I've been doing some research in the last couple of weeks about the astronomer Thales of Miletus for an upcoming episode of a podcast I host about the history of astronomy that I run [0]. I had known that Thales was one of the Seven Sages of Greece, but I didn't quite appreciate the extent to which the Seven Sages had entered the popular consciousness.
It turns out that centuries later over in Rome there was a public latrine in the town of Ostia Antica that has some graffiti that reference a few of the sages, including Thales, and provide advice for those using the facilities:
* “To shit well, Solon rubbed his belly {Ut bene cacaret, ventrum palpavit Solon}.”
* “Thales admonished those shitting to strain hard {Durum cacantes monuit ut nitant Thales}.”
I googled around a bit to find some actual Roman jokes [0][1][2]:
One man complains to another: "The slave you sold me died!" "By the gods!", the other replies. "During the time he was in my service, he never did such a thing!"
A man is attending the burial of his wife, who has just died. When a passerby asks, "Who is it who rests in peace here?", he answers, "Me, now that I'm rid of her!
A provincial man has come to Rome, and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, as he was a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."
An intellectual came to check in on a friend who was seriously ill. When the man's wife said that he had 'departed', the intellectual replied: "When he comes back, will you tell him that I stopped by?"
A misogynist stood in the marketplace and announced: "I’m putting my wife up for sale! Tax-free!" When people asked him why, he said: "So the authorities will impound her."
A runner going to participate in a contest had a dream that he was driving a quadriga. Early in the morning he goes to a dream interpreter for an explanation. The reply is: "You will win, the dream meant you have the speed and the strength of horses."
But, to be sure, the runner visits another dream interpreter. This one replies: "You will lose. Don’t you understand that four ones came to me before you?"
An intellectual got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine!"
A intellectual checked in on the parents of a dead classmate. The father was wailing: "O son, you have left me a cripple!" The mother was crying: "O son, you have taken the light from my eyes!" Later, the student says to his friends: "If he were guilty of all that, he should have been killed while still alive."
An incompetent astrologer cast a man's horoscope and said: "You are unable to father children." When the man objected that he had seven kids, the astrologer replied: "Look after them well."
A young man said to his libido-driven wife: "What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?" She replied: "You can choose. But there's not a crumb in the house."
An astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I’ll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"
> A provincial man has come to Rome, and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, as he was a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."
Solid burn. Being based on the emperor not only sets the joke up (being someone well recognized), but make the comeback sharper/funnier.
This implies that the emperor may not be heir to the throne. Or, may not be 'high born'. This was 2000-2500 years ago, perhaps.
Legitimacy came from the male in these times.
So, having a shared father means nothing bad for the emperor. Having a shared mother means his title, his lands, his bloodline may be entirely false, and thus, his legitimacy.
(Even if the emperor rose and claimed his place by blood/conflict, the above all still counts in many ways.)
> A man is attending the burial of his wife, who has just died. When a passerby asks, "Who is it who rests in peace here?", he answers, "Me, now that I'm rid of her!
I had no idea Rodney Dangerfield was a Stand Up Philosopher[0].
A young man said to his libido-driven wife: "What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?" She replied: "You can choose. But there's not a crumb in the house."
OK, that's quite good. I can easily imagine one along those lines in a standup set today (probably more along the lines of "So, the other night my boyfriend asked...").
In Cyprus, where i live, this is an actual joke still said today!
I've heard (and said) this joke many times in my life, and it never crossed my mind that it's 2000 years old.
Setup is the same and the punchline goes "Οτι νομίζεις τζιαι εν καλά τζιαι ύστερα τρώμε!" (in Cypriot greek)
"An incompetent astrologer cast a man's horoscope and said: "You are unable to father children." When the man objected that he had seven kids, the astrologer replied: "Look after them well.""
The Astrologer is pointing out that since the guy can't have any (more) children, he should take good care of the ones he has.
It's also possible that this is a bad translation from Latin, and the original punchline was along the lines of "take a good look at them" (i.e., implying that he's not the biological father).
It’s a joke at the expense of the astrologer. Rome had Augurs with official responsibilities for predicting the future, so maybe these kind of jokes were more subversive at that time.
Although I could imagine a modern joke about an astrologer making grand predictions that are whittled down as the person corrects them.
Or maybe the incompetent astrologer is also mean and going to try to make their statement right by killing the children, so the father should better look after them.
This joke is actually in ancient Greek (it's in a book called «Philogelos»), but the translation looks right to me. I think your interpretation is spot on.
I've basically run out of new movies to watch, which are good. Yet some movies over the years, maybe a few every year, are quite good.
The further back I go, the more nuanced (from my perspective) the comedy or comments can become. And further, the more I may "miss" without looking deeply into topical, timely events.
Some stuff literally makes zero sense, then you google, learn something about that specific time, and "oh, I get it". And I'm just talking the 60s or 50s here.
And that's what I can google, which 100% doesn't even remotely give the feeling, the nuance, of actually living in that time. All the quirks, all the jokes, all the in humour.
Words become slang, meaning changes, then that slang falls out of favour.
My point in all of this?
I don't think we have proper, 100% accurate nuance of latin, with properly mapped slang and meanings of words, over 1000s of years.
(And this joke may have been greecian too, but who knows)
> An astrologer cast a sick boy's horoscope. After promising the mother that the child had many years ahead of him, he demanded payment. When she said, "Come tomorrow and I’ll pay you," he objected: "But what if the boy dies during the night and I lose my fee?"
So if they look down on astrologers as being opportunistic charlatans (at least the bad ones), they are mocking that they will say one thing and when confronted about how wrong they are slide right into their next statement.
Who knows? Generally speaking it's hard to get two meanings to both translate -- especially over 2000 years.
I guess a good example of this style of joke would be a used car salesman confronted how the roof has been torn off of the car and immediately switching to upselling it as a convertible.
An astrologer predicts no kids, then switches to advising on the future that he should watch over his kids.
This one made me laugh out loud and I don't think any of the other replies understood it correctly. The astrologer has gone way out on a limb by telling the man that he is infertile without first ascertaining whether he has children. Then, when cornered, he desperately tries to cover his error by implying that the man is now infertile. "Look after them (because you won't be able to replace them.)"
Apparently I interpreted it differently from everyone else. I thought it meant that he couldn't father them in the sense that he was a shitty dad, not that he couldn't have kids.
The astrologer says "you are unable to father children". It is ambiguous whether the astrologer is implying that the man cannot conceive children or whether he has no ability to be a father. When the man reveals that he has seven kids, the astrologer's reply of "look after them well" could be interpreted as sarcasm. I think initially you're supposed to think that the man cannot have kids, but the joke is that he's implying he's a terrible father.
I had a completely different interpretation to everyone else. I read it as the astrologer doubling down on his assertion despite the evidence staring him in the face. The guy can't have kids, so he should look after the ones he has! (Even though they prove that he CAN have kids)
Not very funny one. The astrologer says only that he won't be able to produce any more children in the future. There is the implication that the kids might die and he will be childless as the initial prediction implies.
I took it to mean that the astrologer is bad at his job and shifts the goalposts so he’s “right”, like “you won’t have any more kids AFTER THIS!” As psychics and astrologers have been known to do for thousands of years apparently.
Yes, I agree. In those situations the usual punchline is "I hope that you will take care of them as if they are yours." and that's why I didn't think of that interpretation.
Thanks for finding these! I'm often impressed by how often jokes in other languages/cultures are funny, without much cultural or linguistic context needed.
The original article mentions that there were "tropes" in Roman, recurring characters in different jokes playing the same roles. In the examples it seems to be a character who takes things quite literally either in a serious manner or in a joking manner. I don't see anything particularly negative.
The linked sources don't say the four "came to me before you", as above, but rather "came before you". So it's a joke about the fickleness of dream interpretations. That is, a dream of driving a four horse chariot is taken by one interpreter as bestowing the speed of horses on the dreamer, while the next interpreter says oh no, it's a dream about having four in front of you!
I think four other competitors came also, so the fortuneteller realized that either a) he was going to lose because of the competition or b) he already told someone they were going to win so couldn't tell multiple
After looking up what a quadriga is, I think the joke is that he's behind four horses. So the dream can be interpreted in two opposite ways. So presumably the other four dreamt of being a horse.
I'm surprised that the author doesn't see modern usage of coined names, maybe we read different things. It is very common in almost all of Pynchon's novels. Vonnegut used it often as well."Benny Profane", "Oedipa Maas", "Pierce Inverarity", "Malachi Constant", and half of the characters in Gravity's Rainbow: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Gravitys-Rainbow/characters/
A lot of anime characters have highly unusual but descriptive names. Ex.: Katsuki Bakugo from My Hero Academia is a narcissist preoccupied with proving he's the best, and has explosion based powers. His name incorporates the kanji for "self", "win", and "bomb". Many of the other MHA characters are so named according to their traits, superpowers, and even signature colors.
It's kind of a shame that you don't see a lot of this in popular Western media.
The bit about Romans dressing and acting like Greeks reminds me of the Gilbert and Sullivan play The Mikado, which satirized British life but was set in a comical version of Japan. When the Crown Prince of Japan visited Great Britain, all exhibitions of the play in London were cancelled so as to avoid giving offense. Unfortunately, His Highness had wanted to seeThe Mikado while he was in town...
Romans and Greeks were a little cosier than British and Japanese though. In addition to Greece not being far, southern Italy was called Magna Graecia for its Greek population, and it's my understanding that Roman aristocrats and politicians often spoke Greek.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in funny stories of Roman life to read the Satyricon from Gaius Petronius Arbiter (eBook available on Project Gutenberg)
All of the apologies for the blue comedy are grating. We get it, making fun of women isn't socially acceptable. You don't need to preface every single description of an off-color joke.
I don't have any reference, but I heard once that someone looked at the jokes they told about Hitler, and was able trace more than half of them back to the Romans.
I would be completely unsurprised if that were true. If you look at the graffiti in Pompeii it's a parade of dick drawings, boasts about virility, and generally would look quite at home in the modern era.
Part of me really wants to believe that ancient Rome’s plebeians sang “Ceaser unum testiculum habuit, Augustus duo sed parvae sunt” (or whatever it would be: please excuse my use of Google translate).
There are a few Grimm's Fairy Tales involving the Lord taking human form and asking a (real) human to host him. He might be accompanied by St. Peter.
The stories are obvious, direct correspondences to Greek stories about Zeus, perhaps accompanied by Hermes, doing the same thing.
However, since the Brothers Grimm collected their stories from aristocrats, it isn't clear whether the Greek stories passed down naturally through time (while mutating into a slightly more Christian theme), or whether the narrators learned the stories in their original Greek as part of a classical education and then rethemed them as "native German" stories for the benefit of the Grimms.
Maybe a reference would help - I'm not sure how this is a meaningful statement.
It seems that there could be many somewhat "generic" Western European jokes about despots which date back to Roman times. But without more information I can't think of any jokes at or about Hitler specifically that could possibly date back to the Romans.
Baffling that this piece manages to mention so much modern comedy, in discussing Romans, without referencing the centurion scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, with Caesar's friend (he had a wife you know)!
All of Life of Brian aged well. I rewatched the film last year – still thoroughly enjoyable.
What I completely forgot were the scenes with Stan transitioning into Loretta. What seemed like an eccentric joke at the time (more than 40 years ago!) proved fairly prescient. Funny yet handled with kindness.
Well, it does portray a very PC acceptance (fighting for Stan/Loretta's right to have babies even if he/she can't actually have them) even if it is a joke.
So I think it's at least difficult to object to? Yes that behaviour is correct but it's not allowed in a comedy? Stop laughing (so it can still be in the script, it's just not a joke?)?
I think the whole film is far more thoughtful than it is unkind, to any group. The main contemporary objection was from religious groups of course, but just watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKWVuye1YE.
It portrays a serious extremist group being derailed by the demands of the furthest, most boundary-obliterating, most ludicrous social extremists imaginable at the time. The fact that that group was later considered centrist doesn't make the joke PC, it just means people don't get the joke anymore.
We can only behave according to what is acceptable in the present moment we happen to exist in, it would be unreasonable to ask people to attempt to predict future morality when making ethical choices. We can try to make a good guess about it and act accordingly but it'll never be perfect, nobody can make a ruler with units that don't exist yet let alone try to measure something with it. I think intent counts in these situations too, like you say Monty Python never set out to be unkind or bigoted to anyone.
Would it be an acceptable sketch today? Probably not, and that's not really a bad thing given that improvements to the rights and recognition of transgender people is one of the more positive things to come out of the last couple of decades in my opinion. Should Monty Python be cancelled over this sketch though? Not in a million years.
"Never Be Rude to an Arab" is Islamaphobic on its face, as well as normalizing other racial slurs.
"I like Chinese" is full of pretty gross stereotypes as well.
The troop claims they harbor no ill intent, and that may be true, but it's easy to say "We're not here to offend" about someone else but not acknowledging the power differences here and why someone might be offended.
I recently watched a great "explainer" video on why that scene was even funnier at a deeper level if you had been classically educated in Latin (as John Cleese was):
That joke is very complex. Let's not forget that it's about people that lost a war not long before it, that had plenty of them killed by the Romans, and are forced to support the empire with taxes (that go mostly to Rome, not to local improvements).
The way people represent the joke, as if they had no reason to oppose the Romans is a joke by itself.
It is a joke the filmmakers may not be fully in on - the Romans in Python are analogues for the British, managing an empire and bringing the "benefits of civilization" to "quarrelsome and backwards natives".
Nah, the joke is more self-centered than that--it's the answer to a British adolescent's exam question "Name x benefits of Roman rule." No actual Romans would sit around saying "Wait...this is the same word either way, but is it dative or ablative??" either.
High school historian perspective: I don't know; compare their conquest to the greek's. Greek civilians thought of Rome as "the light of the world," even though their wealth was used in much the same way.
That's the complexity. The Roman invasion did enrich their society (as did the Greek before), yet all none of the dead people got any of it and many individual lives were completely destroyed even if not literally terminated.
It turns out that centuries later over in Rome there was a public latrine in the town of Ostia Antica that has some graffiti that reference a few of the sages, including Thales, and provide advice for those using the facilities:
* “To shit well, Solon rubbed his belly {Ut bene cacaret, ventrum palpavit Solon}.”
* “Thales admonished those shitting to strain hard {Durum cacantes monuit ut nitant Thales}.”
* “Sly Chilon taught to fart silently {Vissire tacite Chilon docuit subdolus}.”
Below these there are some other pieces of advice, though not from the sages:
* “shake yourself about so you’ll go faster {agita te celerivs pervenies}”
* “you’re sitting on a mule-driver; I’m hurrying up {mvlione sedes, propero}”
* “friend, the proverb escapes you: shit well and fuck the doctors {amice fvgit te proverbivm: bene caca et irrima medicos}”
* “no one talks to you much, Priscianus, until you use the sponge on a stick {verbose tibi nemo dicit dvm priscianvs utaris xylosphongio}”
An interesting article with more details: https://www.purplemotes.net/2014/01/19/seven-sages-ostia/
[0]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/