Laughter in Ancient Rome (50 page)

65.
Gowers 2005; Gowers 2012, 182–86, 199–204 (with review of earlier work); Oliensis 1998, 29.

66.
The title of the second chapter of Saint-Denis 1965; the first reflects a similar style: “Jovialité rustique et vinaigre italien.” See also Minois 2000, 71: “Le Latin, paysan caustique.”

67.
Macrobius attributes some
Fescennini
to the emperor Augustus (
Sat.
2.4.21); otherwise, as Oakley (1997, 60) rightly insists, the only institutional context attested in the late Republic and early empire is the wedding ritual (Hersch 2010, 151–56); whether or not the term should be applied also to the ribald, joking verses sung at a Roman triumph—as Graf (2005, 201–2), along with many others, implies—is far less clear.

68.
Conybeare 2013 is a major study of laughter focused on biblical and theological texts, Jewish and Christian, to which readers frustrated by my limitations are warmly directed!

4. ROMAN LAUGHTER IN LATIN AND GREEK

1.
The
OLD,
for example, offers “to smile at, upon or in response to” for
arridere
/
adridere
and “to laugh at, mock, make fun of” for
irridere; ridere
with a dative suggests “to laugh as a sign of goodwill.” The etymology of
ridere
is obscure, despite occasional attempts to relate it to the Sanskrit for “to be shy” or to the Boeotian form κριδδέμεν (a variant of γελᾶν, “laugh”).

2.
Ovid,
Ars am.
2.201; Terence,
Ad.
864; Horace,
Ars P.
101.

3.
Silius Italicus 1.398; another decidedly sinister use of
arridere
(Seneca,
Controv.
9.2.6) is discussed on pp. 79–80. It most likely indicates mocking laughter at Cicero,
De or.
2.262.

4.
Eun.
249–50; Priscian in
GLK
3.351.11 (=
Inst.
18.274). Most modern translators and critics who have rightly focused on this passage (e.g., Damon 1997, 81; Fontaine 2010, 13–14) have also missed the full nuance, whichever way they choose to translate
adridere.

5.
Martial,
Epigram.
6.44: “omnibus adrides, dicteria dicis in omnis: / sic te convivam posses placere putas” (ll. 3–4, as the manuscripts have it); the typical sting in the tail turns out to be the man’s fondness for oral sex. For the emendation, see Shackleton Bailey 1978 (quotation on 279, my emphasis—and he goes on: “Since that compound does not take a dative in classical Latin,
omnibus
must become
omnis
”); this reading is now incorporated in his Teubner edition of 1990 and repeated in the Loeb Classical Library edition of 1993. For critical discussion of the emendation and Shackleton Bailey’s interpretation of the poem, see Grewing 1997, 314; Nauta 2002, 176–77.

6.
Catullus 39, passim; Tacitus,
Ann.
4.60 (a more sinister context).

7.
Ovid,
Ars am.
3.283 (advising girls not to display
immodici rictus
while laughing); Lucretius 5.1064 (of dogs); see further p. 159.

8.
Nonius Marcellus 742 (Lindsay): “non risu tantum sed et de sono vehementiore vetustas dici voluit.”

9.
Verr.
2.3.62. That at least is Cicero’s highly colored presentation of the scene (he admits that Apronius’ uproar is only extrapolated from his laughter at the trial).

10.
Persius 1.12; see 1.116–18 for an explicit comparison with Horace.

11.
Catullus 13.5; Suetonius,
Vesp.
5.2; Lucretius 4.1176.

12.
Nonius Marcellus 742 (Lindsay) quoting Accius (=
ROL
2, Accius,
Tragoediae
577) on the pounding of the ocean—the text is not entirely certain, and on another reading
cachinnare
could refer to the screeching of a seabird; Catullus 31.14 (of the ripples of Lake Garda), 64.273 (“leviter sonant plangore cachinni”). There is a curious set of relations here with aspects of the Greek laughter lexicon. Γελᾶν, in Greek, is commonly used for the behavior of the sea.
Cachinnare
matches (even if it is not directly derived from) the Greek καχάζειν, which does not appear to be used metaphorically for the sound of water, though the very similar Greek word καχλάζειν (with a lambda) is a regular term for “splashing.” It is tempting to think that this pairing lies somewhere behind Catullus’ play with
cachinnare
(or perhaps καχάζειν and καχλάζειν are not as separate as modern lexicography likes to make them).

13.
M. Clarke 2005 is a useful recent review of relevant material stressing the unfamiliarity of the Greek semantics of “smiling”: see also Lateiner 1995, 193–95; Levine 1982; Levine 1984. For the stress on the face: Sappho 1.14;
Hom. Hymn
10.2–3 (note that, very unusually, Homer,
Il.
15.101–2, has Hera laughing “with her lips”).

14.
Halliwell 2008, 524, part of a longer, careful discussion (520–29) of Greek laughter terminology and its physical referents, though apart from this appendix, μειδιῶ has hardly a mention in the book.

15.
For example, Virgil,
Aen.
1.254 (see also Homer,
Il.
15.47); Servius Auct. (ad loc.) quotes a parallel passage from Ennius, which uses
ridere
rather than
subridere:
Ennius,
Ann.
450–51 (
ROL
) = 457–58 (Vahlen).

16.
Catullus 39. In Kaster 1980, 238–40, the key examples are
Sat.
1.4.4, 1.11.2 (quoted), 3.10.5, 7.7.8, 7.9.10, and 7.14.5 (translated accordingly in his edition of Macrobius for the Loeb Classical Library), but note also 1.2.10 (involving the whole face) and 7.3.15 (accompanying an apparent insult), neither of which quite match. Kaster is, I suspect, too keen to find smiles in both Macrobius and the texts he uses for comparison. He refers, for example, to the smiles of Cicero’s dialogues “as an instrument of amused debate and rejoinder,” but the Ciceronian passages he cites refer explicitly to a variety of “laughing” (
ridens, adridens,
etc.). I am relieved that König 2012, 215–26, has (independently) similar reservations over details in Kaster’s argument on smiling, although for different reasons.

17.
Catullus 39.16; Ovid,
Ars am.
2.49; Ovid,
Met.
8.197; Livy 35.49.7; Quintilian,
Inst.
6.1.38 (
renidentis
a plausible emendation for the manuscript
residentis
).

18.
Apuleius,
Met.
3.12; Valerius Flaccus 4.359; Tacitus,
Ann.
4.60.2.

19.
1.2.10.

20.
This is obviously made more complicated by the fact that
os, oris
(occasionally used with
renideo,
as at Ovid,
Met.
8.197) could refer to the face or the mouth.

21.
I am thinking here of the work of such scholars as Paul Ekman (1992; 1999) and that discussed in ch. 3, n. 18. I hope that by this point in the book I do not need to explain why I do not follow such a universalist path.

22.
Chesterfield 1890, 177–79 (letter of 12 December 1765, to his godson), reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 342–43: “The vulgar often laugh but never smile; whereas, well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.” Similar sentiments are expressed in Chesterfield 1774, vol. 1, 328 (letter of 9 March 1748), reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 72.

23.
“Kissing,” Jones’s (as yet) unpublished paper given at Columbia University in 2002, also points to the ancients’ careful calibration of different styles of kissing.

24.
Le Goff 1997, 48 (“I wonder whether smiling is not one of the creations of the Middle Ages”); see also Trumble 2004, 89.

25.
Plutarch,
Caes.
4; Edwards 1993, 63.

26.
The survival of so much Roman writing on oratory—some of which is concerned with how or whether to make the listener laugh (on which see pp. 107–20, 123–26)—may exaggerate the apparent preponderance of joking terms over laughter terms, but there is no reason to imagine that the whole imbalance should be ascribed to this.

27.
A piece of popular wisdom rejected by Quintilian: “Potius amicum quam dictum perdendi” (6.3.28). It is possibly echoed by Horace,
Sat.
1.4.34–35 (but different versions of the text and its punctuation give a significantly different sense; see Gowers 2012, 161), and by Seneca,
Controv.
2.4.13. There are some echoes in modern sloganizing too, but the point is always reversed: “It’s better to lose a jest than a friend.”

28.
Cicero,
De or.
2.222 (= Ennius, frag. 167 Jocelyn;
ROL
1, Ennius, unassigned fragments 405–6).

29.
“Cato,”
Disticha.
, prol.: “Miserum noli irridere” (likewise “Neminem riseris”).

30.
Sonnabend 2002, 214–21, offers a brisk summary of scholarship on these lives; A. Cameron 2011, 743–82, is a fuller and more recent discussion (though underplaying, as most critics do, some of the work’s importance, whatever its fictionality: “trivial . . . product,” 781). The collection was probably produced in the late fourth century CE.

31.
SHA,
Heliog.
32.7, 29.3 (“ut de his omnibus risus citaret”), 25.2.

32.
Sat.
2.1.15–2.2.16.