The History of Court Fools. Dr. Doran
was kept by a dull owner, that his own stupidity might seem wit by comparison.
That a noble Roman maintained slaves whose wit should entertain himself and his friends, we know from several instances. The same slaves were also employed to lighten the last hours, and to render death easy to their masters—if they could. Nay, it must be confessed that it seems they sometimes succeeded. Witness the case of Petronius Arbiter, that magnificent Consul, who almost renders vice attractive, like Boccaccio, by writing of it in choice and elegant (yet mournful) phraseology. When that very superb gentleman was stretched on his death-couch, he might have remarked, with the Irish squire, that he died in perfect ease of mind, for he had never denied himself anything. But Petronius could not die easily without a little stimulant. He felt himself ennuyé, and he sent for his wittiest friends and his choicest slaves. Of the latter he freed some and whipped others, and he found a mild pleasure in both. But the dearest solace of this dying Roman noble was in the amusing stories and ridiculous epigrams recited to him. With these he amused his fancy till his jaws suddenly fixed in a fit of laughter, and the jesters around look down upon a corpse. Thus died an accomplished Roman gentleman A.D. 66.
But we are departing from the official fool, of whom it is said, that, with his place and privileges properly marked in a household, he was not known in Europe till the period of the Lower Empire. It is certain that the stern Attila brought professional jesters, as well as irresistible warriors, with him across the Roman frontiers. When the ambassadors of Theodosius the Younger were entertained at a banquet by the Hun, the pomp, gravity, and tremendous drinking were accompanied by an immoderate amount of foolery. “A Moorish and a Scythian buffoon,” says Gibbon, “successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators, by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd speeches, and the strange unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without a change of countenance, maintained his stern and inflexible gravity.” We hear, too, of the presence of a Harlequin at the state ceremonies of the great barbarian and dignified chief. It is, however, indisputable that the professional, though perhaps not exactly the court fool, was known in Rome nearly two hundred years before the period of Attila. To do honour to the accession of Gallienus (when Valerian was alive, but a captive in Persia), numbers of Persian prisoners were paraded at the festival in Rome. At this festival, certain buffoons, we are told, committed an act of audacity for which the common crowd of spectators had not courage. They crossed over among the prisoners, and curiously and deliberately scanned the features of every man there. “Gallienus,” as I have noticed in ‘Monarchs Retired from Business,’ “expected some mirth, but seeing nothing come of it, and that the buffoons were retiring with a disconsolate look, he asked the meaning of the episode. ‘Well,’ said they, with a little hesitation, ‘we went over to these Persians to see if we might discover among them the great Valerian, your gracious divinity’s father.’ Gallienus thought this a very sorry joke indeed. He ordered the buffoons to be bound together, and to be burnt alive in one batch. It was a very serious matter to joke with, and it was a mortal matter to joke against, this Emperor of Rome.”
We come to a later illustration in the Baron de Reiffenburg’s book (‘Le Lundi,’ p. 251), where it is stated that Theophilus, Emperor of Constantinople, found pleasure in witnessing the follies of a jester, Danderi, whose spirit of curiosity led him to the discovery that the Empress Theodora had little images in her oratory to which she prayed. The fool was not cunning in betraying the secret to the Iconoclast husband of Theodora. The Empress, more crafty, persuaded Theophilus that the images were only dolls, for the amusement of their children. So, at least, says the legend, which does discredit to the most accomplished of Eastern Emperors, though he had a hatred for trade, and a love for gaudy toys and jewellery.
Before leaving this part of my subject, let me notice another Court appendage from which ancient monarchs drew incentives to mirth—namely, the Dwarfs. These sometimes rank among the Moriones, and as they formed a portion of the Court household, parents often made dwarfs of their children, by stunting their growth, in order to obtain profit by them. The most clever exhibited their little prowess, in full armour, in mimic fights which sometimes terminated seriously to the combatants, in wounds of certain gravity. Augustus did not disdain either to converse, or gossip rather, and play at various games with them;—or to listen to them chattering and see them playing with each other. By some writers, this taste of Augustus is denied, but it may be believed, since of one dwarf, Lucius, he had a statue sculptured, the eyes of which were of precious stones. That these little personages sometimes exercised great influence may be seen in a passage of the sixty-first chapter of the Tiberius (in Suetonius’s “Lives”), wherein it is said:—“A person of Consular dignity, in his Annals, has this passage, that at a great feast, where he himself was also present, the question was put suddenly and loudly to Tiberius by a dwarf, who was standing in waiting near the table among the dirty buffoons (‘inter copreas’), ‘Why Paconius, who had been condemned for treason, was still living?’ ” Suetonius adds indeed that the dwarf was sent to prison for being impertinent, but also that Tiberius, thus reminded of the existence of an enemy, sent orders to the Senate, that speedy care might be taken for his execution. Domitian was the Emperor who especially delighted in putting arms into the hands of his dwarfs, and setting them to pink out each other’s little lives. From the Court the fashion reached wealthy people generally, and Dio, in his ‘History of Rome,’ tells us of these small personages being kept by Roman ladies, in whose rooms they ran about all day long, and perfectly naked. The fashion did not cease till after the accession of Alexander Severus, who drove from his Court the whole tribe of dwarfs, male and female, and indeed other equally unseemly appendages to the household of a grave and dignified prince. They became matters of attraction to the mob, and being vulgar, are no more heard of in the palaces of kings and the mansions of nobles, till a later period and in highly civilized Christian courts. Let us do with them as Alexander Severus did, and consider now the condition of the more modern Court Fool, though in doing so we may have to look occasionally to a more remote antiquity than that at which I close this Chapter. It will perhaps be found that kings and their fools must, for a time, have had a rather pleasant time of it. “He,” so ran an old proverb quoted by Seneca, “he who thinks to achieve every object that enters his head, must either be a born king or a born fool.” Herein, it is supposed, is intimated the proximity in degrees of happiness of the respective individuals, who could neither be called to account for things done nor for words uttered.
THE FOOL BY RIGHT OF OFFICE.
When Erasmus praised Folly, it was only by making Folly advocate her own cause. After all, her pleading neither recommends her cause, nor says much for the wit of the pleader. Folly, in the abstract, has been denounced alike by Scripture and ancient heathen sages. “All men are fools,” was once a received text. Over the text, some have laughed, some have cried, and upon it, or its equivalent, divines have preached sermons now mirthful now melancholy. “If I wish to look at a fool,” says Seneca modestly, “I have not far to go. I have only to look in a mirror.” A sharper saying still was once uttered by Rhodius, a physician of Marburg, who had adorned the front of his house with full-length portraits of all the lawyers and doctors in the city, himself in the centre, and all in the dress of the professional buffoon. “You have a large number of thorough fools painted on your walls,” once remarked a passer-by. “Ay, ay,” rejoined Rhodius, “but there are still more who pass this way and look at them.” He was something of the opinion of Schuppius of Hamburg, who used to remark that in this world, the fools outnumbered the men; and the Emperor Maximilian II. delicately expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that every young fellow must be pulled by fools’ strings, for seven years, and that if, during that time, he forgot himself for an instant, he had to re-commence his seven years’ service. This potentate distinguished the dullest of his counsellors by the title of the King of Fools. On once addressing a prosy adviser by this title, the gentleman neatly enough replied, “I wish, with all my heart, I were King of Fools; I should have a glorious kingdom of it, and your Imperial Majesty would be among my subjects.”
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