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"Why the popular resonance of 'mansplaining' (despite the intense dislike of the term felt by many men)? It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not to be taken seriously: a bit like when I get lectured on Roman history on Twitter. Britain's best known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit she shows how history has treated powerful women. With examples ranging from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Elizabeth Warren, Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, how we look at women who exercise power, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. With personal reflections on her own experiences of sexism online and the gendered violence she has endured as a woman in the public eye, Mary asks: if women aren't perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn't it power that we need to redefine?"--Publisher

"What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear-a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing-from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book-Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient 'monkey business' to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really 'get' the Romans' jokes?"--

Laughter is one of the most difficult and intriguing historical subjects, one that defies firm conclusion or systematization. Beginning with Dion Cassius's first-person account of laughter in the Colosseum in 192 CE, this article explores some of the heuristic challenges of writing about the laughter of the past—particularly that of classical antiquity. It attempts to undermine some of the false certainties that surround the idea of a " classical theory of laughter" (which originated during the Renaissance) and argues that ideas about laughter in ancient Greece and Rome were much more diverse than one usually imagines. Important patterns in the discursive use of laughter in ancient Rome can nonetheless be observed. This article also examines the way laughter was used to mediate political power and autocracy in addition to how laughter operated on the boundary between animals and humans. It concludes with a reflection on the extent to which we can still share in the laughter of the Romans and under what conditions.

RésuméLe rire est l'un des plus difficiles et des plus fascinants objets historiques, tant il résiste à la possibilité de conclusions fermes et de systématisation. En partant du témoignage de Dion Cassius à propos d'un fou rire, au Colisée, en 192 av. J.-C., cet article explore les différents défis heuristiques de l'histoire du rire – plus particulièrement pour l'Antiquité classique. Il défend l'idée qu'il n'existe pas de « théorie classique du rire », qui est, dans la forme que nous connaissons, une invention de la Renaissance, relayée ensuite, et que les approches du rire en Grèce et dans l'ancienne Rome sont bien plus nombreuses que l'on imagine habituellement. Il est néanmoins possible d'identifier des éléments types repris dans les usages discursifs du rire dans la Rome antique. Ce texte examine plus particulièrement la manière dont le rire fut utilisé pour intervenir entre le pouvoir politique et l'autocratie, mais aussi comment le rire est considéré comme frontière entre l'animal et l'homme. La réflexion s'achève sur la possibilité et les conditions selon lesquelles, nous, contemporains, pouvons partager, encore aujourd'hui, le rire des Romains.

In 1985 Edmund Leach, well into retirement from his chair of Anthropology in Cambridge, made his first visit to the site of the temple of Diana at Nemi, some fifteen miles southeast of Rome.Leach called this visit a pilgrimage, for Nemi and the problems of its bizarre cult were the starting place for James Frazer's founding work of Social Anthropology,The Golden Bough. This was the spot that Frazer described in such lavish detail in his opening chapter: 'the sylvan landscape [that] was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy.' This was the setting for the problem that Frazer set out to solve: Why in Roman times could the priest-king of the sacred grove of Nemi (the so-calledRex Nemorensis) win his priestly office only by killing the previous incumbent; why would he himself lose it only through murder at the hands of his successor? For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful, but minor, backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social Anthropology.