ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the social structure that gives rise to Greek and Roman humour. A mooch disrupts the harmony of a banquet by flattering his host to get a free meal. Emboldened by flattery, the host overestimates his own prowess, and holds forth on subjects he does not understand. His unwilling listeners are rescued when someone asks simple questions the quack cannot answer. We see this dynamic in a scene from Aristophanes’s Women at the Festival of Demeter, where a man, caught infiltrating a women’s-only festival, reenacts a scene from Euripides, in which a character kidnaps a baby and holds it hostage. Aristophanes’s kidnapper is a quack, using a tragic plot in everyday life, the baby’s mother a sucker—and the whole scene ridiculous, when the “baby” turns out to be a wineskin in diapers and booties. Petronius’s Satyricon affords a Roman example in the “Widow of Ephesus” tale, in which a quackish woman of sham virtue is seduced by a soldier/moocher. Various plot twists lead her to crucify the corpse of her late husband, who thereby becomes a sucker. Humour here resides in the urbane treatment of a grotesque subject.
