Laughter in Ancient Rome (33 page)

In classical Greece, monkeys—
pithēkoi
—were associated with, among other things, various forms of inauthenticity and imitation. In the first half of the fifth century BCE, Pindar used the image of the monkey to evoke deceptively persuasive speech (children, he wrote, think that apes are pretty or lovely [
kalos
], but Rhadamanthys, the judge of the underworld, is not taken in by the slander or deception associated with such creatures
²²
). In later comedy and Athenian courtroom speeches, pretense—claiming, for example, rights of citizenship that you did not have—was regularly attacked as the behavior of a monkey.
²³
Aristophanes, in fact, exploited for comic effect the ape’s awkward place on the boundary between fraud and flattery: one of his clever coinages, the word
pithēkismos
(monkeying around or monkey business), captures the ideas of both mimicry or pretense and fawning or toadying.
²⁴
And he was not the only writer to do so. In a short surviving fragment of another fifth-century BCE comic dramatist, Phrynichus, four men are each compared to a monkey: one a coward, one a flatterer, and one an illegitimate, so spurious, citizen, or an imposter (the last comparison is sadly lost).
²⁵

Writers of the Roman world inherited and developed all these themes. But the closeness between the Latin words
simia
(monkey) and
similis
(like or similar)—and the tempting, though incorrect, idea that one derived from the other—gave an added edge to many Roman explorations of the mimetic properties of the monkey.
²⁶
Puns on the two words go back at least as far as the poet Ennius, whose tag “simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis”—or “the simian, how similar that ugly creature is to us”—is quoted by Cicero.
²⁷
And in many different contexts, apes and monkeys became bywords for mimicry.

The Roman comic theater found in the figure of the monkey a powerful symbol of its own mimetic tricks. Plautus in particular packed his plays with monkey names (Simia, Pithecium, and so on), monkey dreams, even monkey bites,
²⁸
and this simian conceit was visualized in a curious statuette, almost certainly of Roman date, that depicts a comic actor with an ape’s head in place of a theatrical mask (see fig. 3).
²⁹
Horace too, with Ennius surely somewhere at the back of his mind, could refer to a secondhand, imitative poet as “a monkey.”
³⁰
And Aelian’s confidence—in the late second or early third century CE—that mimicry was the defining property of this particular animal fits well with the Roman cultural landscape. “The monkey is the most imitative creature,” as he explained, “and every bodily action that you teach it, it will learn exactly, so as to be able to show it off. Certainly, it will dance if it has learned how and will play the pipes if you teach it.” He later observed that the animal’s habits of imitation could be the death of it (or at least lead to its capture). Monkey hunters in India would put their shoes on in sight of their prey, then leave out some more pairs for the animals to copy their actions—the trick was that the monkeys’ shoes were attached to snares.
³¹

Various images discovered at Pompeii turn on the monkey’s notorious mimicry of human beings.
³²
One statuette depicted some kind of ape dressed in a Phrygian cap and clutching a dagger.
³³
A curious painting from one of the grandest houses in the town shows a boy with a monkey that is dressed in a tunic and (presumably) all ready to show off its imitative skills (see fig. 4).
³⁴
But most striking of all is a painted frieze that caricatures the founding heroes of Rome. It includes an image of Romulus and (in a much better state of preservation) one of the escape of Aeneas, with his father and son, from Troy. All these human characters are represented as strange crossbred apes, with outsize penises, tails, and dog heads (see fig. 5).
³⁵
There has been considerable debate on what the exact joke was here. Some have seen a learned visual pun (the nearby island of Pithecusae [Monkey Island] was also known as Aenaria, which many Romans thought meant “Aeneas island”—so the picture conflates the two).
³⁶
Others have detected “comic resistance” to the Romanization of Pompeii and to the Augustan exploitation of the legends of early Rome.
³⁷
But whatever precise reading we give to these images, they point at least to the comic interchangeability of monkeys and mythical heroes; monkeys could even play the role of Rome’s founding fathers—for a laugh.

But what exactly was it that made apes such a prompt to laughter? We would be deceiving ourselves if we thought we could explain why any particular Roman cracked up when they caught sight of a monkey (let alone of an Aeneas in ape form). But a series of anecdotes and moralizing discussions in Roman literature takes us closer to understanding the shifting relationships between “monkey business” and laughter. These stories point to the importance of mimicry and flattery and also to the edgy intersection between the human and the animal.

At one level, as Aristophanes’ coinage implies, the monkey could be seen as the bestial equivalent of the human parasite—the freeloading guest who traded flattery and laughter for a meal. This is exactly what Plutarch suggests in his essay
How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend.
“Do you see the monkey?” he asks at one point. “He can’t guard your house, like a dog can; he can’t carry loads like a horse; he can’t plough the land like oxen. So he endures abuse and buffoonery and puts up with practical jokes, offering himself as an instrument of laughter. That’s just like the flatterer.”
³⁸
The monkey, in other words, is nature’s version of human culture’s “flatterer-cum-clown.” That is what Phaedrus hints too when he makes one of his fables turn on an encounter between a tyrant and a flatterer, and from the animal kingdom chooses a lion to stand for the tyrant and an ape for the flatterer.
³⁹
It is also a point that the story of Anacharsis underlines. For when he was asked to explain why the monkey had made him laugh when the jesters had not, the sage replied that a monkey was laughable (
geloios
) “by nature but a man only by practice.”
⁴⁰

Another major factor must be the imitative side of the monkey. We have already seen (p. 119) how Roman orators could be almost guaranteed to raise a laugh—vulgar as it might be—by mimicking their opponents in voice and stance, and we shall shortly look at aggressively imitative forms of comic performance staged purely for laughs. Part of the hilarity that apes and monkeys prompted certainly went back to their mimicry of human beings. But one or two anecdotes hint at something a little more complicated than mimicry pure and simple. They suggest that what was particularly laughable about these primates was their position on the very boundary between human and animal—and the precariousness of their attempts to imitate human beings. To put it another way, some of the loudest laughter accompanied their
failed
attempts at imitation, which exposed the mimicry for what it was.

These ideas underlie a story told by Lucian, the second-century CE satirist and essayist. It features an Egyptian king who had taught a troupe of monkeys to do a Pyrrhic dance, which they did very expertly, dressed up in masks and purple robes—until, Lucian writes, one of the spectators threw some nuts into the show. At that moment, monkeys became monkeys again, forgot the dance, threw off their fancy dress, and fought for the nuts. And the spectators laughed.
⁴¹

Lucian is using this story to make a particular point in the course of a gleefully satiric philosophical debate. The monkeys are like those hypocrites who purport to despise wealth and advocate the sharing of property . . . until one of their friends is in trouble and needs some cash, or there’s some gold and silver on offer. Then they reveal their true nature. But Lucian offers insights too into the working of laughter. Who caused the laughter, and how? There turn out to be two different prompts here. On the one hand, there is the man who threw in the nuts (explicitly described by Lucian as
asteios
—the Greek equivalent of the Latin
urbanus,
“cleverly witty”). On the other hand, there are the monkeys themselves. In their case, it is their inability to sustain their human role—their recrossing of the boundary between ape and man—that provokes the hilarity.

A different nuance—pointing to different pressure points along the fuzzy dividing lines between ape and man—is found in an anecdote in Strabo’s
Geography,
in his discussion of North Africa. For a brief moment, a laugh interrupts the sober, scientific narrative. Writing in the early first century CE, Strabo is drawing on an account by the Stoic philosopher and intellectual Posidonius, who lived about a hundred years earlier. As he sailed along the African coastline, Posidonius caught sight of a colony of wild monkeys in a forest, some living in the trees, some on the ground, some nursing their young, and some that made him laugh: these were the ones with heavy udders, the bald ones, and those with obvious disfigurements.
⁴²
These monkeys were not, of course, actively imitating anyone; they were just being monkeys. In that way, the story serves to remind us that “imitation” rests as much in the observer’s perception of similarity as in any intentional mimicry. The joke here is that Posidonius laughs at those features that he would have laughed at if the animals had been human beings (we have already seen baldness as a surefire prompt to laughter in the Roman world; pp. 51, 132–33, 146). It is a further suggestion that some of the laughter about ancient monkeys stems from the ambiguity of their position on the boundary between the human and animal kingdoms—or at least our perception of it (in other words, the joke’s probably also on Posidonius, and us).

All these anecdotes offer telling hints about the connections between primates and human laughter, but only hints, not attempts to face head on the basic question of why people laughed at monkeys. There was, however, one writer of the Roman Empire—the physician Galen—who did face that question directly, in an extraordinary few paragraphs of reflection in which he not only tried to explain what is funny about the ape but also came close to using the ape’s example to reflect back onto human practice and to explain why human clowns (or comic artists) make us laugh. Buried in a long medical treatise,
On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body,
this brave ancient discussion of laughter has not received the attention it deserves.

I gave a brief preview of Galen’s reflections in chapter 2, summarizing his idea that monkeys and apes operate, as we would put it, as “caricatures” of the human being. “We laugh particularly,” he wrote, “at those imitations that preserve an accurate likeness in most of their parts but are completely wrong in the most important ones.” And he refers to the example of the ape’s “hands,” which are similar to human hands—but for the thumbs, which are not opposed to the fingers and so are not only useless but “utterly laughable” (
pantē geloios
). But this is only one part of a longer discussion that raises further issues about how visual joking works.

Two passages in this treatise are particularly important. The first, which includes the discussion of the ape’s “hands,” has more to say both about the animal’s capacity for imitation and about the practice of human artists who try to raise a laugh. For Galen—in a way that echoes the story about the monkeys and the nuts—the basic point about the primates is that they are bad imitators rather than good ones. Pindar’s famous quotation about children finding monkeys “beautiful” reminds us, he explains, that “this creature is a laughable [
geloion
] toy for children at play, for it tries to mimic all human actions but fails in these laughably [
epi to geloion
]. Have you not seen an ape trying to play the pipes and dance and write and everything else a human being does correctly? What ever did you think? Did you think he handled it all just like us, or laughably [
geloiōs
]? . . . As for its whole body, my argument as it goes on will show that it is a laughable [
geloion
] imitation of a human being.”
⁴³
He continues by suggesting that there is an analogue here for the procedures of the comic artist: “If a painter or a sculptor, when he was depicting [
mimoumenos
] the hands of a human, was going to make an intentional error for a laugh [
epi to geloion
], he would make exactly the kind of error that we see in apes.” Later in the treatise, Galen returns to the apes in summing up his overriding principle that the character of the parts of the body matches the character of the soul: