The Jests Of Hierocles And Philagrius - Newly Translated From The Greek

by Charles Clinch Bubb

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

114 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2010

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ancient Greek jokebook with a heavy dril vibe ("thinking of inventing a new type of person to get mad at on here. maybe people who carry too many keys around.. i dont know yet"). Loads of "doctor doctor!" jokes and absent-minded prof jokes. Most of em are recognisable as jokes (or anyway dumb reversals). Maybe not surprising since our theatre (and so films and so TV) is based on theirs. Then there's stuff like this:

57. [Someone] advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a slave to do away with the child. He replied, “Bury your own children before you advise me to destroy mine.”

(Is the gag that he views the slave child as an heir, like a RUBE?)

A misogynist bereaved of his wife put on mourning at the funeral. When someone asked, "Who has entered into eternal peace?" he answered, "Me, bereft of this woman."

7 snorts out of 264 jokes.

A miser writing his will appointed himself heir.

A pedant asked the price of the clothing of people he met. When his father heard of this and condemned him, he replied, "Father, you have been persuaded by slander and not by a man."
His father said, "Such a one told me."
"And did you really give heed to someone who doesn't even possess a cloak worth 50 drachmas?"

Someone reviled a witty fellow: "I had your wife as a free gift."
He replied, "[By contract] I have to endure her; what did you do to deserve it?"

Two pedants were walking together and one of them, seeing a black hen, said, "Perhaps her rooster is dead."

A pedant was writing to his father from Athens and, being vain because he had been educated, he added, "I pray you, seek to be the defendant in a trial for your life so I may show you real public
speaking."

A pedant, a bald man, and a barber pitched camp in a wilderness and agreed that each should stand watch four hours in turn. It fell to the barber to watch first and the pedant second. For a laugh, he shaved the head of the sleeping pedant, and woke him. Rubbing his head and finding himself bare, the pedant said, "What a worthless fellow that barber is - he woke the bald man instead of me."

A certain person coming to a pedant physician said, "Doctor, when I awake from sleep I have a dizziness for half an hour and then I recover." The physician replied, "Get up after the half hour."

Free here.

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a child, I had a big jokebook, one of those that purports to hold some ridiculous number of jokes, though even at the time I could see that lots of them were basically the same gag, scattered throughout the book's many pages so you don't notice. It was perfect idle reading, and perhaps the only kind of reading that was acceptable when you had a friend over, because you could take turns flipping through the book at random and reading out jokes you thought were decent. You couldn't read it any other way, because of course there's no point to reading an endless stream of disconnected jokes, you get habituated to it and even the good ones become boring. Riffing on a specific joke is of course fine in conversation, but this dies naturally within a single digit of iterations, and only a stringing narrative can excuse sustained gag delivery, as all stand-up comics demonstrate. Just reading more than 20 jokes together is an insult to the form.

So, biographical digression done with, here's my reaction to reading 264 ancient Greek jokes one after another with no more refreshment of the palate than my own natural attention lapses can furnish: they were alright, actually.

There were a few that were puns that did not survive translation, and a smaller number that weren't obviously puns but made no sense whatsoever. A bunch were the sort of thing I recognise as being in the genre of humour but never found funny (e.g., a bunch were almost literally 'this person's breath smells so nobody likes him'), but that was as true for my childhood book. More importantly, a decent third or so of the jokes were in some way funny, and a few even made me snort with laughter.

The material is mostly fairly timeless and universal, and it was amusing to see the ancestors of things like the 'Doctor, Doctor' format, but the most interesting bits came when the culture gap was exposed by the joke. Some examples:

"A friend said to a pedant who was going on a journey, 'I wish you to purchase for me two slave boys of fifteen years each.' He replied 'If I do not find such, I shall buy for you one of thirty years.'"

(A thirty-year-old slave is not fungible with two young sex-slaves.)

"A pedant visited his mother by night and being beaten for this by his father, he said 'It is only a short time since you were with my mother and you suffered nothing from me, and now you are angry at finding me once with my mother.'"

(Having sex with your wife was a few-times-a-month thing, boys seem often to sleep with their fathers.)

"A father advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a slave woman to do away with the child. He replied, 'First bury your own children before you advise me to destroy mine.'"

(Not the first to highlight this, but the pedant is the butt of the joke, thinking your bastard slave-child counts as a child is worth mockery.)

"A pedant whilst voyaging asked the helmsman what hour it was. Upon his replying that he did not know, he asked how long a time he had steered the boat. He answered three years. 'How is it,' he asked, 'that I having bought a house six months before, when the sun comes into the courtyard guess at the hour, but you are not able to reckon from the boat having steered it for such a long time?'"

(I wonder how many people now could tell you the time from the sun's location on their property.)


I also liked the foreword's quote from this 1803 review by Sidney Smith, explaining a core element of the bull and wit joke genres:

A bull is an apparent incongruity, and a real incongruity of ideas, suddenly discovered. And if this account of bulls be just, they are (as might have been supposed) the very reverse of wit; for as wit discovers real relations, that are not apparent, bulls admit apparent relations that are not real. The pleasure arising from wit proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be similar, in which we suspected no similarity. The pleasure arising from bulls proceeds from our discovering two things to be dissimilar, in which a resemblance might have been suspected... It is clear that a bull cannot depend on mere incongruity alone; for if a man were to say that he would ride to London upon a cocked hat, or that he would cut his throat with a pound of pickled salmon, this, though completely incongruous, would not be to make bulls, but to talk nonsense. The stronger the apparent connection, and the more complete the real disconnection of the ideas, the greater the surprise and the better the bull. The less apparent, and the more complete the relations established by wit, the higher gratification does it afford.

And also this scathing (and accurate) comment on an earlier translation of some of the jokes:

A few jests were translated in 1741 and published in the Gentleman's Magazine for that year. These have been attributed by Lowndes to Dr. Samuel Johnson, and are to be found in an appendix to this work. They form an interesting Johnson item which many bibliographers have overlooked. Doctor Johnson was a contributor to the magazine at that time and if they were not translated by him, they well might have been, judging from their ponderous and involved style which takes the real point out of the joke.

The collection took a couple of hours to read, mostly because I was typing a few quotes to friends. For the time investment, pays off well enough.

[Gmllama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this online via google books, so this is about the content not the specific translation.

As others have mentioned you're probably only going to get a few actual snorts out of this but I think it would be quite strange to read these jokes specifically to get a laugh. I'm unlearned when it comes to Greek history but being able to see what passed as amusing or funny to humans so long ago is an interesting mental exercise. We haven't really changed much, have we? Farts are universally funny (isn't the supposed oldest joke from ancient Babylon or Sumer something about people not being unable to laugh at a fart?), you can't help but laugh at overly miserly folks, and there have always been a subset of folk who think jokes about "the 'ol ball and chain" are actually worthy of consideration as comedy.

Almost every single one of these short jokes had me pondering the context behind them: Just how common was bad breath? How revered were doctors? What common culture/etiquette underlies some of these situations? Also even though there's a language barrier I'm surprised at how many of the puns still hold true in modern English (sometimes albeit, with a bit of explanation).

A few random things I believe I have learned about ancient culture by reading these:
- Ancient folk are eating a lot of figs
- Patricide for inheritance/station was perhaps rampant enough to joke about it?
- Even back then at least some people knew diviners/soothsayers were full of it
- Making fun of people who pursue high intelligence at the expense of wisdom... literal/actual classic.

Overall this is a quick read. Agree that it's the kind've thing that might be fun to take turns reading with others to discuss and compare. Give it it a shot if you're willing to try and put yourself in a different place, pass on by if you just want a big book of jokes.

[Jaymz · Rating 3 out of 5]

couple bangers mostly mid

[Ayush · Rating 2 out of 5]

Historically relevant perhaps, but largely meh.