My guess is that Romans in a sense didn’t smile in anything like the way that we do or understand it. Of course, they sometimes did probably curl their lips up at the edges.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 7, 2009.
Doctors, men with bad breath, eunuchs, barbers, men with hernias, bald men, shady fortune-tellers—none of these are spared in the jokes of ancient Rome. Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University and classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, talks about the ancient Roman joke book known as the Philogelos, a collection of hundreds of gags and the only joke book from the ancient world still surviving. Beard shares Roman jokes about the colorful—and mostly male—characters of ancient life, delving into what cracked the ancient Romans up.
