Laugh as long as you can
James Davidson: Roman Jokes, 16 July 2015
Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up
by Mary Beard.
California, 319 pp., £19.95, June 2014,978 0 520 27716 8 Show More
by Mary Beard.
California, 319 pp., £19.95, June 2014,
“... dispel our misgivings. She begins in autumn 192 AD, when the emperor Commodus, megalomaniac son of Marcus Aurelius, is beginning seriously to lose it. He has subjected the people and senate of Rome to two weeks of compulsory entertainment, mostly involving the slaughter of a great number of animals in the Colosseum. At one point in this Blutfest, we are told ... ”