Aristophanes against the vices or failings of his countrymen. He
claimed the privileges of Comedy, as the Fool did those of his cap and
bells. This he does, especially in ‘The Acharnians,’ when Dicæopolis,
looking straight at the audience, says, “Think nothing the worse of me,
Athenian gentlemen, if, although I am a beggar, I hazard touching on
your affairs of state, in comic verse; for even comedy knows what is
proper, and, if you find me sharp, you shall also find me just.” Still
nearer did the poet come to the license of the jester, when, in ‘The
Knights,’ he himself turns actor as well as author, and so dressed,
looked, and mimicked, without once employing the name of, the great
demagogue whom he was satirizing, that every spectator recognized the
well-known Cleon. The same author’s attack on the litigious spirit
of the Athenians, in his ‘Wasps,’ is another instance of what I am
attempting to illustrate. This is more particularly the case when he
makes his characters address themselves immediately to the audience,
as may be supposed to occur in the Parabasis of the last-named piece.
Here the satirist bids the audience to provide themselves with clearer
understandings, if they would enjoy the poets thoroughly. “Henceforth,
good gentlemen,” are his words, “have more love and regard for such of
your poets as treat you to something original. Preserve their sayings,
and keep them in your chests with your apples. If you do this, there
will be a scent of cleverness from your clothes, that shall last you
through a whole year.” In his ‘Peace,’ the finest touch of satire
is not in what is said, but in what is left unsaid; for the goddess
whose name gives a title to the piece, never once opens her mouth. The
licensed jester appears as broadly in the author’s dealings with the
gods, whose place in Heaven is represented as occupied by the Demon
of War, who is engaged in braying the Greek States in a stupendous
mortar. The daring of the author, as exercised in pelting the gods
themselves with jokes, is still more flagrant in ‘The Birds,’ where
he burlesques the national mythology, in presence of a people whose
jealous fury was just then aroused by suspicion of a conspiracy
existing against the national religion. That the audience should
have tolerated the audacity of their favourite jester, is a proof of
the power he held over them. Nevertheless, they were probably more
delighted with his personalities, and they recognized with shouts of
laughter the brace of gallant military gentlemen thus described by
one of the women in the ‘Lysistrata’:--“By Jove, I saw a man with
long hair, a commander of cavalry, on horseback, who was pouring
into his brazen helmet a lot of pease-soup, which he had just bought
from an old woman. I saw also a Thracian, with shield and javelin,
like Tereus. He went up to the woman who sold figs, and, frightening
her away with his arms, took up her ripe figs and began swallowing
them.” The national satirist is seen again in the recommendation put
in the mouth of the male chorus in the same play, and which is to
this effect:--“If the Athenians would only follow my advice, their
ambassadors should never go upon their missions, except when drunk.
Sobriety and Common Sense do not go together with us. If, for instance,
we send sober legates to Sparta, they only watch for opportunity to
create mischief. If the Spartans speak, we do not heed them; if they
are silent, we wrongly suspect them. Let our envoys get drunk, and
agree in what they hear, and in the reports they send home.” Nor does
Aristophanes spare the women more than the men. How archly, no doubt,
did Mnesilochus look at the audience, when he ungallantly remarked, in
‘The Thesmophoriazusæ,’--“Among all the ladies of the present day, you
would seek in vain to find a Penelope. They are Phædras, every one of
them.” It is not to be supposed that the comic poet ever offended by
his trenchant jests, although a passage delivered by the chorus, in
‘The Ecclesiazusæ’ (that exquisite satire against the ideal republics
of philosophers, with impracticable laws), would seem, perhaps, to
imply something of the sort. Turning to the audience, the Chorus
remarks, “I am going to make a little suggestion to you. I wish the
clever among you to be on my side; for remember how clever I am myself.
They who laugh merrily will prefer me, I know, because of my own
mirthful jesting.” This suggestion sounds as if the dunces and dullards
had been sneering at the satirist for his smartness and sprightliness.
Even if so, he continued to laugh at gods and men. At both, as in
‘Plutus,’ where he ridicules the deities for their many names, by which
they hoped to catch a gift under one appellation, which they lost
under another; and where he illustrates the irreligiousness of men, by
remarking that nowadays they never enter a temple, except for a purpose
which, it will be recollected, was religiously avoided by the Essenes
on the Sabbath. The last illustration is made in the very spirit and
letter which marked the “Fools” of the fifteenth century. _They_
pleaded for such jokes the immunities of their office, and Aristophanes
does something very like this when he makes Xanthias exclaim, in ‘The
Frogs,’ “Oh, they are always carrying baggage in comedy!”
Flögel has been too anxious to increase his list of Fools, by including
among them the _planus_, or impostor. He takes for a joker, the cheat
denounced by Horace in the 17th of the First Book of his Epistles.
That cheat is simply a street vagabond, who deceives the humane by
pretending to have broken his leg, and who laughs at them when they
have passed on, after giving him relief. Even this sorry joke he cannot
often repeat. Then we have, from Athenæus, other comical fellows cited,
whose funny things won the admiration of Greece and Rome, the people
of which countries must have been easily pleased. Among these are the
Alexandrian Matreas, who wrote chapters of a ‘Comic Natural History,’
wherein he discussed such questions as, “Why, when the sun sets at sea,
does he not set off swimming?” “Why do the swans never get drunk with
what they imbibe?” Then we hear of a Cephisodorus,--neither the tragic
poet nor the historian,--whose stock joke consisted in his running
breathless, either from or towards the city honoured by his residence,
and with an air of frantic terror, informing all whom he passed or
encountered, of some awful calamity. It is hardly possible to imagine
that people laughed more than once, _if_ once, at a sorry fool like
this. Not much more risible was that Pantaleon, who was wont to address
strangers in the street in tirades of bombastic nonsense, utterly
meaningless and incomprehensible. The joke was for the standers-by,
who knew Pantaleon, and enjoyed the astounded look of those whom he
addressed. According to Athenæus, the last comicality of Pantaleon
was in imposing on his two sons, whom he called separately to his
side, when dying, and confidentially told each where he would find a
hidden treasure. When they had looked for this in vain, they probably
understood why their respectable sire had died laughing. Many of this
class of fools can only be considered as “hoaxers.” Such was another
Cephisodorus, who disgraced his dignified name by very undignified
tricks,--as when he hired a host of hardy day-labourers, and gave them
rendezvous in such a narrow street that, when all were assembled,
it was impossible to move either backward or forward. The “Berners
Street Hoax,” by Theodore Hook, was entirely after the fashion of
Cephisodorus, and was not the more excusable on that account.
Forcatulus, a learned writer on law, accepts as true a story, very
like one to be found in Rabelais, and which Flögel quotes from another
accomplished jurist, Accursius. It is a story in which ignorance is
made to pass for wisdom, and is therefore, although common, yet not
quite so excellent a joke as it would pretend to be; and is to this
effect:--
The Romans sent an ambassador to Greece, in order to procure a copy of
the Laws of the twelve Tables. The Greeks would make no such costly
gift till they were satisfied that the petitioners had men amongst
them who could comprehend the wisdom of the Laws. They despatched an
envoy to look into the matter; and when the Romans heard of him and
his purpose, they resolved to defeat him by means of a fool. They
clothed the latter in purple, surrounded him with a guard of honour,
and dismissed him to encounter the accomplished ambassador from Greece,
with one single point of instruction,--he was on no account to open his
mouth.
The Athenian commissioner, seeing the representative of Roman wisdom
standing before him, grave and speechless, observed, with a smile, “I
understand. The gentleman is a Pythagorean, and carries on an argument
only by signs. With all my heart!” And, thereupon he raised a single
finger, to imply that there was only one principle of nature in the
universe.
The simpleton sent by Rome, not dreaming that this was the opening
of a philosophical argument, but looking upon it rather as a menace,
extended two fingers and a thumb towards the Greek, as if about to take
him by the nose.
“Good! very good!” murmured the Athenian. “He shows me the Pythagorean
Trias,--the triple God in one. I must intimate that I understand
him;”--and the philosophical envoy approached the stolid Roman, with
the flat of his hand extended towards him. He intended thereby to
imply that the divine Trias was the upholder of all things. The Roman,
however, thinking it an approximation to a box on the ear, drew back a
step, lifted his doubled fist, and awaited the coming of the Greek.
The face of the latter was covered by a radiant smile. He could only
exclaim, “Perfect! charming! divine! The silent sage tells me that the
divine supporter of all things is in himself All-mighty. Admirably
done! a nation with such sages _must_ be worthy of laws enacted by the
leaders of civilization.”
Now if this story be, as Forcatulus will have it, historically true, I
must add that it has been improved in the hands of the story-tellers.
These, of course, have made it a Christian disputation, in which the
hired fool has but one eye. The real metaphysician reads in the signs
of the simpleton the whole Christian revelation, but the story is
improved by the fool’s own description of the matter. “When I saw him
raise one finger, I thought he mocked me, as having but one eye; and
I held out two fingers, meaning that my single eye was as good as his
two. But when he, therefore, held out three fingers, signifying that
there were only three eyes between us, I doubled my fist, to knock him
down for his insolence.”
Among the old class of jesters some writers rank the _Aretalogi_, who
appear to have been improvisers of merry or wonderful stories for the
amusement of a company, by whom they were invited, or hired. Juvenal
says that when Ulysses, at the table of Alcinous, described the person
and deeds of the cannibal Polyphemus, some of the guests turned pale,
while the narrator, to others seemed only a jester:
“Risum fortasse quibusdam
Moverat mendax Aretalogus;”
or, as the Jesuit Tarteron translates this passage,--“Les autres
pâmoient de rire, et regardoient Ulysse comme un diseur de contes faits
à plaisir.” Some of the guests, in fact, laughed at Ulysses as they
would have done at a regular romancer.
Again, Suetonius, in the 74th chapter of his Life of Augustus, after
describing the pleasant social customs of the emperor, his agreeable
company, and his courteous and affable manner with them, adds that, to
encourage their mirth and their freedom, “aut acroamata et histriones,
aut etiam triviales ex circo ludios interponebat, ac frequentius
aretalogos.” To show the value of this last word, according to English
writers, I turn to an old translation of Suetonius, published in 1692,
and there I find that, “for mirth’s sake, Augustus would often have
at his table either some to tell stories, or players, or common Merry
Andrews out of the Circus, but more frequently _boasting pedagogues and
maintainers of paradoxes_.”
It might easily be concluded that the Aretalogus was really of the
number of professional jesters, were it not that I find Lampridius
quoted by Flögel as including Ulpian in this class, because he sat at
the table of Alexander Severus, “ut haberet fabulas literales.” But
it is almost impossible to admit of this, for the wise Ulpian was the
solemn president of the Imperial Council of State, a great lawyer, a
great reformer, a moral and a religious man, according to the light
possessed by him. He was, as it seems to me, rather the Mentor than
the Jester of Severus, who was, for a time, the bright example of
men,--of any and every rank. The imperial virtues were held to be the
result of the teaching and practices of Ulpian. To his frugal table the
Emperor invited men of learning and virtue, and Ulpian was invariably
of the number. So far, however, was the profound jurisconsult from
being a mere jester, that, as we are told, the pauses in the pleasing
and instructive conversation of himself and fellow-guests “were
occasionally enlivened by the recital of some pleasing composition,
which,” says Gibbon, “supplied the place of the dancers, comedians, and
even gladiators, so frequently summoned to the tables of the rich and
luxurious Romans.” That there was little or nothing of the conceited
Aretalogus in Ulpian, may be seen in the fact that his virtue was of
too stern a quality, and that he was slain by the Prætorian guards
because he was more wise than merry.
We next come to the _Scurra_, a jester, of whom we find an illustration
in ancient comedy. When the witnesses called by Agorastocles (in the
‘Pœnulus’ of Plautus) pompously order Collybiscus to walk in their
rear, that personage remarks,
“Faciunt scurræ quod consuerunt; pone sese homines locant.”
“They act exactly like buffoons, who put every man behind them;” in
which we see something of the ordinarily insolent character of these
individuals.
Yet they are themselves said to have been originally the “followers”
in the retinue of great men, and their name, Scurra, or _Sequura_, is
derived by some lexicographers from ‘sequi,’ to follow. Their wit was
sharp but polished, and to be scurrilous, in the olden time, was rather
a credit than a disgrace; and if the enemies of Cicero called him the
_scurra consularis_, it was not that they found his sarcasms coarse,
but that they felt them penetrating and fatal.
The _Scurræ_, however, seem to have sunk to a level with the common
buffoons, as we collect from the letter of Pliny to Genitor (l. ix.
ep. 17). Pliny’s friend had written to him to express his disgust
at a splendid entertainment where he had been a guest, being marred
by the jokes, antics, and wiles of the professional _scurræ_,
_cinædi_, and _moriones_. The difference between the first and the
last who belonged to the profession of fools, consisted in this,--the
Scurra professed the art of exciting his hearers to risibility by
extravagant yet sparkling wit. The Morio worked more quietly, and
as if he joked licentiously by natural disposition thereto. It is
worthy of observation that Pliny rather chides his friend. He writes,
substantially, in reply, “Pray smooth your brow. I do not hire such
fellows myself, but I do not turn up my nose at those who follow a
contrary fashion. There is nothing novel or grateful to me in the
hackneyed gestures of the wanton, the pleasantry of the jester, or the
nonsense of the fool.” And the philosopher adds, with great fairness,
“You see it is not so much my judgment as my taste that is against
them;” and, he says further, “When I have reading, music, or the
company of an actor at my own house, there are some guests who leave
directly, or who, if they stay, look as ‘glumpy’ at the diversions I
provide, as you did at those which lately marred your entertainment.
The truth is,” thus concludes the philosopher, and it is advice as
valuable now as ever, “we should accept, as well-meant, the diversions
provided for us by others, that they, in their turn, may be indulgent
towards those we provide for them.” One thing noteworthy here is, that
the sensible people in Rome did not really care for the “fool.” If
the conquest of Scipio Asiaticus over Antiochus brought in that sort
of entertainment, the _best_ philosophers (for some stooped to folly)
protested against it by both precept and example.
The Scurra, as I have said, was not in every age a polished fool. The
buffoon at the fair who obtained the applause of his audience for
grunting like a pig, and, as the audience thought, more like a pig than
the animal itself, is called by Phædrus a “Scurra.” He probably sank
lower in his practice than any of his class, for he announced that the
entertainment he was about to exhibit had never before been known on
any stage. But even the best of the Scurræ seem to me to justify rather
the censure of Genitor than the praise of Horace. The latter, it will
be remembered, on the famous journey to Brundusium, was present at the
cudgelling of brains between Sarmentus (who had run away from slavery
to set up as a Scurra) and Cicerrus, who was a well-to-do parasite of
his day. Horace asserts that the wit of these two induced them all to
merrily prolong their supper; and yet all the fun perpetrated was of a
dreary cast. The Scurra joked coarsely on the deformity and infirmity
of the parasite, and the latter retorted by reproaching the Scurra with
his condition of slave, and the puny insignificance of his body. If
Sarmentus was the “delight” of Cæsar Augustus, that monarch was very
easily pleased.
Perhaps there was no greater patron of the Scurræ, and all similar and
many more degraded persons, than Sylla. He wasted his colossal fortune
on fools of every description,--some of them monsters of uncleanness.
Flögel, when noticing the criminal liberality of Sylla towards the
crowds of debauched followers who occupied his table and house, and
accompanied him abroad, says that for their sakes and under their
influences, he neglected public business. But the fact is, that Sylla
did not lead this disreputable life until after he had abdicated the
dictatorship, and had gone into his sensual and unhappy retirement at
Puteoli.
Antony was not more choice than Sylla in his “jolly companions,” nor
in his own conduct. He was often indeed his own fool, and few great
men ever played that character so thoroughly, but all were not fools
and jesters and jugglers, whom historians have placed round the table
and at the hearth of Antony. Flögel especially errs in classing among
the jugglers retained by the Triumvir the beautiful Cytheris, or
Lycoris, that slave whom the gentle and gallant Gallus loved, but whose
desertion of him for Antony gained for us the tender eclogue of Virgil.
Juvenal cites with Sarmentus, the name of Galba as a buffoon or
parasite of Augustus, and he does this (Sat. v.) in order to shame a
dissolute friend who saw no harm in allowing his “loins to grow fat by
others’ meat.” “What!” exclaims the Satirist, “are you not yet ashamed
of your course of life? Can you still believe that sovereign happiness
consists in living at another man’s table,--where you support more
insults than were ever heaped on Sarmentus and Galba at the table of
Cæsar?”
Galba was an aristocratic Demonax. He was, moreover, a short
hump-backed fellow, and he seems rather to have been the cause of wit
in others than witty himself. It was in allusion to his deformity that
Augustus remarked, after Galba had maintained some absurd proposition,
“I can tell you what is right, yet I can’t put you straight.” It is of
Galba that is told the story of his feigning to go to sleep at his own
table while Mæcenas was saying very polite things to the host’s wife;
but when another of the guests attempted to filch something from the
board, “Hold there!” cried Galba, “I am asleep for him, but not for
you!”
Martial complains that he himself was less known to his contemporaries,
all witty poet as he was, than Caballus, the buffoon of Tiberius.
This individual is supposed to be the same with the Claudius Gallus
of Suetonius. But Gallus seems to have been as much of a friend as a
man could be, of an Emperor who was accustomed to behead such of his
acquaintances as got the better of him in argument. That Gallus was
hardly a professional fool may be gathered from the words of Suetonius,
according to the quaint translation of the edition of 1692. “Claudius
Gallus, a most notorious old Sir Jolly, who had been formerly branded
for his debauches by Augustus, and severely reprimanded by himself
(Tiberius) in the Senate, inviting him (Tiberius) to supper, he
promised to come, on the terms that nothing were omitted of his usual
way of entertainment,”--which, according to the context, seems to have
been of a terribly licentious character.
Flögel refers, for an example of the impunity of Court Fools, in the
bold wagging of their tongue at the Courts of the Roman Emperors,
to the remark of a jester to Vespasian. The former had been saying
sharp things to all around him, but, observed the Emperor, “you have
addressed no observation to me.” Now Vespasian, whom we are accustomed
to picture to ourselves as a towering personage of heroic carriage,
was a poorly built fellow who went about in a half-sitting posture,
like Mr. Wright in the part of the retired coachman, whose limbs have
stiffened into the posture which he had preserved through a long course
of years, on the box. The jester joked very indecently on this weakness
of the monarch, but I do not think the sorry humourist was a wit by
profession. “Quidam urbanorum,” is the way in which he is described,
but this may mean “one of the men about town,” and the old translation
from which I have already made an extract, renders it “one of the wits
of the time.” Whichever it be, it seems to show that the jokers could
take great liberties with some emperors. Other instances prove that
some emperors took deadly vengeance on the jokers.
Commodus Antoninus may be reckoned among those princes who have been
their own fools, and he played the part rarely; but it was more in the
spirit of insane than witty folly. His fun, like the club of Hercules,
which he for ever carried on his shoulder, was crushing rather than
exhilarating. Gallienus, who resembled him in many respects, and was
as cruel, licentious, depraved, and cold-hearted, kept a second table
for his buffoons; which they occupied like regular gentlemen of the
Imperial household. When this potentate played the fool for his own
amusement, he could be, by caprice at least, less bloodthirsty in his
frolicsomeness than Commodus; as, for instance, when he ordered a knave
of a jeweller to be flung into the arena, and let loose upon him--not a
roaring lion, but a poor capon. The joke, as poor as the bird, was, of
course, received with universal applause.
We have some insight afforded us with regard to the position occupied
by the retained jester, in the account of the strange supper given by
Nasidienus to Mæcenas and others. The guest just named took with him
his two “shadows” uninvited. They were expected to contribute to the
hilarity of the feast, and they occupied the same couch with their
patron, the latter reclining between them. Nasidienus was in the same
way supported by his two parasites, one of whom excited the mirth of
the company by swallowing whole cheesecakes at once, like a clown in
a pantomime; and the other extolled the dishes generally. These two,
however, drank little or nothing; they appear to have been trained to
spare their master’s wine. The guests and _their_ parasites observed no
such temperance, but tippled freely, and one of the latter especially
kept up the laughter of the visitors by mock compliments on the feast,
and mock sentiment on things, generally.
The _Morio_, as I have previously observed, was usually a mis-shapen
creature, a sort of monstrous imbecile, heavy and hideous in body,
and childish in mind; a simpleton, whose naturally foolish remarks
contrasted with his strength and rude shape of body. Ladies in the
olden time kept them, as ladies of a later period kept monkeys, for
their amusement in their own chambers. There was even a market for
them, and at the _Forum Morionum_, a thoroughly frightful and foolish
animal of this species would fetch about eighty pounds sterling.
Many Emperors, too, bought specimens of these monstrosities, a fashion
which was only less hideous than the mania of a later time for china
monsters, who exonerated their stomachs of the liquor required by their
mistresses. Heliogabalus was a prodigal amateur of the former kind of
property; and it has been suggested that an imbecile Morio was kept by
a dull owner, that his own stupidity might seem wit by comparison.
That a noble Roman maintained slaves whose wit should entertain himself
and his friends, we know from several instances. The same slaves were
also employed to lighten the last hours, and to render death easy to
their masters,--if they could. Nay, it must be confessed that it seems
they sometimes succeeded. Witness the case of Petronius Arbiter, that
magnificent Consul, who almost renders vice attractive, like Boccaccio,
by writing of it in choice and elegant (yet mournful) phraseology. When
that very superb gentleman was stretched on his death-couch, he might
have remarked, with the Irish squire, that he died in perfect ease of
mind, for he had never denied himself anything. But Petronius could not
die easily without a little stimulant. He felt himself _ennuyé_, and he
sent for his wittiest friends and his choicest slaves. Of the latter he
freed some and whipped others, and he found a mild pleasure in both.
But the dearest solace of this dying Roman noble was in the amusing
stories and ridiculous epigrams recited to him. With these he amused
his fancy till his jaws suddenly fixed in a fit of laughter, and the
jesters around look down upon a corpse. Thus died an accomplished Roman
gentleman A.D. 66.