Author: Caroline Wazer / Source: Atlas Obscura
In his 1698 Dictionary of the Greek and Roman Antiquities, translated into English in 1700, the French abbot-scholar Pierre Danet dedicated an entire entry to an Aedicula Ridiculi—in English, Little Temple of Ridicule—in Rome.
This chapel, he tells readers, was built on the spot where bad weather had forced the Carthaginian general Hannibal to give up on besieging the capital in 216 BC. “The Romans, upon this occasion, raised a very loud laughter,” Danet wrote, “and therefore they built a little oratory under the name of the God of Joy and Laughter.”Danet gave the temple’s precise location (along the Appian Way, at the second milestone outside the Porta Capena), but trying to find it in a guidebook today would be an exercise in frustration. There’s a simple reason for this: It never existed. A rather beautiful Roman structure does stand on the site he described, but it’s not a temple—instead, it’s now widely believed to be the tomb of a woman named Annia Regilla, who died nearly 400 years after Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. To give Danet some credit, he was far from alone in making this mistake.
Despite being fake, the Aedicula Ridiculi was commonly treated as fact in the early encyclopedias of Roman ruins put together by pioneering Italian and French antiquarians of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Bartolomeo Marliani, Onofrio Panvinio, and Jean-Jacques Boissard. Even after being debunked by archaeologists, the Temple of Ridicule would continue to pop up for centuries in texts written for general audiences as a fun factoid: As late as 1852, an essay on the history of wit in Dolman’s Magazine notes, as evidence that humans have always valued humor, that “the ancient Romans went so far as to erect a ridiculi aedicula, or chapel of laughter.”
It’s simple enough to understand how rumors of the temple took hold. Only two ancient texts are ever cited as evidence for its existence. The first is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which mentions in a section on birds that a shoemaker once buried his beloved pet raven “on the right-hand side of the Appian Way, at the second milestone from the City, in the field generally known as the ‘field of Rediculus’” (in Latin, campus Rediculi). The second is a fragment written by the second-century grammarian Festus: “The temple of Rediculus [fanum Rediculi] was outside the Porta Capena; it was so called because Hannibal, when on the march from Capua, turned back at that spot, being alarmed at certain portentous visions.”
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