cambridge university press greek laughter a study of cultural psychology from homer to early christianity nov 2008 kho tài liệu bách khoa

This page intentionally left blank


GREEK L AUGHTER

This is the first book to offer an integrated reading of ancient Greek
attitudes to laughter. Taking material from literature, myth, philosophy, religion and social mores, it analyses both the theory and the
practice of laughter as a richly revealing expression of Greek values and
mentalities. From the exuberantly laughing gods of Homeric epic to
the condemnation of laughter by some early Church fathers, the subject provides a fascinating means of investigating complex features of
cultural psychology. Greek society developed distinctive institutions
(including the symposium and certain religious festivals) for the celebration of laughter as a capacity which could bridge the gap between
humans and gods; but it also feared laughter for its power to expose
individuals and groups to shame and even violence. Caught between
ideas of pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, play and seriousness, laughter became a theme of recurrent interest in various contexts. Employing a sophisticated model of cultural history, Stephen
Halliwell traces elaborations of the theme in a series of important
poetic and prose texts: ranging far beyond certain modern accounts
of ‘humour’, he shows how perceptions of laughter helped to shape
Greek conceptions of the body, the mind and the meaning of life.
st e ph e n h a l l iwel l is Professor of Greek at the University of
St Andrews. His most recent book, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient
Texts and Modern Problems (2002), has been awarded an international
prize, the ‘Premio Europeo d’Estetica’ for 2008.



G R E E K L AU G H T E R
A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer
to Early Christianity

STEPHEN HALLIWELL


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521889001
© Stephen Halliwell 2008
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part
may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13

978-0-511-43728-1

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-88900-1

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.


Contents

Preface
Note to the reader
Abbreviations

page vii
xi
xii

1 Introduction: Greek laughter in theory and practice
Nature and culture, bodies and minds
The dialectic of play and seriousness
To laugh or not to laugh?

1
1
19
38

2 Inside and outside morality: the laughter of Homeric gods
and men
Between pathos and bloodlust: the range of Homeric laughter
Divine conflict and pleasure in the Iliad
Thersites and the volatility of laughter

Sex and hilarity on Olympus
From debauchery to madness: the story of the suitors
Epilogue: Achilles’ only smile

51
51
58
69
77
86
97

3 Sympotic elation and resistance to death

100

Dreaming of immortality
Face-to-face tensions: intimacy and antagonism
Satyric and tragic versions of sympotic laughter
Socratic complications: Xenophon’s Symposium

100
109
127
139

4 Ritual laughter and the renewal of life

155

Worshipping the gods with laughter
A map of ritual laughter
Patterns and explanations
Is Old Comedy a form of ritual laughter?

155
160
191
206

5 Aischrology, shame and Old Comedy

215

Who is shamed by shameful speech?
The sociolinguistics of aischrology
The speech habits of Theophrastus’ characters
Aristophanic shamelessness

215
219
237
243

v


vi

Contents

6 Greek philosophy and the ethics of ridicule
Archaic anxieties
Laughter on (and behind) the face of Socrates
Stoic compromises: laughing at self and others
How Aristotle makes a virtue of laughter

7 Greek laughter and the problem of the absurd
Existential absurdity: predicaments ancient and modern
Laughing Democritus (and weeping Heraclitus)
What made Cynics laugh?

8 The intermittencies of laughter in Menander’s social world
The confusions of laughter and tears
Menandrian perspectivism
Laughter blocked and released

9 Lucian and the laughter of life and death
The view from the moon
Other aerial perspectives (or head in the clouds?)
The view from Hades
The absurd suicide of Peregrinus

10 Laughter denied, laughter deferred: the antigelastic
tendencies of early Christianity
Mocking ‘the king of the Jews’
Clement of Alexandria: the protocols of the Christian body
John Chrysostom and the dance of the devil
Ascetic disciplines for the face and the soul
Epilogue: a disputed legacy

Appendix 1 The Greek (body) language of laughter and smiles
Appendix 2 Gelastic faces in visual art
Bibliography
Index of selected authors and works
Index of selected Greek terms
General index

264
264
276
302
307

332
332
343
372

388
388
404
415

429
429
436
454
462

471
471
483
495
512
517

520
530
553
603
609
611


Preface

In his characteristically bittersweet essay Elogio degli uccelli, ‘A eulogy of
birds’, written in 1824, Giacomo Leopardi puts in the mouth of Amelius (a
fictionalised version of Plotinus’ student of that name) a set of meditations
which, among other things, treat the singing of birds as a kind of laughter.
This thought gives Amelius the cue for a digression on the nature of laughter
itself, which he regards (in a perception so typical of Leopardi, and one
which later influenced Nietzsche) as a paradoxical capacity of humans, ‘the
most tormented and miserable of creatures’. After pondering a number of
laughter’s qualities – including its strange connection with an awareness of
the vanity of existence, its appearance as a sort of ‘temporary madness’, and
its association with inebriation – Amelius gives a startling undertaking: ‘but
these matters I will deal with more fully in a history of laughter which I am
thinking of producing . . .’ (‘Ma di queste cose tratter`o pi`u distesamente

in una storia del riso, che ho in animo di fare . . .’), a history in which he
promises to trace the intricate fortunes of the phenomenon from its ‘birth’
right up to the present.
This passage in Leopardi’s wonderful essay is, as far as I am aware, the first
place where anyone ever contemplated such a peculiar thing as a ‘history of
laughter’. Amelius’ promise (and Leopardi’s vision) is, for sure, not without
irony, especially since he had earlier stated that the nature and principles of
laughter can hardly be defined or explained. Yet the idea reappeared later
in the nineteenth century when the Russian socialist Alexander Herzen (as
quoted by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book on Rabelais) mused that ‘it would
be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter’. It was to be two
other Russians who in the twentieth century took active steps towards
converting the idea into practice. One was the folklorist Vladimir Propp,
who sketched out his thoughts on laughter in more than one text and left a
book on the subject unfinished at his death in 1970. The other was Bakhtin
himself, who in the 1940s and later developed his now well-known (though
controversial) model of carnival and the carnivalesque as a major test case of
vii


viii

Preface

a ‘culture of laughter’ in which particular needs and mentalities were socially
manifested. Whatever verdict might be reached on Bakhtin’s specific model,
it was his work more than anything else which established the possibility
of addressing laughter as a fruitful topic of cultural history. And in recent
decades the subject has indeed received an increasing amount of attention
from historians of many periods between antiquity and the contemporary

world. For all his irony, Amelius (or, rather, Leopardi) seems to have been
prescient.
But what might it mean to pursue the history of one of the most familiar yet elusive of human behaviours? After all, the most influential of all
approaches to laughter remains the one (itself partly of ancient ancestry)
paradigmatically linked with both Bergson and Freud. This is an approach
whose highest priority is the construction of general explanatory models (whether of ‘humour’, ‘the comic’ or some related category) to which
history, it seems, is irrelevant. Henri Bergson’s argument in Le rire (first
published in book form in 1900) allows itself to refer to the ‘essence’ and
‘laws’ of the comic; yet despite its insistence that the ‘natural environment’
of laughter is the social world, it tells us virtually nothing about historical
variations, shifts or tensions in the perception of what counts as ‘laughable’.
This absence of history, and its displacement by universalising theory, is
equally a feature of Freud’s 1905 book, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum
Unbewussten (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious). Freud, who cites
Bergson’s views with some approval, aspires to reduce jokes, and the pleasure they release in laughter, to a set of ‘universal’, ‘essential’ principles.
(Freud was always, in part, a Platonist.) Even though sexual mores and
social aggression are central to his theory, he never confronts the problem
of historical variability in the operation of such factors of human behaviour.
It would be ill-advised to deny that insight and stimulus can be found in
the sometimes subtle observations of Bergson (for whom laughter and the
comic are near-synonymous) and Freud (for whom they are not), as well as
in the psychological theorising which has followed in their wake. But there
is a price to be paid for dissociating psychology from history. And it is too
high a price where laughter is concerned.
The present book is not, even so, exactly a ‘history’ of ancient Greek
laughter. Like Leopardi’s Amelius, I think a history of laughter is something worth imagining yet (ultimately) incapable of being written. But it is
certainly vital to regard laughter as having a history and therefore as most
rewardingly to be studied within wider investigation of cultural forms and
values. Although in one respect a deeply instinctive gesture, laughter’s psychological energy and vivid physical signals generate expressive protocols

Preface

ix

and habits with complex social ramifications. As regards Greek antiquity,
my dominant aim in this book has been to explore both the idea and the
practice of laughter, including some of its intricate entanglements with religion, ethics, philosophy, politics and other domains. It needs stressing that
I have not attempted to formulate a conception of Greek ‘humour’, nor
to analyse at length Greek theories of ‘the comic’, even if my arguments
inevitably touch on such issues from time to time. Surprising though it
may seem, comic drama in its own right plays a deliberately subordinate
part in the enquiry. Even in those chapters (4, 5 and 8) where comedy does
figure prominently, I offer not so much a reading of the genre per se as a
sort of meta-reading of its relationship to broader Greek perceptions and
experiences of laughter. I try to elucidate attitudes to and uses of laughter –
as enacted behaviour, symbolic imagery and an object of reflective analysis –
across a wide spectrum of Greek culture, from Homeric epic to the writings
of Greek church fathers in the early centuries of Christianity. I am interested
in Greek representations and evaluations of laughter above all where they
impinge on the dialectic of cultural self-definition and conflict. Guided by
such basic coordinates as pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, honour
and shame, Greeks themselves often took laughter very seriously; and we
too should do so in order to enrich our understanding of their myths, their
literature and their lives. And because no one has tackled the material in
quite this way before, I have supplied extensive and detailed documentation, both primary and secondary, in the hope that it may enable others to
assess the evidence closely for themselves.
Arguments developed in this book have been presented as papers
over many years and in many places. I owe sincere thanks to hosts and
audiences in Bari, Birmingham, Boston, Cambridge, Freiburg, Glasgow,

Glenalmond, Grenoble, Harvard, Lecce, London, Manchester, Mannheim,
New York, Nottingham, Oxford, Philadelphia, Rome, St Andrews and Syracuse for their interest, encouragement and criticism. In the later stages of
the project it was a particular pleasure to share some of my ideas with
the audiences of the Gaisford lecture in Oxford, May 2005 (see Halliwell
(2005)), and the Roberts lecture at Dickinson College, September 2005: I
am grateful to Chris Pelling and Marc Mastrangelo, respectively, for organising those events. At Dickinson, I was fortunate to have as a commentator
Ralph Rosen, with whom I have enjoyed congenial exchanges on other
occasions as well. Many individuals have generously sent me copies of their
own, or sometimes others’, work: my thanks to Mario Andreassi, Simone
Beta, Bracht Branham, Christian Brockmann, Michael Clarke, Rossella
Saetta Cottone, Angela Gigliola Drago, Anna Tiziana Drago, Steven Evans,


x

Preface

Olimpia Imperio, Melissa Lane, Dina Micalella, Jeffrey Rusten, Ineke
Sluiter, Isolde Stark and Piero Totaro. The list of friends and colleagues
who have helped me in various ways (including the most important of all,
by challenging my ideas) is too long to present in full; but I would like to
single out for warm appreciation Kai Brodersen, Herb Golder, Jon Hesk,
Harry Hine, Jason K¨onig, Rosanna Lauriola, Sian Lewis, Anatoly Liberman, Nick Lowe, Giuseppe Mastromarco, Karla Pollmann, Michael Silk,
Alan Sommerstein, Onofrio Vox, Peter Woodward and Bernhard Zimmermann. I am also indebted to the erstwhile Arts and Humanities Research
Board (AHRB, now the AHRC) for facilitating my work on this project
with a Research Leave Award in 2004. I benefited greatly at the penultimate stage of writing from encouraging comments on a complete draft
from David Konstan, always a perceptive critic. Last but not least, Linda
Woodward has saved me from errors with her meticulous copy-editing, and
Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press has been a supportive editor
throughout.

Note to the reader

(1) Dates are bc unless otherwise indicated.
(2) The spelling of Greek names involves compromise, and therefore some
inconsistency, between traditional Latinisation (which I usually prefer
on grounds of familiarity) and the stricter principles of transliteration.
I have tried to avoid forms that might puzzle non-specialists.
(3) The abbreviations of ancient authors’ names and works for the most
part follow those used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary; the Index of
selected authors and works should also be consulted.
(4) All translations, from texts both ancient and modern, are my own
unless otherwise indicated.
(5) All comic fragments are cited from PCG (see under Abbreviations
below) unless stipulated otherwise, but ‘PCG’ is normally added to
fragment numbers only of minor playwrights.
(6) The names of modern scholars appearing after references to ancient
texts indicate the specific editions used; this applies especially to minor
authors or to texts which can be cited with different systems of numeration. The editions appear in the bibliography under the editors’ names.
(7) Most miscellaneous abbreviations are self-evident, but note the
following: bf = black-figure, rf = red-figure, = scholia.

xi


Abbreviations

ABV
ANRW

ARV2
CA
CAG
CEG
CPG
DGE
DK
EGF
FGrH
FHG
GELNT
IEG
IG
LfgrE

J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1956)
Aufstieg und Niedergang der r¨omischen Welt (Berlin, 1972–)
J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1963)
Collectanea Alexandrina, ed. J. U. Powell (Oxford, 1925)
Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 23 vols. in 28 (Berlin,
1882–1909)
Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, ed. P. A. Hansen, 2 vols.
(Berlin, 1983, 1989)
Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum, eds. E. L. Leutsch
and F. G. Schneidewin, 2 vols. (G¨ottingen, 1839–51)
Diccionario griego-espa˜nol, eds. F. R. Adrados and E.
Gangutia, in progress (Madrid, 1980–)
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, eds. H. Diels and W.
Kranz, 6th edn, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1952)

Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. M. Davies (G¨ottingen,
1988)
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby
(Berlin/Leiden, 1923–58)
Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, ed. C. M¨uller, 5 vols.
(Paris, 1841–70)
A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other
Early Christian Literature, eds. W. F. Arndt and F. W.
Gingrich, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1979)
Iambi et Elegi Graeci, ed. M. L. West, 2nd edn, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1989–92)
Inscriptiones Graecae (Berlin, 1873–)
Lexikon des fr¨uhgriechischen Epos, eds. B. Snell et al.
(G¨ottingen, 1955–)
xii


List of abbreviations
LIMC
LSJ
OCD3
PCG
PETF
PG
PGL
PGM
PLF
PMG
RE
SEG

SH
SIG
SSR
SVF
ThesCRA
TrGF

xiii

Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 16 vols.
(Zurich, 1981–97)
A Greek–English Lexicon, eds. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott,
9th edn (Oxford, 1940), with a revised supplement, ed.
P. G. W. Glare (Oxford, 1996)
Oxford Classical Dictionary, eds. S. Hornblower and A.
Spawforth, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1996)
Poetae Comici Graeci, eds. R. Kassel and C. Austin, 9 vols.
in 11 (Berlin, 1983–)
Poetarum Elegiacorum Testimonia et Fragmenta, eds. B.
Gentili and C. Prato, vol. i, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1988), vol. ii
(Leipzig, 1985)
Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne,
162 vols. (Paris, 1857–66)
A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Oxford,
1971)
Papyri Graecae Magicae, 2nd edn, eds. K. Preisendanz and
A. Henrichs, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1973–4)
Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, eds. E. Lobel and D. Page
(Oxford, 1955)
Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. D. L. Page (Oxford, 1962)

Paulys Realencyclop¨adie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft
(Stuttgart, 1893–1978)
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden/Amsterdam,
1923–)
Supplementum Hellenisticum, eds. H. Lloyd-Jones and P.
Parsons (Berlin, 1983)
Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. W. Dittenberger, 3rd
edn, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1915–24)
Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, ed. G. Giannantoni, 4
vols. (Naples, 1990)
Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim, 3 vols.
(Leipzig, 1903–5), with index vol., ed. M. Adler (Leipzig,
1924)
Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum, 5 vols. (Los
Angeles, 2004–5)
Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, eds. B. Snell et al., 5 vols.
in 6 (G¨ottingen, 1971–2004)



chap t e r 1

Introduction: Greek laughter in theory
and practice

Laughter . . . is a reflex that characterises man alone and has its own
history . . . We do not laugh now as people once laughed . . . a
definition [of the comic and of laughter] can be only historical.
Vladimir Propp

Men have been wise in many different modes, but they have always
laughed the same way.
Samuel Johnson1

nature and culture, bod ies and minds
When ancient Greeks laughed, did they take themselves to be yielding to
an instinct rooted in their animal bodies or displaying a characteristic they
shared with their gods? Might they have imagined, for that matter, that
they were doing both those things at the same time?
In broaching such large, scene-setting questions, it is hard to avoid taking
initial orientation from Aristotle’s famous obiter dictum in the Parts of
Animals that humans are the only living things capable of laughter. This
proposition – sometimes replaced in antiquity, and even conflated (as it
occasionally still is), with the logically distinct idea of laughter as part of
the essence of humans – addresses an issue which has continued to provoke
debate right up to the contemporary study of animal behaviour.2 It would be
1

2

First epigraph: Propp (1984) 127 (first published in Russian, 1939). Propp and Bakhtin (ch. 4, 204–6)
were exact contemporaries: I am grateful to Anatoly Liberman for checking Propp’s posthumously
published book on laughter (see Liberman’s introduction in Propp (1984) xvii) and confirming that
it cites Bakhtin for the idea of unrestrained, ‘Rabelaisian’ laughter; I am not aware of references to
Propp in Bakhtin’s work. Second epigraph: Johnson, Life of Cowley, in Brady and Wimsatt (1977)
365; quoted slightly inaccurately in Halliwell (1991a) 279.
For Aristotle’s claim (Part. An. 3.10, 673a8) and its later history, see ch. 6, 315–16. Critchley (2002)
25, paraphrasing the tradition, slides from laughter as ‘proper to’ humans (i.e., in Aristotelian terms,
an exclusive capacity of theirs) to laughter as ‘essentially human’. Aristotle never asserts the latter,
though he does regard laughter as belonging to a fully human life: ch. 6, 307–31.

1


2

Introduction

unreasonable to expect Aristotle, for all his wide-ranging biological interests,
to have anticipated the findings of the modern science of ethology, which
claims to identify among other primates (and possibly elsewhere too) forms
of behaviour that are physically and even socially analogous to laughter (and
smiling) and that can help shed light on the evolution of these types of body
language among humans.3 But it is nevertheless surprising that Aristotle
did not qualify his predication of human uniqueness in this respect. At
a simple level of what might be called ‘folk ethology’, others in antiquity
certainly reached divergent conclusions. It is true that the only direct denial
of the Aristotelian tenet is found in the Christian Lactantius, writing in
Latin in the early fourth century ad. But Lactantius’ assertion that laughter
can be observed not only in the appearance of the ears, mouths and eyes
of certain animals (he is presumably thinking, in part at least, of dogs) but
also in their capacity to play both with humans and among themselves, can
hardly have been original with him.4 In fact, even during Aristotle’s own
lifetime Xenophon, an aficionado of hunting with dogs (a favourite activity
of many wealthy Greeks), has no difficulty in detecting ‘smiles’ on the faces
of eager hounds. Nor does he feel any need to elaborate the point, which
must therefore have been readily intelligible to his readership, even though
it is only many centuries later, in the ornate didactic poetry of Oppian,
that dogs are again depicted in such terms.5 Aelian can similarly adduce the
smiles of oxen in a way which suggests an uncontroversial perception that

would probably have been familiar to farmers and others.6 For the purposes
of imaginative assimilation rather than literal description, it was easy to
picture certain kinds of animal behaviour as redolent of laughter. The
Philocleon of Aristophanes’ Wasps, for instance, when prancing around
scoffing drunkenly at his fellow-symposiasts, is compared to a frisky little
ass. The accused in a fourth-century Athenian court case (to be considered
3

4
5

6

For modern ethological literature, and some traces of ‘folk ethology’ in antiquity, see Appendix 1.
The Aristotelian commentator David (c. ad 600), In Isag. 204.14–16, wrongly claims that Aristotle
called the heron capable of laughter in Hist. An.
Lactantius, Div. Inst. 3.10.2, arguing that the only uniquely human property is knowledge of god;
but he assumes the familiarity of ‘only humans laugh’.
Xen. Cyn. 4.3, where the (rare) verb –mmeidiŽn reinforces the adj. jaidr»v, ‘bright’, at 4.2 (cf. n. 33
below); the whole context, 4.2–4, posits expressive body language in animals (as does Ael. NA 5.25;
cf. next note). See ibid. 5.4 for the kindred idea of animal play (hares frolicking in a full moon); cf.
the ‘bright’ (galhn”v) face ascribed to fawning dogs at ps.-Arist. Physiog. 6.811b37–8, with Clarke
(2005a) 43–4 for affinities with smiling. Oppian, Cyn. 1.507, 523, 4.363 uses kagcal†w (ch. 2 n. 15)
of the laughter-like excitement of hunting dogs; cf. the same verb of deer at Cyn. 2.237 (with 246 for
a smile-like look). Oppian, Hal. 2.626 (different author?) has jackals ‘laughing’ over dead stags.
Ael. NA 6.10. Aelian’s ascription of scorn (katagelan) to the hare watching its pursuers, ibid. 13.14.32,
is not directly facial but reads a mental state into body posture; cf. n. 91 below on owls.


Nature and culture, bodies and minds

3

in more detail later) is alleged to have displayed exultant derision for his
battered enemy by performing a crowing cock song-and-dance around him.
The epigrammatist Meleager makes a disturbed lover hear (with intense
vexation) the early cock-crow itself as the bird’s voicing of pleasurable
laughter. And at least some people thought they heard laughter-like sounds
in the neighing of horses.7 To such images can be added the suggestive
vignettes of Aesopic fables, in which laughter or smiles are commonly
ascribed to animals. Does this convention of the genre depend only on
anthropomorphising fantasy, or might it obliquely reflect habits of thinking
which were more diffusely present in dealings with animals? Patchy though
the overall evidence may be, not everyone was as confident as Aristotle
of excluding laughter from the expressive repertoire of species other than
humans.8
When we turn from animals to the other end of the spectrum, the
situation is rather clearer. Aristotle himself, it is worth noting, held a larger
world-view in which there was no room for belief in laughter as a trait of the
divine.9 For him, therefore, laughter was one of the things which helped
define a peculiarly human position in the world, suspended between the
domains of animals and gods. But most Greeks thought otherwise. The
anthropomorphic traditions of Greek religion left no doubt that laughter
(and smiles) had an important place in the divine realm; a deity incapable of
laughter was the exception, not the rule.10 The remarkable Homeric images,
7

8

9

10

Philocleon: Wasps 1305–6; cf. n. 91 below, with ch. 4, 209–10, and the ‘laughing’ ass in the next
note (Ar. Wasps 179 has the opposite, a comically ‘weeping’ donkey). Conon’s cock-crowing dance:
34–5 below. Meleager: Anth. Pal. 12.137.4 (cf. n. 89 below). Horses: Eutecnius, Para. Opp. 12.28
T¨uselmann (unknown date) describes a horse’s neigh as ‘like a laugh of shared pleasure in its rider’
(o³a dŸ prosgelän –ke©nwƒ kaª sunhd»menov); cf. Appendix 1 n. 24. Surprisingly, no ancient text
ascribes laughter as such to monkeys/apes, despite their supposedly intrinsic risibility (ch. 6 n. 94;
cf. 31, 41 below on Semonides’ monkey woman), though Galen, Usu part. 1.22 (3.80 K¨uhn) pictures
one as a playmate of children; in the Renaissance, by contrast, Erasmus ascribes laughter to dogs
and monkeys: Screech (1997) 3. McDermott (1938) 181 (no. 123), 240–1 (no. 337), detects smiling
apes in visual artefacts; cf. 180 (no. 119), 211 (no. 288). But a simian’s curving mouth is no guarantee
of a smile: see e.g. Robinson (1931) pl. 59.420a (with 99, no. 420).
Laughter/smiles in animal fables: e.g. Aesop 39, 150, 226, 232 Perry, Babrius 94.6, 106.29, 107.9,
140.7; cf. the anthropomorphic laughter of donkey and ostrich in Job 39.8, 17. Akin to fable is
occasional depiction of animal laughter in art: see Lissarrague (2000) 110 for a terracotta mirthful
ass. On the other hand, Lucian’s mockery of Peripatetic belief in the human uniqueness of laughter,
Vit. Auctio 26, depends satirically on the redundancy of pointing out that an ass cannot laugh; cf.
his play on this (and the equivalence of laughter and neighing/braying: n. 7 above) at Asin. 15. For
a tangential link between laughter and camels, see Appendix 1 n. 14.
Aristotle frames the divine in terms of contemplative blessedness, not practical activity (a conception
of the gods he finds ‘ridiculous’): EN 10.8, 1178b8–22.
The goddess Adrasteia/Nemesis is skuthr¯opos, ‘grim-faced’, in Men. fr. 226, therefore without
smiles/laughter (cf. n. 101 below): this symbolises implacable vengefulness; but Lucian, Apol. 6


4

Introduction

in both the Iliad and Odyssey, of collectively ‘unquenchable’ or irrepressible
laughter among the Olympians – laughter, what’s more, directed by gods
against other gods – are the most concentrated testimony to the character
of those traditions. But they were far from unique. In addition to other
passages in the Homeric poems themselves, depictions of divine laughter
appear in numerous texts and in all periods of Greek literature; they will
figure frequently in subsequent chapters of this book. Nor is the idea of the
laughter of gods exclusively ‘literary’. As Chapter 4 will explain in detail, it
informs a great deal of practical Greek religion, helping to explain the ethos
of many of its festivals and rituals, not least those in honour of Demeter
and Dionysus, deities both thought of as capable of laughter in rather
distinctive ways. The very concept of religious festivity (—ort†zein, the
enactment of heortai) is closely entwined in Greek thought with notions of
‘play’, celebration and laughter; and it makes no sense to worship the gods
in this way unless they themselves can somehow appreciate and share the
spirit of laughter, as Homer and others had shown them doing. The grip of
this religious mentality in the archaic and classical periods induced Plato,
in a gesture of radical theological revisionism (and bodily puritanism), to
argue the need specifically to repudiate belief in gods who were ‘lovers of
laughter’ (philogel¯otes) and who could be ‘overcome’ by it.11 Some of Plato’s
later followers in turn resorted to allegorical readings of Homer to resolve
what they saw as the problem. Yet the tenacity of the older model of the
divine within Greek culture was such that Choricius of Gaza, a rhetorician
working in the sixth century ad against a mixed background of pagan and
Christian values, felt able to claim that laughter, alongside rationality (logos),
was actually one of two features which humans shared with the divine and
which separated them from ‘irrational nature’, i.e. from other animals.12
So Choricius, as it happens, half agrees and half disagrees with Aristotle.
The uncertain, problematic relationships between human laughter and
the behaviour of animals and gods supply useful preliminary illustrations

of the kind of issues which must be faced in an attempt to construct a
historically nuanced perspective on the status of laughter (and the distinct
but closely kindred phenomenon of smiling) in ancient Greek culture. But
they also provide an initial indication of how we can obtain a firmer handle
on the elusiveness of laughter by situating it within larger frameworks

11
12

allows her vindictive derision (katagelan). Other instances of non-laughing deities, such as Hom.
Od. 8.344 (ch. 2, 82–3), are exceptional.
Rep. 3.388e–389a.
Choric. Apol. Mim. 93–4 (Foerster), with Reich (1903) 204–30 on the work as a whole. A modern
attempt to connect laughter and rationality can be found in Scruton (1983) 153–65.


Nature and culture, bodies and minds

5

of cultural meaning, value and symbolism. This entails accepting that
laughter, though an evolved means of somatic expression with well
entrenched, if complex, underpinnings in the brain, has its own history.13
It is subject, in both its physical coding and its psychological implications,
to the social, ethical, religious and other pressures of particular times and
places. What makes laughter, and the patterns of body language in which
it shapes itself, exceptionally challenging but also rewarding to study is its
double-sided character. It exists at the interface, so to speak, between body
and mind, between instinct and intention. Though by definition inarticulate (i.e. non-linguistic), it is nonetheless a means of communication (i.e.
often paralinguistic) and can be far-reaching in the attitudes and values it

embodies. Though often resistant to cognitive understanding, it is woven
into ordinary life in ways which entangle it with such fundamental concerns as sex, religion, ethnicity, politics, food and drink. Though typically
fugacious in its vocal and facial manifestations, it can function as a highly
charged medium of personal and social relationships. Though sometimes
involuntary, it can be either encouraged or inhibited not just according to
individual inclination but under the influence of education, mores and ideology. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has maintained, while part of a
‘universal language of bodily interruptions’ laughter nonetheless becomes
subject to varying cultural thresholds of tolerance.14 And all this means that
we can look for its historical traces and cultural significance even where its
immediate sounds and appearances have vanished.
This book will attempt to demonstrate, then, that it is possible and
worthwhile to write parts of the cultural history of ancient Greek laughter, gel¯os, including its negative counterparts, agelastic and antigelastic
conduct.15 To do so involves charting the place of laughter within habits of
13

14

15

Neurological research shows various brain pathways are involved in physical laughter per se and
in its expressive accompaniment to cognitive/affective states; hence the possibility that the act and
the states can come apart (cf. ch. 2, 93–6, for a Homeric case in point). Damasio (2004) 74–9,
307–8, Ramachandran (1998b) 199–211 offer brief accounts; more technical discussion in Arroyo et
al. (1993), McCullagh et al. (1999), Wild et al. (2003). For the idea of laughter’s ‘history’, see my
Preface; cf. Pfister (2002a) v–ix.
Douglas (1975) 86–8. The (in)voluntariness of laughter is a sliding scale, not an either/or distinction:
cf. Ruch and Ekman (2001) 427–8; Winn (2001) 424 garbles the point. At one extreme stand pathological seizures vel sim.: Provine (2000) 165–71; cf. ch. 2 n. 105. Less extreme are barely controllable
outbursts (cf. ch. 6 n. 138, with 8–10 below). At the opposite end lies conscious manipulation, e.g.
‘forced’ or sarcastic laughter. In between are many gradations. Smiling, except as pathological rictus,
is usually more under (semi-conscious) control than laughter: see Provine (2000) 49–53; Kris (1964)

226–9 reads smiling psychoanalytically as a controlled (and potentially deceptive) substitute for
laughter.
In addition to employing ‘gelastic’ as a general adj. for laughter-related/arousing behaviour, I use
‘agelastic’ (with the noun ‘agelast’: see nn. 100–2 below) to denote ‘non-laughing’, ‘avoiding laughter’,


6

Introduction

behaviour, forms of life, and systems of value. The enterprise is made more
feasible by the fact that laughter happens to be a subject on which such
eloquent and reflective types of ancient discourse as poetry, philosophy and
rhetoric have important things to say and to show. It is an object of representation and evaluative scrutiny in a perhaps surprisingly large range of Greek
texts, from Homer to late antiquity.16 Laughter mattered to Greek minds
and lives in multiple respects – stretching, as we have already glimpsed in
rudimentary outline, from their views of the body to their conceptions of
the divine. It is remarkable, for instance, that virtually every major school
of Greek philosophy, and many of its individually most notable practitioners, took up an explicit stance towards the uses (and/or abuses) of laughter,
something that could hardly be claimed about most modern philosophy
and philosophers. Why this is so should be left to emerge gradually and
cumulatively, not least in Chapters 6–7. But one can anticipate to the
extent of saying that laughter seems to have a set of intricate connections
with the broader schemes of value – of friendship and enmity, honour and
shame, pleasure and self-discipline, freedom and servility – that structure
the dominant modes of expression, as well as the underlying tensions, of
Greek culture. Whether, when, at whom/what, and how to laugh (if at all)
constitutes a cluster of questions whose repercussions spread out into many
vital regions of Greek thought and action.
To clarify how I propose to bring such questions to bear on the representation of laughter in ancient texts, I should at once add two notes of

caution, one of which will impose limitations on, while the other enlarges,
the scope of the enquiry. The chief limitation is that this book is not centrally
about ancient views or senses of ‘humour’, nor about ancient theories of
‘the comic’. No hermetically sealed definition of humour is possible, especially in view of the historical evolution of the term and the difficulty of
establishing a consistent lexicon of humour across languages, both ancient
and modern. A relatively neutral approach to the subject might demarcate
humour as above all the sphere of behaviour which aims self-consciously at
arousing amusement in others ‘for its own sake’, which is not to deny that
humour can also be used for further purposes such as persuasion, ingratiation, deception or the exercise of power. But much argument over the

16

and ‘antigelastic’ to characterise a stronger, principled antipathy. (There is no Greek precedent for
this last usage; in its only occurrence, ˆntigelŽn means ‘laugh back in retaliation’: ch. 10 n. 16.)
Note also the adj. misogel¯os, laughter-hating, Alex. Aet. fr. 7.2 CA, Vita Eur. 5 (ch. 6 n. 16).
My enquiry extends, selectively, down to the fourth century ad, with occasional glimpses beyond. For
continuing/evolving traditions of laughter in medieval Byzantium, see the stimulating perspective
of Magdalino (2007).


Nature and culture, bodies and minds

7

definition of humour in any case moves beyond the level of the descriptive to that of a normative understanding of preferred/prohibited means,
(un)acceptable objects, and (in)appropriate contexts for the creation of
amusement. If humour, on any standard account, typically includes joketelling, banter, many forms of play-acting and playfulness, as well as the
basic materials of comic performances (from, say, solo mimicry to fully
staged comic drama), this book will certainly mention numerous ancient
situations to which such categories of behaviour are relevant. My aim in

doing so, however, will not be to pursue the concept of ‘humour’ per se, but
to tackle the wider psychological, ethical and cultural concerns which such
behaviour generates within ancient frameworks of perception. Even comedy itself, and the concomitant theorising of ‘the comic’ (or ‘the laughable’)
in antiquity, does not lie at the centre of my interests. When I do discuss
comic drama directly (particularly in Chapters 4, 5 and 8), my focus will
be fixed on what it can help us discern about larger ancient evaluations of
laughter as a set of social behaviours.17
If what has just been said underlines that the phenomena of laughter include much more than the phenomena of humour, it is equally
important to stress that my investigation will not be narrowly confined
to actual occurrences of physical laughter, or even to the physically distinct but behaviourally cognate phenomenon of smiling.18 I shall also be
persistently interested in metaphorical and metonymic laughter, a category
which embraces all the ways in which gelastic vocabulary and symbolism
can be drawn on to convey ethical and social judgements or to characterise
states of mind. Whereas much ‘humour’ is incorporated in specific kinds
of practice or marked language games (jokes, banter, anecdotes, mimicry,
play-acting and so forth), metonymic laughter is a much more fluid factor in social behaviour. One immediate illustration of this is the notion
of implicit or ‘concealed’ laughter as an index of superiority, contempt, or
deception. Someone can be thought of as ‘laughing at’ another even when
not manifesting any of the bodily signs of laughter. In special instances,
17

18

Turk (1995), esp. 309–12, touches on the difference between the humorous/comic and a diffuse
‘culture of laughter’ (German Lachkultur), the latter a Bakhtinian notion; cf. Bausinger (1992). As
early as 1725–6 Hutcheson distinguished between laughter and ridicule: Hutcheson (1997) 230 (with
235 for historical shifts in ‘what is counted ridiculous’). A pithy case for taking a definition of humour
to be impossible (because of the intrinsic uncertainty of ‘when and where we might laugh’) is made
by Cohen (2001) 380. Cf. Liberman (1995): an interesting set of data, but insufficient to support his
larger historical claims. On the Greek side, Rapp (1947–8) is mostly flimsy. Plebe (1956) attempts a

broad correlation of Greek laughter in life and comedy.
On the relationship between laughter and smiles, see Appendix 1. For economy of expression, I
sometimes allow ‘laughter’ to cover laughter and/or smiling; but the distinction is always explicit
where it matters.


8

Introduction

laughter can be entirely ‘in the mind’, thus invisible on the face. A wonderfully emblematic case in point is the ‘sardonic’ smile of Odysseus, within
the cunning secrecy of his thumos (his motivational ‘heart’), in Book 20
of the Odyssey.19 Metaphorical laughter can be a potent vector in various
kinds of social interaction.
In both its literal and metaphorical forms, laughter can serve as an expression of individual and cultural mentalities. The material addressed in this
book cuts across the fields of education, politics, law, religion, war, philosophy, sex, sport, drinking and more besides. It turns out, accordingly,
that to ask questions about the causes, uses and consequences of laughter
is always to engage with issues ‘bigger’ than laughter’s strictly physiological
dimensions. That is not to say, however, that the somatic basis of laughter
is not significant in its own right. The fact that people laugh (to varying
degrees) ‘with’ their bodies – in the tautening of facial muscles, the staccato rhythms of breathing-cum-vocalisation (ca ca ca being the Greek
equivalent of ‘ha ha ha’), and often in accompanying gestures of physical
excitation (e.g. clapping)20 – is a prominent consideration in many of the
themes I shall be exploring in the following chapters, from the depiction of
the violently derisive suitors of the Odyssey to early Christianity’s imprinting
of laughter with the sinfulness of corporeal (even diabolical) disorder and
dissolution.
The strongest laughter, in fact, is a physically arresting occurrence. It
possesses a convulsiveness which takes over the person and defies restraint;
its force can be so intense that one may even die of it – literally, as well as

metaphorically.21 The physiology of laughter undoubtedly received some
19
20

21

20.301–2: see ch. 2, 93. Hidden laughter is recognised from a modern theoretical perspective by
Zijderveld (1996) 42. On ‘sardonic’, see n. 21 below.
ca ca ca: PGM xiii.162, 473 (P. Leiden J395: n. 32 below); cf. Arnould (1990) 144. Eur. Cyc. 157
is not, pace Eirez Lopez (2000) 16, a formal vocalisation of laughter, though an actor could easily
have added one; Ar. Peace 1066 is a stylised annotation; Hdas. 3.93 is probably somewhat different
(Headlam (1922) 160–1). Laughter accompanied by clapping: e.g. Ion Chi. FGrH 392 f6 (ch. 3,
108–9), the Tarentines’ glee over an obscene insult at Dion Hal. Ant. Rom. 19.5.3, and Athanasius’
image of sympotic mirth at Ctr. Ar. 1.4 (26.20 PG); cf. Pan at Hom. Hymn 19.37.
Literal death by laughter is claimed for the painter Zeuxis (amused by his own depiction of an old
woman) in the Roman grammarian Festus (from Verrius Flaccus) s.v. Pictor, Reinach (1921) 192, no.
211; for Rembrandt’s possible reflection of this story in the late Cologne ‘self-portrait’, see Blankert
(1973), Blankert (1997) 34–40, with Schwartz (1985) 354–7 for good ills.; cf. ch. 7 n. 23 for a different
identification. Other reputed victims: the comic poet Philemon (test. 1, 5 PCG, with ch. 9 n. 24),
a legend echoed in Rabelais Gargantua i.20 (cf. Bakhtin (1968) 408–9); the mime-writer Philistion
(Suda s.v. Filist©wn); the philosopher Chrysippus (ch. 6 n. 103). Baudelaire (1976) 155 recalls the
latter (the editor’s note, 1348, is confused). Cf. Joubert (1980) 61–2, 131–3 for Renaissance thoughts
on the subject, Karle (1932/3) 876 for comparative material, and Provine (2000) 182–4 for modern
cases. Different is ‘laughter’ as reflex of (fatal) chest wounds: ch. 6 n. 140. So too is dying with
a ‘sardonic’ grimace (cf. ch. 2 n. 100) after eating poisonous herbs, e.g. Dio Chrys. 32.99, Paus.


Nature and culture, bodies and minds

9

close attention in the ancient world. The evidence for such enquiries is at
least as old as the Problemata produced in Aristotle’s Lyceum.22 But as it
happens the most elaborate remarks on the subject in the Greek tradition
are preponderantly from late antiquity, and some of the most notable are
formulated by those Christian writers whose antigelastic moral agenda
will form the subject of my final chapter. In a passage of impressively
scandalised fervour in one of his homilies on Ecclesiastes, Gregory of Nyssa
rails against the ‘madness’ (paranoia) of laughter, which he says is ‘neither
a form of reason nor an act with any purpose’, and which he proceeds
to describe in a tour de force of distaste as involving ‘an unseemly bodily
loosening, agitated breathing, a shaking of the whole body, dilation of the
cheeks, baring of teeth, gums and palate, stretching of the neck, and an
abnormal breaking up of the voice as it is cut into by the fragmentation
of the breath’.23 Close (not to say fixated) observations such as these could
coexist with more fanciful convictions about physiological mechanisms (in
the intestines, chest and blood) underlying laughter. But there is a recurrent
moralising emphasis on ideas of bodily loosening, opening and excitation.24

22
23

24

10.17.13, anon. Anth. Pal. 7.621, or the related notion of dying ‘laughing’ from a poisonous spider’s
bite at Strabo 11.4.6; Timaeus FGrH 566 f64 traces sardonic laughter to a different context of death
(human sacrifice to Cronus on Sardinia). Metaphorically ‘dying from laughter’: Hom. Od. 18.100
(ch. 2 n. 94), Ar. Clouds 1436, Pl. Euthd. 303b (ch. 6, 290), Plut. Mor. 54d, Lucian, Iup. Trag. 31 (ch.
9, 429); cf. Aretaeus, De causis 1.7.8. Ar. Frogs 1089 is different (ch. 2 n. 5).
Ps.-Arist. Probl. 11.13, 900a24, 11.15, 900b7–14; cf. ch. 6 n. 143. Cic. De Or. 2.235, with irony (ch. 7

n. 25), suggests that no progress had been made understanding laughter’s physiology.
Greg. Nys. Hom. in Eccl. 2 (44.645 PG): di†cusiv d• sÛmatov ˆprepŸv kaª pneÅmatov kl»nov kaª
brasm¼v Âlou toÓ sÛmatov kaª diastolŸ pareiän kaª gÅmnwsiv ½d»ntwn te kaª oÎlwn kaª
Ëperۃav aÉc”nov te lugism¼v kaª jwn¦v par†logov qrÅyiv sunepikoptom”nhv t¦„ kl†sei toÓ
pneÅmatov. (The first phrase is printed as di†lusiv d• st»matov, ‘opening of the mouth’, in PG; but
see text and apparatus in McDonough and Alexander (1962) 310.) For brasm»v (shaking/‘boiling’),
cf. ch. 10 n. 104. See next note for another passage from Gregory, with Baconsky (1996) 181–4 on
both texts. Laughter later became a distinctive interest of Renaissance physiology/medicine: e.g.
Joubert (1980) 47–62. For a summary of respiratory and other components of laughter, see Ruch
and Ekman (2001) 432–3, 439–40.
Simplic. In Epict. Ench. 41 (Hadot), calling laughter an ‘overflow’ (Ëper”kcusiv) of exhilaration,
mentions ‘swollen’ breathing and quasi-bubbling vocalisation. Heightened breathing is implied in
laughing nei»qen, i.e. from deep inside the chest (a ‘belly laugh’), at Lucian, Peregr. 7 (ch. 9, 464),
and ‘holding back’ laughter in the chest, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.1723 (ch. 6 n. 138); cf. laughter in/from
the ‘heart’, ch. 2 n. 34. Other physiological references to laughter: Basil, Reg. fus. 17 (guffawing and
over-excitation: 31.961 PG, with ch. 10, 514–15); Greg. Naz. Carm. 37.886.2–3 PG (‘loosening’ of
the face), 37.953.11 PG (shaking cheeks, increased heartbeat); Greg. Nys. Hom. opif. 12 (44.160 PG;
opening of bodily channels; agitation of intestines, esp. the liver); and the very late (seventh century
ad?) Meletius med. Nat. hom. 44 Cramer (from intestines to face). Further Christian evidence in
ch. 10 n. 104. For physiognomy’s attention to laughter/smiles (nothing in the oldest text, ps.-Arist.
Physiogn.), see ps.-Polemon, Physiogn. 19 Foerster (ËpogelŽn of a shifty look in the eyes; cf. ch. 6
n. 107), 20 (laughing eyes associated with deception/malice; smiling, watery eyes indicate justice,
gentleness etc.), and the adaptation of Polemon in Adamantius, Physiogn. 1.4 (playful laughter-lovers,
philogel¯otes), 1.17 (distinguishing laughter in the eyes and on the whole face; cf. 1.20); for laughter