Controlling Laughter

This work maintains that political abuse exercized real powers of persuasion over Roman audiences and demonstrates how public humour both creates and enforces a society's norms.

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Previous scholarship has offered two explanations for why abusive language proliferated in Roman oratory. The first asserts that public rhetoric, filled with extravagant lies, was unconstrained by strictures of propriety. The second contends that invective represents an artifice borrowed from Greeks. The author assesses evidence outside political discourse - from prayer ritual to philosophical speculation to physiognomic texts - in order to locate independently the biases in Roman society that enabled an orator's jokes to persuade. Within each instance of abusive humour - a name pun, for example, or the mockery of a physical deformity - resided values and preconceptions that were essential to the way a Roman citizen of the Late Republic defined himself in relation to his community.