An essay by Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner appears as a chapter in Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond: Body, Affect, Concepts, a new open-access edited volume from Bloomsbury. The book is described by the publisher as “the first to explore systematically and comprehensively the concept and category of ‘horror’ in antiquity.”
In “Fearful Laughter: Bodily Horror in Roman Sexual Humor,” Weiner says that “while horror may be a modern construct from the standpoint of genre, horror … most certainly existed in Greco-Roman antiquity.” In this essay he asks whether bodily horror, or at least something closely related to it, can be found in comedic literature, and surmises that laughter “could serve an apotropaic function to protect against real and more serious fear.”
Focusing on examples from Petronius’ Satyricon, Apuleius, and Ausonius, and drawing upon authors such as Catullus and Martial, Weiner examines descriptions of the cinaedus and sexual violence in Roman humor. He suggests that, like horror, this humor depends upon responses of disgust and revulsion to the physical bodies – both biological and stylized – of these figures, as well as upon terror of the prospect of domination by these same bodies.
“Judging by the persistence of this macabre humor,” he concludes that “the Romans imagined sexualized scare-figures and fantastic encounters with them as at once funny, terrifying, revolting, and alluring, such that audiences couldn’t take their eyes away.”
