Inger N.I. Kuin, University of Virginia
One of the most disturbing aspects of the hard-to-date Greek joke collection Philogelos is the casual and cruel way in which it features enslaved men, women, and children. A case in point: ‘A friend asks a scholastikos who is traveling abroad: “Would you buy me two fifteen year old enslaved boys?” He answers: “If I cannot find those I will buy you one thirty year old.’ (12 Thierfelder) The collection as a whole is organized into groups of jokes about specific stereotyped stock characters, such as the scholastikos in this joke (variously translated as “idiot,” “egghead,” or “wannabe intellectual”), bad doctors, and several ethnicities, such as people from Kyme and
Abdera. In this paper I will argue that while in Philogelos “the slave” as a stock character does not populate their own subset of jokes, they nonetheless act out various stereotypical characteristics which, in turn, draw on several earlier variants of the stock character of “the slave.”
Recent scholarly interest in the Philogelos has been focused on the stereotype of the scholastikos (Beard 2014, 185-209; West 2017; Baldwin 2019), while the issue of ethnic stereotypes in the collection has been downplayed (Beard 2014, 191-193). Conversely, in the scholarly conversation about race and ethnicity in antiquity of the past decade the Philogelos has gone unmentioned, likely due to its relative obscurity as a text, and the same is true of recent work on slavery. Out of the 265 jokes of Philogelos twelve feature enslaved people explicitly, while another eight do so implicitly. In this latter category fall several jokes where objects or animals are featured as stand-ins for enslaved people, similar to other imperial literature, such as Lucian’s True Histories 1.29 (cf. Sabnis 2011), Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (cf. Bradley 2000), and the doxographical tradition (Diogenes Laërtius 6.29).
In the collection enslaved people can be stereotyped as “other” because of their origin or their skin color (12, 151a), they are sexualized (12, 57, 151a, 251), and they are depicted as disposable (18, 57). At the same time, similar to the servus callidus from Roman comedy, many jokes feature “smart slaves” who act as a foil to the idiotic scholastikos (21, 193), or take a strong interest in obtaining freedom (100, 122). The instability of “the slave” character raises questions about the context in which these jokes circulated and their relationship to other literary genres, but most importantly it opens up new avenues for thinking about the use and subversion of stereotypes in ancient popular literature like the Philogelos collection.