Corbeill Controlling Laughter

Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7289-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 266 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

Although numerous scholars have studied Late Republican humor, this is the first book to examine its social and political context. Anthony Corbeill maintains that political abuse exercised real powers of persuasion over Roman audiences and he demonstrates how public humor both creates and enforces a society's norms.

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 the Greeks. After a fresh reading of all extant literary works from the period, Corbeill concludes that the topics exploited in political invective arise from biases already present in Roman society. 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 humor—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.

Originally published in 1996.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Corbeill, Anthony

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike Römische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction 3

Ch. 1 Physical Peculiarities 14

Ch. 2 Names and Cognomina 57

Ch. 3 Moral Appearance in Action: Mouths 99

Ch. 4 Moral Appearance in Action: Effeminacy 128

Ch. 5 A Political History of Wit 174

Works Cited 219

Index Locorum et Iocorum 233

General Index 247