La risa en la Antigua Roma

What made the Romans laugh? How did they understand laughter? Was Ancient Rome a society where pranks and jokes were lavished? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excesses of laughter were a force to be feared with their world of complicity, biting wit and irony? What role did laughter play in the world of law courts, the imperial palace, or circus shows? The well-known historian Mary Beard, Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2016, analyzes one of the most complex historical issues: what and how the ancient Romans laughed. She has based her research on a wide variety of writings of the time, ranging from essays on rhetoric to the first anthology of jokes, "Philogelos", some of which illustrate her analysis throughout the book. Although each society and time has its own sense of humor, Mary Beard's book leads us to the conclusion that the Romans are not alien to us. There is a certain continuity between his sense of humor and ours, since the ancient Romans had a concept of the joke as it is understood today in Europe. In other words, in addition to Roman Law, the Latin languages ??and everything we have inherited from Ancient Rome, we have one more element that has come to us from the Romans, the idea of ??a modern "joke" and, with it, a peculiar and shared sense of humor.