Three Dad Jokes from Ancient Greece for Father’s Day
A couple years ago I published a list of thirteen dad jokes from ancient Rome for Father’s Day. They were all in Latin, mostly by Cicero. This year I’d like to add three more from ancient Greece. All three are by Plutarch, the ancient Roman-Greek who wrote all kinds of wonderful stuff that isn’t read as often as it should be. Plutarch was the first to translate Cicero’s jokes from Latin to Greek, but it seems the good priest of Delphi had quite the funnybone of his own.
All three jokes come from a treatise titled Peri Dysopias (On Not Being a Pushover). My translation and notes will come out next year with Princeton University Press. Till then, notice how all three jokes skillfully deflect an inappropriate request. Now if you’re a dad, that’s a skill you can use!
1. A young man was the son of a distinguished military officer, but unimpressive himself. When he asked for a promotion, Antigonus told him,
“Around here, kid, we recognize attitude, not dad-itude.”
[Note: You probably think I’m just being cute with that word “dad-itude” here. Not so! The two key Greek words are ἀνδραγαθία (andragathia, “bravery,” as in the south-Italian criminal organization) and πατραγαθία (patragathia, “virtue of one’s father(s)”). The latter is a made-up word in Greek, just like daditude!]
2. Lysimache was a priestess in Athens. When some deliverymen brought the sacramental wine and chalices and asked her to pour them a “libation,” she quipped,
“Sorry, boys, can’t risk making a ‘customary observance’ of it.”
3. In the public baths a couple guys — the one a stranger, the other a notorious thief — wanted to borrow a man’s body groomer. The man used humor to get rid of both, quipping:
“You I don’t know; you, I do.”
That last one’s a classic, by the way. It appears as #150 in the late Roman-Greek joke book known as Philogelos. In the excellent (and free!) 2008 translation by Bill Berg, it goes:
A quick study is in the public bath. Two guys ask to borrow one of his strigils for scraping the olive oil off their bodies. One of them is a stranger, the other he recognizes as a thief. To the one he says, ‘No deal; I don’t know you.’ To the other: ‘No deal; I know you.’
Gift givers, take note! To judge from these jokes, it seems that male body groomers — a perennial recommendation for Father’s Day — never go out of style.
Mike Fontaine is Professor of Classics at Cornell University. His latest book, How to Get Over a Breakup, was published by Princeton University Press last week. It’s a translation of Ovid’s Remedies for Love, and it’s hilarious.
