The ancients generally thought violent laughter undignified. Cf. Isocrates Demon. 15, Plato Laws 732 C, 935 B, Epictetus Encheirid. xxxiii.4, Dio Chrys. Or. 33.703 R. Diogenes Laertius iii.26, reports that Plato never laughed excessively in his youth. Aristotle's great-souled man would presumably have eschewed laughter (Eth. iv.8, Rhet. 1389 b 10), as Lord Chesterfield advises his son to do.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, June 16, 2023
Undignified Laughter
Paul Shorey, ed., Plato, The Republic, Vol. I: Books I-V (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 211 (note on 3.3.388e):