ARCHAIC ANXIETIES

What (if anything) do wisdom and laughter have in common, and how (if at all) should one expect a philosopher to laugh, or to judge the laughter of others? Symbolically at least, Friedrich Nietzsche's intuition in the above epigraph provides an intriguing yardstick to apply to surviving testimony for the life and thought of ancient Greek philosophers. In biographical terms, that testimony, which Nietzsche knew well from his own early scholarly work on Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the philosophers, is predominantly anecdotal, which means that it is often of doubtful value. Such material is nonetheless potentially revealing about the mentalities and popular perceptions that lay behind the creation and dissemination of those anecdotes; it will therefore receive some attention in what follows. But for many Greek philosophers we have the direct evidence of their writings or ideas to illuminate their attitudes to laughter. It is a striking index of the significance of laughter for the values and practices of Greek culture that, unlike most of their later counterparts (Nietzsche himself being one of a handful of exceptions in this regard), many philosophers adopted an overt or at least discernible position on the subject.