Free Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard Page A

explained that way). This book is a reply to some of those oversimplifications and a long-considered provocation—reminding us of the puzzling centrality of laughter at Rome and challenging us to think about Roman culture a little differently through laughter.
    We start from two occasions in Rome when laughter was explicitly written into the ancient script: an encounter in the Colosseum, and a joke on the comic stage.

PART ONE

  

  
FIGURE 1.   Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624). This painting—which we now take for granted as an image of a laughing man—raises the question of how confidently we can identify laughter in the art of the past.
      

  
FIGURE 2.   Mosaic—“Beware of the dog”—from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii (first century CE). How can we decide if this image was intended to make visitors laugh?
      

  
FIGURE 3.   Bronze statuette of an actor with an ape’s head (Roman date). This nicely symbolizes the overlap between the mimicry of actor and of monkey.
      

  
FIGURE 4.   A boy with a performing monkey, from an original painting (first century CE) in the House of the Dioscuri, Pompeii. The ape becomes an actor.
      

  
FIGURE 5.   Parody of Aeneas, escaping from Troy, with his father and son—with ape heads (from an original painting, first century CE, from Pompeii).
      

  
FIGURE 6.   Rembrandt’s self-portrait as Zeuxis (c. 1668). Notice the painting of the old lady in the background.

PART TWO

Acknowledgments
    I arrived at UC Berkeley in September 2008 with a mess of ideas about laughter in my head and absolutely nothing on paper. I am enormously grateful to all the classicists and ancient historians there (faculty and graduate students) for giving me the support and confidence to pull that mess together—and for making me feel so at home. I shall never forget clothes shopping with Leslie Kurke, touring the local wineries and having my first American Thanksgiving with Andy Stewart and Darlis, learning about the mysteries of election “propositions” with Kathy McCarthy, and reconnecting with Ron Stroud after more than thirty years. The graduates took me under their wing and were determined that I should miss nothing of the excitement of a U.S. presidential campaign. It is good now to bump into so many of them at conferences in different parts of the world and find them going from strength to strength. They are a great advertisement for Berkeley.
    In the long process of turning the lectures into this book, I have had generous help from colleagues in Cambridge and elsewhere, who have read parts of the draft and answered queries of all kinds: Colin Annis, Franco Basso, James Clackson, Roy Gibson, Ingo Gildenhard, Simon Goldhill, Richard Hunter, Val Knight, Ismene Lada-Richards, Robin Osborne, Michael Reeve, Malcolm Schofield, Ruth Scurr, Michael Silk, Caterina Turroni, Gloria Tyler, Carrie Vout, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Tim Whitmarsh. Joyce Reynolds has read and commented on the whole manuscript (I feel very privileged to be approaching my sixtieth birthday and still able to discuss my work with my old undergraduate teacher!).
    Many other people have also contributed to the project. Debbie Whittaker chased up endless references and used her unusually sharp eyes to get the bibliography under control. Lyn Bailey and the staff of the Classics Faculty Library in Cambridge went far beyond the call of duty in helping me find books and check references in the final stages. My contacts at UC Press (especially Cindy Fulton and Eric Schmidt) have been a pleasure to work with, as has Juliana Froggatt, a great copy editor. The learned commenters on my blog ( http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/ ) have chipped in with all kinds of sharp suggestions, from bibliography to joke interpretations; one even spotted that my subtitle was a clear, if unconscious, echo of Adam Phillips’s great book, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored .
    Special thanks must