Laughter in Ancient Rome (2 page)

The particular prompt for Dio’s half-stifled laughter was one memorable moment of imperial histrionics. After noting the emperor’s threats of Herculean violence against the audience in general, Dio’s account turns to Commodus’ assault on the senators in their—dangerously exposed—seats at the front:

He did something else along the same lines to us senators, which gave us good reason to think that we were about to die. That is to say, he killed an ostrich, cut off its head, and came over to where we were sitting, holding up the head in his left hand and in his right the bloody sword. He said absolutely nothing, but with a grin he shook his own head, making it clear that he would do the same to us. And in fact many would have been put to death on the spot by the sword for laughing at him (for it was laughter rather than distress that took hold of us) if I had not myself taken some laurel leaves from my garland and chewed on them, and persuaded the others sitting near me to chew on them too—so that, by continually moving our mouths, we might hide the fact that we were laughing.
⁶

This glimpse of life in the dangerous front line of Roman imperial politics is one of the rare occasions where, across almost two thousand years, Roman laughter seems to come truly alive. We recognize the sensation that Dio describes; we can almost feel what he must have felt. In fact, his short account of how he desperately tried to conceal his laughter is bound to resonate with anyone who has ever bitten their lip, their chewing gum, or their eraser to prevent some dangerous or embarrassing hilarity from erupting in an entirely inappropriate setting, to disguise or contain the telltale quivers of face and mouth. Replace the laurel leaves with candy, and it is one of those moments when the Romans seem just like us.

Some might now say that Dio was in danger of “getting the giggles” or “corpsing,” which is how we often envisage that struggle between, on the one hand, discretion, obedience, or politeness and, on the other, the laughter that stubbornly refuses to be put down. But there are in Dio’s language none of the gendered associations that come with the English word
giggle—
the sound, as Angela Carter memorably put it, that “expresses the innocent glee with which women humiliate men in the only way available to them.”
⁷
Nor does Dio use the Greek word
kichlizein,
often translated as “giggle” and with its own significantly eroticized implications; indeed, on one occasion, it is explicitly defined as “the laughter of prostitutes.”
⁸
What Dio was trying to keep to himself was
gelōs
or
gelan
, the standard Greek word, from Homer to late Roman antiquity and beyond, for “laughter” or “to laugh” (and the root of some of the modern technical terminology of laughter—the adjective
gelastic
and the noun
agelast,
“nonlaugher”—which, I am afraid, will inevitably crop up in the chapters that follow).
⁹

There is, of course, something curiously gratifying about a story that casts the excesses of Roman imperial power as the object of laughter. Dio’s account of Commodus’ threats in the amphitheater—both menacing and ridiculous as they were—suggests that laughter could be one of the weapons of those opposed to Roman autocracy and the abuse of power: one response by the disaffected was violence, conspiracy, or rebellion; another was to refuse to take it seriously.

This is not the only occasion in Dio’s
History
when laughter plays a role in the clash between Roman power and its subjects. There is another, even less well-known story in his account of Rome’s expansion at the beginning of the third century BCE, almost five hundred years earlier—which brought the Romans into conflict with the Greek town of Tarentum in South Italy. At the start of hostilities, the Romans dispatched envoys to Tarentum, dressed in their formal togas, intending to use this costume to impress their adversaries. When they arrived, according to Dio at least (there are other versions), the Tarentines laughed at the Romans’ dress, and one man managed to shit all over the clean Roman clothes of the chief envoy, Lucius Postumius Megellus. This went down well with the locals but provoked a predictable response from Postumius: “‘Laugh,’ he said, ‘laugh while you still can! For you will be crying for a very long time, when you wash these clothes clean with your blood.’” The threat, of course, came true; Roman victory meant that the Tarentines did shortly pay with their blood.
¹⁰

What made the Tarentines laugh? In part, maybe, it was a laugh of derision or scorn (that certainly is how, in Dio’s account, Postumius took it when his toga was aggressively fouled). But Dio implies that the sheer silliness of the formal Roman dress was also a factor in causing the Tarentines to crack up. In other words, this combination of laughter, power, and menace matches the much later story from the Colosseum. Power is met, and spontaneously challenged, by laughter. In the case of Tarentum there is an added extra: a clear hint that the cumbersome and hopelessly impractical Roman toga could look as funny to non-Romans in the ancient world as it now does, in the modern, to us.

Dio’s stifled laughter in the arena raises three important sets of questions, which this book will explore. First, what prompted the Romans to laugh? Or, to be realistic, what prompted urban elite male Romans to laugh? For we have almost no access to the laughter of the poor, of the peasants, of slaves, or of women—except in the descriptions that urban elite males give.
¹¹
In the ancient world, as often now, one way of marking difference among different social groups was to assert that they laughed differently, and at different things. Second, how did laughter operate in Roman elite culture, and what were its effects? What political, intellectual, or ideological jobs did it do? How was it controlled and policed? And what does that tell us about how Roman society worked more generally? Third, how far can we now understand or share the Roman culture of laughter? Were there some aspects of it in which the Romans really were “just like us”? Or will modern historians of Roman laughter always resemble anxious guests at a foreign party—joining in with the hearty chuckling when it seems the polite thing to do but never quite sure that they have really got the joke?

These are big questions, which I hope will open up new perspectives on the social and cultural life of ancient Rome, as well as contribute some classical insights to the cross-cultural history of human laughter—and I mean primarily laughter, not humor, wit, emotion, satire, epigram, or comedy, even though all those related subjects will make occasional appearances in what follows. A second look at Dio’s description of the scene in the Colosseum reveals just how complicated, intriguing, and (sometimes unexpectedly) revealing those questions can be. Simple as it may seem at first sight, there is more to the narrative of Dio’s laugh than a straightforward, first-person account of a young man resourceful enough, in the deadly power politics of second-century Rome, to suppress his laughter, and so save his skin, just by chewing on some laurel leaves. For a start, in Dio’s account the strategy adopted is definitely chewing, not—as would be more familiar to us—biting. Of course, it is tempting to tell the story as if it exactly matched the modern cliché of the desperate laugher who crunches on some convenient implement to repress his laughter (“Dio recorded how he had
kept himself
from laughing . . . by chewing desperately on a laurel leaf,” as one modern historian summarized the event
¹²
). But Dio makes clear that he was not actually preventing himself from laughing but rather exploiting the movement of his jaws on the leaves as a clever disguise—an alibi, even—for the movement that his laughter produced.

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 book
¹⁴
).

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
at
²⁰
). 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.