In the days of King Philip, the Macedonian, whenever a man told an extremely witty story, he was pretty sure to be met with the remark, “Ah, that comes from the Sixty.” It was as much as doubting the originality of the wit. “The Sixty” was, in fact, a club of wits. They met in Athens, not at a tavern, but in the temple of Hercules. We should as soon expect to hear of a convivial body of wits assembling every Saturday night in “Rowland Hill’s Chapel.” They were fellows who had the very highest opinion of their own abilities, for they regularly entered in a book all the witticisms of the evening. This was, probably, the very first jest-book ever put together. To listen to it, when the Secretary took it with him to private parties, must have been an antepast of ‘Punch.’ The precious book has perished, but Athenæus has preserved the names of a few of the members, which, however, are not worth repeating, though it may be stated, that the owners had also nicknames; and one tall, clever, nimble fellow, Callimedes, was familiarly hailed by his fellow-clubbists as “the Grasshopper.” Philip heard of this merry, social, witty company, and longing to know more of them, their sayings and doings, he did not indeed invite them to his distant court, but he sent them a talent (nearly £200 sterling), and requested the loan of the last volume of the transactions of the “Sixty Club.” The book was duly despatched; and perhaps the loan of a volume was never paid for at so high a rate: the authors thus played the part of court fools by deputy. Their jokes were stereotyped, and had a long and merry life of it. It was useless for any man to fire one off as his own, for the source was instantly discovered, and the company would derisively call out, “An Old Sixty!” just as dull retailers of faded jests are suppressed, in our own day, by the cry of, “An Old Joe!”
Philip is said to have possessed his own court fool in Clisophus. Flögel says, that the latter excited shouts of laughter by his imitations of his royal master’s style, voice, manner, and even infirmities. But, according to Athenæus, Clisophus seems to have been a parasite, who imitated his patron out of flattery, and did not mimic him in order to excite risibility. At other courts there were mimics who played the fool before their sovereign lords, by caricatured imitations of fencers, singers, and even orators,—especially of their defects. The most celebrated, perhaps, was Herodotus, a burly namesake of the father of history, who kept the court of Antiochus ever merry by his mimicry, and who was named, par excellence, Logomimus.
The fools and the philosophers were not always identical, and they often came in contact, as was to be expected. We have an instance in the buffoon Satyrion, named by Lucian, and the grave Alcidamas, who wrote a treatise on death. The sage could not tolerate the fun and the Egyptian accent of the ugly and close-cropped fool; and when the latter called the man of wisdom a “lap-dog,” the philosopher challenged him to single combat. Some of the guests were ashamed, and some laughed, to see sciolist and sage heartily belabouring each other; but the laughter was universal when the philosopher, beaten to a mummy, confessed himself vanquished, and afterwards stood as mute as a courtesan in a Greek play.
Socrates (as I have previously remarked) is said, by more than one writer, ancient and modern, to have united in his own person the philosopher and the fool. His ugliness, deformity, and uncouthness,—his childish play, his extravagant dancing, his inclination to laugh at everything,—all these and more have been cited as foundations for reckoning him among the jesters. Zeno, according to Cicero, especially styled him the “Athenian buffoon,” which was probably meant for a compliment. The best description of him is that of Alcibiades, in Plato, who says that Socrates resembled the large images of Silenus, which were filled with little statuettes of the gods. Flögel rejects the picture of Socrates, represented by Aristophanes in the ‘Clouds,’ as “suspicious.” But Socrates has nothing of the fool in him in that play, except that he is represented as proprietor of the Thinking-Shop, and deriving powers of humbug and circumlocution, from the clouds. In this play, the recognized freedom of the fool, as regards liberty of speech at the expense of the audience, is exercised by the characters “Just Cause” and “Unjust Cause,” as the following sample will show:—
“Unj. Now, then, tell me: from what class do the lawyers come?
“Just. From the blackguards.
“Unj. Very good! And the public speakers?
“Just. Oh, from the blackguards, also.
“Unj. ——And now look; which class most abounds among the audience?
“Just. I am looking.