So, anyone have any recent insight as to what a “Bean farce” was? Two references, The Apocolocyntosis and Cicero:
Olim inquit magna res erat deum fieri: iam fabam mimum fecistis… (Apoco. 9.3)
sed heus tu! videsne consulatum illum nostrum, quem Curio antea ἀποθέωσιν vocabat, si hic factus erit, fabam mimum futurum? (Cic. Att. 1.16)
Have you looked at the commentary in Cambridge edition of Divi Claudii Apokolokyntosis? It references a mention in Hermes 92, 1964 pp. 251 ff. contrasting the common idea of life after death with apotheosis.
Well, yes, but my interest is in the bean farce.
No nibble on this one? I did find an interesting article (on JSTOR) which discusses the two passages:
Perfume on Lentils
Lionel Pearson
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association
Vol. 94 (1963), pp. 176-184 (9 pages)
But he’s much more interested in ἀποθέωσις than the bean farce, other than to be skeptical that such a thing really existed, “as the textual emendations show.”
This is from the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, Herzog u. Schmidt, München, 2002:
https://books.google.com/books?id=TsE28cSPWtgC&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=faba+mimus&source=bl&ots=KukxDXdC3Z&sig=ACfU3U10twqcCCY2cBkWPr0Xv-Jdpwar7w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwis18-qmLDlAhXRVN8KHe4CAnkQ6AEwBnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
The last sentence is probably what you’re interested in:
Perhaps the likewise anonymous expression Faba mimus belongs to the time of Sulla, and was a byword for something coarse or worthless.
At the top of the entry (Lit.1) there are instances where it is mentioned in various scholarly articles.