Part 3

The above is among the boldest of the personal assaults made by 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.