Mary Beard: humour in ancient

Rome was a matter of life and

death
It has always been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong way or to
crack jokes about the wrong targets, not least in the presence of Caligula

One evening at a palace dinner party, in about 40AD, a couple of

nervous aristocrats asked the emperor Caligula why he was laughing so
heartily. Just at the thought that Id only have to click my fingers and I
could have both your heads off! It was, actually, a favourite gag of the
emperor (he had been known to come out with it when fondling the
lovely white neck of his mistress). But it didnt go down well.

Laughter and joking were just as high-stakes for ancient Roman

emperors as they are for modern royalty and politicians. It has always
been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong way or to crack
jokes about the wrong targets. The Duke of Edinburgh got into trouble
with his (to say the least) ill-judged slitty-eyed quip, just as Tony Abbott
recently lost votes after being caught smirking about the grandmother
who said she made ends meet by working on a telephone sex line. For
the Romans, blindness not to mention threats of murder was a
definite no-go area for joking, though they treated baldness as fair game
for a laugh (Julius Caesar was often ribbed by his rivals for trying to
conceal his bald patch by brushing his hair forward, or wearing a
strategically placed laurel wreath). Politicians must always manage their
chuckles, chortles, grins and banter with care.
In Rome that entailed, for a start, being a sport when it came to
taking a joke, especially from the plebs. The first emperor, Augustus,
even managed to stomach jokes about that touchiest of Roman topics,
his own paternity. Told that some young man from the provinces was in
Rome who was his spitting image, the emperor had him tracked down.
Tell me, Augustus asked, did your mother ever come to Rome? (Few
members of the Roman elite would have batted an eyelid at the idea of
some grand paterfamilias impregnating a passing provincial woman.)
No, retorted the guy, but my father did, often.
Where Caligula might have been tempted to click his fingers and
order instant execution, Augustus just laughed to his lasting credit. The
Romans were still telling this story of his admirable forbearance 400
years later. And, later still, Freud picked it up in his book on jokes,
though attributing it now to some German princeling. (It was, as Iris
Murdoch puts into the mouth of one of her angst-ridden characters in
The Sea, The Sea, Freuds favourite joke.)
It also entailed joining in the give-and-take with carefully contrived
good humour and a man-of-the-people air (I suspect Nigel Farage would
have gone down horribly well in ancient Rome). The same Augustus
once went to visit his daughter and came across her being made up, her
maids plucking out the grey hairs one by one. Leaving them to it, he
came back later and asked casually, Julia, would you rather be bald or
grey? Grey, of course, Daddy. Then why try so hard to have your
maids make you bald?

Julia wasnt usually quite such a pushover. She was one of the few
Roman women celebrated for her own quips (which were published after
her death, risqu as some of them were). When asked how it was that
her children looked liked her husband when she was such a notorious
adulteress, she equally notoriously replied, Im a ship that only takes
passengers when the hold is full; in other words, risk adultery only when
youre already pregnant.
Unlike Augustus, bad politicians repeatedly got the rules of
Roman laughter wrong. They did not joke along with their subjects or
voters, but at their expense. The ultimate origin of the modern whoopee
cushion is, in fact, in the court of the 3rd-century emperor Elagabalus, a
ruler who is said to have far outstripped even Caligula in luxury and
sadism. He would apparently make fun of his less important dinner
guests by sitting them on airbags, not cushions, and then his slaves
would let out the air gradually, so that by the middle of the meal they
would find themselves literally under the table.
The worst imperial jokes were even nastier. In what looks like a
ghastly parody of Augustuss quip about Julias grey hairs, the emperor
Commodus (now best known as the lurid anti-hero, played by Joaquin
Phoenix, of the movie Gladiator) put a starling on the head of a man who
had a few white hairs among the black. The bird took the white hairs for
worms, and so pecked them out. It looked like a good joke, but it caused
the mans head to fester and killed him.
There were issues of control involved, too. One sure sign of a bad
Roman ruler was that he tried to make the spontaneous laughter of his
people obey his own imperial whim. Caligula is supposed to have issued
a ban on laughter throughout the city after the death of his sister along
with a ban on bathing and family meals (a significant trio of natural
human activities that ought to have been immune to political
interference). But even more sinister was his insistence the other way
round that people laugh against their natural inclinations. One
morning, for instance, he executed a young man and forced the father to
witness his sons execution. That same afternoon he invited the
father to a party and now forced him to laugh and joke. Why did
the man go along with it, people wondered. The answer was simple: he
had another son.

Self-control also came into the picture. The dear old emperor
Claudius (who was also renowned for cracking very feeble in Latin,
frigidus, cold jokes) was a case in point. When he was giving the first
public reading from his newly composed history of Rome, the audience
broke down at the beginning of the performance because a very large
man had caused several of the benches to collapse. The audience
members managed to pull themselves together but Claudius didnt; and
he couldnt get through his reading without cracking up all the time. It
was taken as a sign of his incapacity.
Roman histories and biographies are full of cautionary tales about
laughter, used and misused told, for the most part, to parade the
virtues or vices of emperors and rulers. But just occasionally we get a
glimpse from the other side, of laughter from the crowd, from the
underlings at court, or laughter used as a weapon of opposition to
political power. Romans did sometimes resort to scrawling jests about
their political leaders on their city walls. Much of their surviving graffiti, to
be honest, concentrates on sex, trivia (I crapped well here, as one
slogan in Herculaneum reads) and the successes of celebrity gladiators
or actors. But one wag reacted to Neros vast new palace in the centre of
Rome by scratching: Watch out, citizens, the citys turning into a single
house run away to Veii [a nearby town], unless the house gobbles up
Veii, too.
But the most vivid image of the other side of political laughter
comes from the story told by a young senator, Cassius Dio, of his own
experiences at the Colosseum in 192AD. Hed nearly cracked up, he
explains, as he sat in the front row watching a series of gladiatorial
games and wild beast hunts hosted by the ruling emperor Commodus.
Commodus was well known for joining in these performances as
an amateur fighter (thats where Gladiator gets it more or less right).
During the shows in 192, he had been displaying his combat skills
against the wild beasts. On one day he had killed a hundred bears,
hurling spears at them from the balustrade around the arena. On other
days, he had taken aim at animals safely restrained in nets. But what
nearly gave Dio the giggles was the emperors encounter with an ostrich.
After he had killed the poor bird, Commodus cut off its head,
wandered over to where Dio and his friends were sitting and waved it at
them with one hand, brandishing his sword in the other. The message

was obvious: if youre not careful, youll be next for the chop. The poor
young senator didnt know where to put himself. It was, he claims,
laughter that took hold of us rather than distress but it would have
been a death sentence to let it show. So he plucked a leaf from the
laurel wreath he was wearing and chewed on it desperately to keep the
giggles from breaking out.
Its a nice story, partly because we can all recognise the sensation
that Dio describes. His anecdote also deals with laughter as a weapon
against totalitarian regimes. Dio more or less boasts that he found the
emperors antics funny and that his own suppressed giggles were a sign
of opposition. What better than to say that the psychopathic tyrant was
not scary but silly?
Yet it cannot have been quite so simple. For all Dios bravura
looking back on the incident from the safety of his own study, it is
impossible not to suspect that sheer terror as much as ridicule lay
behind that laughter. Surely Dios line would have been rather different if
some burly thug of an imperial guard had challenged him on the spot to
explain his quivering lips?
My guess is that those frightened aristocrats at the court of
Caligula would have laughed in terror (or politely) at the emperors
murderous joke. But, back home safely, they would have told a bold
and self-congratulatory story, much as Dio did: Of course, we couldnt
help but laugh at the silly man . . . !
The truth is that, in politics as elsewhere, no one ever quite knows
why anyone else is laughing or maybe not even why they themselves
are laughing.