Laughter in Ancient Rome (41 page)

That is essentially the same point that we find in a rather more complex joke tagged to “a grumpy man” who wanted to avoid an unwelcome visitor who had come to call on him at home. “Someone was looking for a grumpy man. But he answered, ‘I’m not here.’ When the visitor laughed and said, ‘You’re lying—I hear your voice,’ he replied, ‘You scoundrel, if my slave had spoken, you would have believed him. Don’t I seem to you more trustworthy than him?’”
⁶⁴
This is, in fact, one of those jokes in the
Philogelos
with a venerable history stretching back centuries. Cicero quotes a similar though longer anecdote in
On the Orator.
⁶⁵
It is set in the second century BCE and features the Roman poet Ennius and Scipio Nasica, a leading member of one of republican Rome’s grandest families. This story starts with Nasica calling on Ennius, only to find a maid who explains that Ennius is out. Despite her assurances, Nasica is convinced that she is just speaking to order and that Ennius really is at home. A few days later, the roles are reversed: “When Ennius had gone to call on Nasica and was asking for him at the door, Nasica cried out that he was not at home. ‘What?’ said Ennius. ‘Don’t I recognize your voice?’ ‘What a nerve you have,’ retorted Nasica. ‘When I was looking for you, I believed your maid when she said that you weren’t at home. Don’t you trust me myself?’”

There are some significant differences between the two versions. This is another case where the
Philogelos
includes an anonymized version of a joke elsewhere attributed to famous historical characters (see pp. 189–90). The main moral of the story is different too: in
On the Orator,
the apparently offending line is Nasica’s clever way of teaching Ennius a lesson; in the joke collection, it is simply a crass piece of deception on the part of the grumpy man. But issues of identity and authority run through both, nuanced as they are by issues of status and slavery. In the simpler version of the
Philogelos,
the main question is whom you can trust to vouch for someone or for their presence or absence. The joking paradox points to the fact that it is impossible for anyone to vouch for their own absence.

Several other jokes touch on these and similar themes. “Was it you or your twin brother who died?” asks an egghead when he meets the survivor in the street. Another egghead decides to give his baby his own name, “and I’ll just do without one.” What, in other words, is the relationship between naming and selfhood? At an embalmer’s studio, a man from Kyme tries to identify the dead body of his father through his distinguishing feature: that is, his cough. How far, this joke asks, does identity—and its markers—survive death? How funny is it that the affliction, which presumably defined the old man and eventually killed him, turns out to be no use at all in identifying him among a load of other look-alike corpses?
⁶⁶

Whatever the precise social origin of the
Philogelos,
its variants, and its predecessors—whether we imagine it coming fresh from the barbershop or crafted on the library desk—laughter here is pointing us to the debates and anxieties that must have bulked large in a world where formal proofs of identity were minimal: no passports, no government-issued ID, not much in the way of birth certificates or any of those other forms of documentation that we now take for granted as the means of proving who we are.
⁶⁷
In the Roman world, identity was a problem: people must have gone to ground, reinvented and renamed themselves, pretended to be who they were not, or failed to convince even their closest family that they really were who they claimed to be. The domestic anthropology of these jokes presumably raised a laugh (or hoped to) by exposing to a Roman audience the very nature of their day-to-day uncertainties about the self. When that egghead woke up, rubbed his head, and wondered if he had suddenly turned into the bald man, he was gesturing—hilariously, maybe—to shared anxieties about who in fact was who. Just as the story of the man who wanted to keep the dogs by his bed, to frighten off the dream bears, chimed with all kinds of Roman questions about the status of what you “saw” when you were asleep.

ROMAN JOKEBOOKS

The
Philogelos
is the only Roman jokebook to survive. Modern (re)-construction though it is, it certainly descends from a joke collection, or more likely collections, assembled, configured, and reconfigured in the Roman Empire. Whatever the point or the funny side of its individual gags, the
Philogelos
as a whole raises questions about the genre of the jokebook. Where and when did such anthologies originate? What do they imply about the status of jokes and joking? What hangs on the apparently simple fact that jokes could become the object of collecting and classification?

We have already come across references to various collections that may have been similar in some ways to the
Philogelos.
Different compilers gathered together the wit and wisdom of Cicero in several volumes. These presumably provided the raw material for Macrobius’ chapters on Cicero’s jokes, and collections of the same kind may well have been the ultimate source of the numerous wisecracks of Augustus and Julia also quoted in the
Saturnalia
(see pp. 77–78, 104–5, 130–31, 156). In fact, anthologies of witty sayings coined by notable individuals were clearly part of the stock-in-trade of ancient literary production. There are surviving examples in the various collections of
apophthegmata
compiled by Plutarch (
Sayings of Kings and Commanders, Sayings of the Spartans,
and
Sayings of the Spartan Women
) and clear traces of them in such works as Lucian’s
Life
of the second-century CE philosopher Demonax, which largely consists of a list of his witty or moral sayings (often referred to as
chreiai
)—presumably drawn from some earlier anthology.
⁶⁸
And there were once many more, now known only from the occasional quotation or brief reference. Julius Caesar, for example, was supposed to have compiled his own
Dicta Collectanea
(Collected Sayings), reputedly suppressed after his death by Augustus.
⁶⁹

Wit may well have been the hallmark of these collections. But whatever their superficial similarities to the
Philogelos,
they are crucially different in one major respect. They are all, as the title
Dicta
or
Apophthegmata
suggests, compilations of sayings of particular named individuals, which remain explicitly tied to their originators—even if there were sometimes competing claims about who exactly had coined which bon mot. In that sense, they are as close to the traditions of biography as to the traditions of joking.
⁷⁰
They stand clearly apart from the un-attributed, decontextualized, generalized jokes of the
Philogelos.

To these, the closest parallel may possibly be found in the 150 volumes of
Ineptiae
(Trifles), later called
Ioci
(Jokes), put together by an imperial librarian named Melissus in the reign of Augustus. But although it was obviously a vast compendium of wit, we do not have the faintest clue of its focus or organizational principles. It too might have been organized biographically, as a series of witty sayings by great men and a few women.
⁷¹
Clearer parallels, albeit fictional, are the jokebooks that formed a distinctive part of the professional equipment of parasites in Roman comedy (see pp. 149–50). In Plautus’
Stichus
we find the unfortunate Gelasimus trying to learn up jokes from his
libri
(books)—which at one point earlier in the play he had tried to auction off to the audience in return for dinner (a classic case of a desperate man selling his sole means of support just to get his next meal).
⁷²
Saturio, the parasite in the
Persa
(
The Persian
), perhaps has a better idea of the value of his books. He sees their jokes as a potential dowry for his daughter: “Look, I’ve got a whole cartful of books. . . . Six hundred of the jokes in them will be yours for your dowry.”
⁷³

Whatever their real-life models may have been, Plautus’ jokebooks were ultimately a figment of his imagination, and he never quotes any of their (imaginary) gags. The terms he uses to describe them—
verba, dicta, logi, cavillationes,
and so forth—could mean almost anything across the whole repertoire of wit, joking, and banter. But the logic of the comic plot demands that these quips were multipurpose, brought out and adapted for any occasion when the parasite might want to raise a laugh; it demands that they were generic rather than specific jokes. It is for that reason that some modern readers of the
Philogelos
have been keen to see that collection as the closest we have to the practical aidemémoire of an ancient jester.

That is, however, to miss a more important signal that Gelasimus, Saturio, and their joking equipment offer. For despite the close, formal relationship between Roman comedy and its Greek comic ancestors, there is no indication at all that parasites in Greek comedy came onstage carrying their jokebooks or that jokebooks ever acted as props in the Greek comic repertoire. None of the surviving traces of those plays gives any hint of them. Arguments from silence are, of course, always perilous. But the evidence we have (and there are, as we shall see, other pointers in the same direction) suggests that jokebooks of this type, whether on or off the stage, were something characteristically Roman. To return to some of the big themes I broached in chapter 4, the jokebook—in contrast to compendia of witty maxims or sayings attached to named characters—may be one of those features that help us prize apart a little the “laughterhood” of Rome from that of Greece.

This is not the usual story. Scholars have normally assumed that there must have been such general joke anthologies in the ancient Greek world and massaged fragments of evidence to fit. Robert Maltby, for example, has taken Saturio’s reference to “Athenian” and “Sicilian” jokes among those that might make up his daughter’s dowry (“They’ll be all Athenian; you won’t get a single Sicilian”) as proof of Athenian and Sicilian traditions of jokebooks.
⁷⁴
But that is to miss the point. Saturio was surely referring casually to the stereotypical hierarchy of jesting in the Roman world, with “Attic salt” coming out on top, Sicilian wit a little way behind (see p. 94). Only really tip-top jokes were to be included in the dowry—even Sicilian ones wouldn’t be quite good enough.

To others, the surviving titles of classical and Hellenistic Greek anthologies of wit and humor have suggested a literary tradition very much in the style of the
Philogelos.
But that too is very hard to sustain when we look at what little we can reconstruct of the books beyond their titles. At first sight, for example, we might expect Aristodemus’ collection—
Geloia Apomnēmoneumata
(“Funny Stories” or “Humorous Memoirs”)—to contain a mixed bag of jokes, not simply the sayings of particular individuals. Maybe it did. But the few quotations preserved from it in Athenaeus (and that is all we have) suggest something closer to named, authored bons mots.
⁷⁵

Even the supposed remains of a genuine Hellenistic jokebook—now often hailed as a single precious survival of the genre—hardly stand up to much scrutiny. The traces of text on this very ragged third-century BCE papyrus are frankly scant. They seem to indicate a series of one-line comments or questions grouped under various headings.
Eis purron
is the only heading to survive complete, but editors have disagreed whether this means “to (or against) a redhead” or “to (or against) Pyrrhos” (as a proper name, with a capital
P
). They have also disagreed about the status of the one-liners set beneath the headings. In the case of
eis purron,
so far as we can decipher the wording, these seem to take the form of “You do not have a face [
prosōpon
], but . . . ,” repeated with different and equally puzzling insertions following the
but:
“the evening sun,” for example, “the coals of the fire,” and so on.
⁷⁶
It is down almost entirely to the efforts of Rudolf Kassel that it is has become known as a jokebook, for he bravely tried to connect some of its idioms with the banter of the
scurrae
in Horace’s
Satire
on the journey to Brundisium (see p. 68) and other Latin comic forms.
⁷⁷
Unsurprisingly, other critics have thought differently, detecting instead the remains of an anthology of epigrams or even some kind of physiognomical text.
⁷⁸
The fact is that the papyrus is far too fragmentary to yield any certain conclusion—except that there is nothing, beyond some possible scheme of classification by type of character, to link it with the kind of material we find in the
Philogelos.