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 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 19 38 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 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 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 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 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 Greek laughter and the problem of the absurd Existential absurdity: predicaments ancient and modern Laughing Democritus (and weeping Heraclitus) What made Cynics laugh? The intermittencies of laughter in Menander’s social world The confusions of laughter and tears Menandrian perspectivism Laughter blocked and released 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 The Greek (body) language of laughter and smiles Appendix 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 ... 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... notions of laughter as an antidote to both psychological and even physical ailments may have exercised a wide appeal at the level of ancient ‘folk psychology? ?? An association of laughter with health... 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