses of the English phrase
laugh at.
In the weaker sense, “What are you laughing at?” is more or less synonymous with “Why are you laughing?” (“I’m laughing at the jokes”). In the stronger sense, it represents something more aggressive (“I’m laughing at Commodus”). This is not unlike the range of the Latin “Quid rides?” (as in the passage of Terence discussed on pp. 11, 14).

21.
For Romans laughing at the bald, see pp. 51, 132–33, 146.

22.
The complexities of Dio’s account are well noted by Hekster 2002, 154–55.

23.
The precise details of the history of Roman games (
ludi
) and the development of theatrical performances within them are complex, and in part obscure; see F. H. Bernstein 1998; F. H. Bernstein 2011; Beard, North, and Price 1998, vol. 1, 40–41, 66–67; vol. 2, 137–44. Manuwald 2011, 41–55, reviews the festival contexts of theatrical performances.

24.
Beacham 1991, 56—85 (on stages and staging); Manuwald 2011, 55–68 (Temple of the Great Mother, 57); Goldberg 1998 (specifically on the Temple of the Great Mother and comic performances of the second century BCE).

25.
Hunter 1985 is a sane introduction; Marshall 2006 includes an up-to-date discussion of masks (126–58); with Manuwald 2011, 79–80. For masks, or not, in mime, see above, p. 168.

26.
We rely here on the possibly unreliable account of Suetonius,
Poet., Terence
2 (and we must assume that the “repeat performance” refers to the first production).

27.
Barsby 1999 and Brothers 2000 are helpful discussions of the play as a whole.

28.
Another manuscript version of the
didascalia
ascribes the first performance to the Ludi Romani (Barsby 1999, 78)—which would (sadly) rule out any direct connection between the representation of the eunuch in the play and the original performance context. The cult of Magna Mater was a complex amalgam, parading both Roman and disconcertingly foreign elements (such as castration); on these representational and other complexities, see Beard 1996.

29.
Gnatho himself had already paraded that insincerity a couple of hundred lines earlier (249–50), in a double entendre on his life as a sponger, discussed on pp. 71–72.

30.
My translation of this line (“Dolet dictum inprudenti adulescenti et libero,” 430) follows Donatus’ commentary and those more recent critics and translators (such as Barsby [1999, 164]) who see Gnatho flattering Thraso, by offering (mock) sympathy for the young Rhodian.

31.
TH.
una in convivio / erat hic, quem dico, Rhodius adulescentulus. / forte habui scortum: coepit ad id adludere / et me inridere. “quid ais” inquam homini “inpudens? / lepu’ tute’s, pulpamentum quaeris?”
GN.
hahahae.
TH.
quid est?
GN.
facete lepide laute nil supra. / tuomne, obsecro te, hoc dictum erat? vetu’ credidi.
TH.
audieras?
GN.
saepe, et fertur in primis.
TH.
meumst.
GN.
dolet dictum inprudenti adulescenti et libero.
PA.
at te di perdant!
GN.
quid ille quaeso?
TH.
perditus: / risu omnes qui aderant emoriri. denique / metuebant omnes iam me.
GN.
haud iniuria.

32.
TH.
ego hinc abeo: tu istanc opperire.
PA.
haud convenit / una ire cum amica imperatorem in via.
TH.
quid tibi ego multa dicam? domini similis es.
GN.
hahahae.
TH.
quid rides?
GN.
istuc quod dixti modo; / et illud de Rhodio dictum quom in mentem venit.

33.
Donatus on
Eun.
426; see also Eugraphius on
Eun.
497.

34.
GLK
6.447.7 (Marius Plotius Sacerdos); see also 1.419.7 (Diomedes, “hahahe”), 3.91.3–4 (Priscian, “ha ha hae”), 4.255.31 ([Probus], “hahahae”), 6.204.23 (Maximus Victorinus, “haha”). The minor textual variants in the manuscript tradition do not alter the main point (or sound). The recognition of laughter sounds in Greek texts is complicated by the fact that the simple substitution of a smooth for a rough, aspirated breathing turns a
ha ha ha
into an
ah ah ah
! Possible instances of laughter scripted in Greek comedy are discussed (and largely rejected) by Kidd 2011, with full reference to earlier bibliography, back to late antique and medieval critics who saw the problems that the presence or absence of aspiration caused.

35.
One enterprising seventeenth-century systematizer, “un astrologue Italien, nommé l’Abbé Damascene,” attempted to classify the variants in these sounds and relate them to the different temperaments,
hi hi hi
indicating melancholics,
he he he
cholerics,
ha ha ha
phlegmatics, and
ho ho ho
hotheads; cited in
Dictionnaire universel françois et latin,
vol. 5 (Paris, 1743), 1081. Kidd 2011, while acknowledging some version of
ha ha ha
as a possible means of representing laughter in Greek, points also to such variants as αἰβοιβοῖ and ἰηῦ.