Institutio Oratoria

I say this not because I object absolutely to all play on words capable of two different meanings, but because such jests are rarely effective, unless they are helped out by actual facts as well as similarity of sound.

For example, I regard the jest which Cicero levelled against that same Isauricus, whom I mentioned above, as being little less than sheer buffoonery.

I wonder,

he said,

why your father, the steadiest of men, left behind him such a stripy gentleman as yourself.

[*]( Here again the pun is virtually untranslatable. Varium is used in the double sense of unstable or mottled, with reference to the story that he had been scourged by his father. See above §25. )

On the other hand, the following instance of the same type of wit is quite admirable: when Milo's accuser, by way of proving that he had lain in wait for Clodius, alleged that he had put up at Bovillae before the ninth hour in order to wait until Clodius left his villa, and kept repeating the question,

When was Clodius killed?

, Cicero replied,

Late!

[*](sero may mean at a late hour or too late. ) a retort which in itself justifies us in refusing to exclude this type of wit altogether. Sometimes,

too, the same word may be used not merely in several senses, but in absolutely opposite senses. For example, Nero [*]( Cic. de Or. II. lxi. 248. Probably C. Claudius Nero victor of the Metaurus. ) said of a dishonest slave,

No one was more trusted in my house: there was nothing closed or sealed to him.

Such ambiguity may even go so far as to present all the appearance of a riddle, witness the jest that Cicero made at the expense of Pletorius, the accuser of Fonteius:

His mother,

he said,

kept a school while she lived and masters after she was dead.

[*](magister may mean a schoolmaster or a receiver ( magister bonorum )placed in charge of the goods to be sold. The phrase here has the same suggestion as having the bailiffs in the house. This passage does not occur in the portions of the pro Fonteio which survive. ) The explanation is that in her lifetime women of infamous character used to frequent her house, while after her death her property was sold. (I may note however that ludus, is used metaphorically in the sense of school, while magisiri is used ambiguously.)

A similar form of

jest may be made by use of the figure known as metalepsis, [*]( See VII. vi. 37. Substitution is the nearest translation. ) as when Fabius Maximus complained of the meagreness of the gifts made by Augustus to his friends, and said that his congiaria were heminaria: for congiarium [*](congiarium is derived from congius a measure equal to about 6 pints. It was employed to denote the largesse of wine or oil distributed to the people. Fabius coined the word henminaritm from hemina, the twelfth part of the congius. Fabius was consul in 10 B.C. and a friend of Ovid. ) implies at once liberality and a particular measure, and Fabius put a slight on the liberality of Augustus by a reference to the measure.

This form of jest is as poor as is the invention of punning names by the addition, subtraction or change of letters: I find, for instance, a case where a certain Acisculus was called Pacisculus because of some

compact

which he had made, while one Placidus was nicknamed Acidus because of his

sour

temper, and one Tullius was dubbed Tollius [*]( From toellre to take away. ) because he was a thief.