This chapter is devoted to the visual mockery of most aspects of everyday life and mythology.According to Diogenes Laertius (1.33), Thales often used to say that he thanked the gods for makinghim a human not a beast, a man not a woman, and finally a Greek and not a foreigner. I have orderedthe chapter accordingly, gradually, starting from the comical use of inanimate objects, animals insituation comedy, social stereotypes and comic archetypes about women, and then moving onto men,finally concluding with debased heroes and gods.

THE COMICALINANIMATE:VISUAL PUNS AND MISUSEDOBJECTS

Eye-cups

Visual humour begins with corrupted eye-cups, a very common series in the sixth century BC. Tounderstand the comic mechanisms of this very ‘inanimate’ type of visual humour, apresentation of the eye-cup series, and a critique of its usual interpretations, apotropaism, andanthropomorphism is in order.

Eye-cups, Augenschale (Steinhart 1995), coupe àà yeux, asa term of classifi cation, is misleading and probably inadequate; a good number of vases of manydifferent shapes, techniques, provenance, and date were decorated with eyes since the seventhcentury BC. For example, a ‘Melian’ (from Paros) amphora in Athens, produced in the 640s (Papastamos1970:93), has two eyes under the handles. The latter magnify the eyebrows to create an impression ofdepth. On a Boeotian krater in Munich, two eyes with arrows as brows are painted under the handles.A Naxian amphora (from Delos) in Mykonos has a large eye under a handle; an Ionian multiple eye bowl(from Naucratis) in London shows two pairs of eyes; and a Rhodian oinochoe in Munich 5 has two eyespainted on either side of the spout. Except for the eyes, they do not have much in common with theAthenian eye-cups, but they demonstrate that eyes on vases have a long tradition.

South Italian Vase-painting:

The only visual humour that most classicists are usually aware of are the so-called phlyax scenespainted on South Italian vases and possibly inspired from Old Comedy. I will therefore rapidlydiscuss visual humour within South Italian vase-painting before focusing on the satyr and hiscentral role in Greek visual humour. Most aspects of these South Italian phlyax scenes have beentreated systematically by Trendall and more recently by Taplin (2007). What was the purpose ofrepresenting actors on stage? Was it an ‘interesting’ subject, which painters knewwould delight their buyers because it reminded them of a funny play they may have seen? Were theyintended to be funny not just by their reference to stage comedy but through their visualrepresentation?

This section is a very brief incursion into South Italian (Apulian, Paestan, and Lucanian)humorous iconography rather than a survey. It is beyond the scope of the present work to probe SouthItalian iconography beyond this admittedly cursory examination. During the early day of the RomanRepublic, there seemed to have been a local genre of tragic parody known as hilarotragodia or phlyaxplays. The word meant ‘gossip’ plays (in the plural phlyakes). A number of vases fromvarious regions in Southern Italy depict mock-heroic scenes. Although the debate has centred on alocal versus Old Greek Comedy (Aristophanic) origin for the inspiration of these vases, somescholars, such as Green and Handley (1995: 53), have suggested the possibility of a Greek‘classic revival’ in Southern Italy, and Taplin also proposed that a number of thesephlyax vases were actually visual parodies of ‘serious’ Italian imagery.

Heroes Ridiculed

Painters enjoyed mocking heroes. Heroes have grandeur, and are stronger, far more courageous,noble, and beautiful than common men. They are looked up to as models of virtue and often have theirown cult in the form of heroa. However much heroes were revered, the democraticatmosphere of Athens tended to bring everyone to the same level. Maybe this was a consequence oftheir fear of hybris, or maybe this was brought about by a more healthy need forbalance within the city following the old precept of the golden mean, the ‘nothing toomuch’ (meden agan). Maybe it was the sheer pleasure of a socially lowlyartisan in bringing down a superior being, be he superior politically, in wealth, in nobility, orvirtue.

Peleus

‘No city is so barbarous or so strange in its speech that it does not know the fame of thehero Peleus’ writes Pindar (Isth. Od. 6.25). Not only was he the celebratedfather of the great Achilles, but he was a famed hero in his own right, a great one among the firstgeneration of heroes. While a guest at Iolcus in Thessaly, the king’s wife fell in love withhim. He refused her advances, and, as in many other similar stories, Astydamia told her husbandAcastus that Peleus had tried to seduce her. He decided to take Peleus on a hunt on Mount Pelion.During the night, he hid Peleus’s sword and abandoned the hero fast asleep. According to thetextual tradition, Peleus was about to be massacred by the vicious beasts roaming the Thessalianwilderness or even by the wild Centaurs. But Chiron, the wisest of Centaurs, brought the hero hissword and thus saved him from certain death.

Preface

What is a study of ancient visual humour? It is an archaeology of humour, a study of humorous artefacts, rather than verbal humour. My intention is to attempt to recover ancient Greek visual humour, and as far as possible, its social context. It is also an archaeology of knowledge: taken as a metaphor, it is the logical unlayering of strata of meaning and rubbish, of twists and turns in order to recover some social truths deformed by humour. In Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1982), a Benedictine monk is terrified by Aristotle’s apology of humour in the second book of his Poetics. The book is now lost, and this is probably a good riddance. A few sentences on humour by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian have somehow formalised the way ancient humour is studied, and their influence is still palpable within each new theory on humour. Luckily, we have always had Aristophanes and many humorous passages in Greek literature to counterbalance these theoreticians. Visual humour offers yet another way to study ancient Greek humour and, by extension, ancient Greek society. By further extension, it may help us retrace some of our own categories of thought. The concluding chapter on humour as a means of social cohesion also deals with the issue of freedom of expression and with the special relationship between humour and democracy.

I first had the idea of studying visual humour in ancient Greece in 1995 for my master’s degree at the University of Strasbourg under the supervision of Prof. Gérard Siebert. I chose this subject because as a student of classics and archaeology I could not believe that, in the world populated by Aristophanes and his many followers, the visual arts did not express similar forms of humour. I could not believe that all was serious, well-balanced, aesthetically pleasing, and stony white in ancient Greek art. Hopefully, the reader will feel the same way after reading this book.

Autres temps autres moeurs. We have seen in Chapter 2 that the mocking ofreprehensible social behaviour is a form of moral criticism, and it can be considered as acaricature of the soul; the exaggeration of gluttony is a leitmotif in caricature. In a similar way,in archaic and classical Greece, old age, pygmies, and dwarfs aroused laughter. Anything contrary tothe norm was ridiculed. This chapter focuses first on caricature in Athens and then at the Kabirionsanctuary in Boeotia.

Dwarfs, an Introduction

Dasen’s book (1993) on dwarfs in ancient Egypt and Greece focuses on both the medical andthe archaeological aspects of the condition. Most authors who examine dwarfs, or who concentrate ondisability, deformity, or diseases in antiquity, are mainly interested inicono-diagnosis, that is, how much art can tell us about diseases and disabilitiesin the ancient world. My starting point is different: I am interested in representations of dwarfsin Greek vase-painting in comparison to ‘normal’ citizens, and how they were mainlyused in caricature. In Greek art, dwarfs are persons of abnormally short stature and disproportionedbodies. Aristotle, who was somewhat interested in dwarfs (Somn. 3.457a 23–5;Hist. an. 6.24.577b 27–8; Part. an. 4.10.686b; 3.687b 25;12.695a 8; Gen. an. 11.710b 13), categorizes them as ‘monsters’because of the excessive development of the upper part of their body compared to their lower part.With their short legs, they resemble children, but they remain disproportioned throughout theirlives (Louis 1975: 281).

Humour, just like Proteus, can take on many shapes, jumping erratically from one form intoanother, from parody into caricature, from puns into situation comedy. But if one struggles with itlong enough, it will in the end, as Proteus did, deliver some truths and sometimes even insightsinto the human psyche. Most anthropologists and historians know that a writer, or indeed anyone whochooses to mock something or someone, reveals more about himself than about the object of hismockery. The visual jokes tell us something about rules of behaviour, about the differences betweenthe public and the private sphere, about gender differences, ethnicity, politics, beauty anddeformity, buying patterns, fashion, perceptions of religion and myth. It often tells us what peoplereally thought and experienced. This book fits in the framework of the ‘rediscovered’cultural historical trend in archaeology. Current theory is in its post-processual stage, where formany archaeologists, like Ian Morris, ‘Archaeology is cultural history or it isnothing’. Classical archaeologists have often been at odds with the radical theoreticalchanges in archaeology because of the vast amount of literary and epigraphic evidence available tous, and utterly absent from other forms of archaeology, which have had to formulate new theoreticalmodels to tackle their lack of other forms of evidence than archaeological. Numerous scholars havediscussed these prickly issues, and some, such as Shanks, have even tried in recent years to puttogether a ‘social archaeology’ adapted from its prehistoric model to classicalarchaeology. It is an exciting stage in theoretical archaeology, and I for one am glad that we areback in the world of cultural history with a better anthropological grip on who we are to betterunderstand what we observe.

In this concluding chapter, a number of discussions are regrouped under two main headings. Thefirst is centred on vases, painters, and iconography, and the second on humour and social cohesion.The first discussion is partly based on querying an extensive database of comic vases, which Ideveloped during my doctoral research, from different angles. For example, the comparison betweencomic scenes depicted in Athenian black-figure to those in Athenian red-figure. Why are some scenesfound more often or are rarer than others? Are some painters more interested in painting humorousscenes than others? Which types of vases present the most or least humorous scenes? Is there such athing as regional humour? Iconography is then discussed, and a justification given for establishinga future theory of visual humour. I shall also briefly discuss what I have coined ‘visualimmediacy’. The second part contains a series of discussions under the heading of humour andsocial cohesion. For some time, I had thought that only certain comic categories, such as parody,caricature, and situation comedy, were transposable in time and space from culture-to-culture. Butthere is at least one other fundamental aspect of humour that seems commonplace among most cultures– and that is the need for humour as a channel for social cohesion.

It has been underlined on a number of occasions that humour gives us an insight into ancientGreek life, and that, for better or for worse, what we see is a mirrored vision of society. Let ussee, then, in spite of all its distortions and aberrations, what humour reveals.

Crete is by far the largest of the Greek islands (ca. 8,200 sq. km), about 250 km west-east and 57 km north-south at its widest point in the center; this makes it over three times the entire land mass of the Cycladic islands. The topography of the island divides it into five main regions, each defined by a mountain range, extensive arable - usually coastal - plain, and good harborage.

1. Western Crete – The White Mountains (highest point at 2,453 m) limit settlement to the long north coastal plain, with Early Minoan sites of note at Nopigeia and Chania, the funerary (?) caves of Perivolia and Platyvola, and the “shepherds’ compound” at Debla.

2. Rethymnon – This region on the north coast is roughly equidistant between west and central Crete. The major coastal settlement was at Stavromenos, from which an overland route leads south to the Mesara via the Amari valley. Throughout the Minoan period this route would foster cultural links between the two areas.

3. North-Central Crete – The center of the island is dominated by the Idaean mountain range (peak at 2,465 m) that separates the north coastal plain of Herakleion from the Mesara in the south. In the midst of this range is the Idaean cave, which may have had the longest period of sacred use on Crete, from Neolithic through Roman times. Human settlement on the island began in this region, marked by the aceramic Neolithic levels at Knossos. Five km north of Knossos, at the mouth of the Kairatos River, was the principal Neolithic and Bronze Age port for this area at Poros–Katsambas (Herakleion). South of Knossos was the important Minoan settlement at Archanes and the nearby cemetery at Phournoi. A number of overland routes connected the north coast with the Mesara Plain in the south.

4. …