Institutio Oratoria

Some of these jests turn on similarity of meaning. Of this kind was the witticism uttered by Vatinius when he was prosecuted by Calvus. Vatinius was wiping his forehead with a white handkerchief, and his accuser called attention to the unseemliness of the act. Whereupon Vatinius replied,

Though I am on my trial, I go on eating white bread all the same.

[*]( The accused habitually wore mourning. Calvus suggested that Vatinius should not therefore have a white handkerchief. Vatinius retorts, You might as well say that I ought to have dropped eating white bread. )

Still more ingenious is the application of one thing to another on the ground of some resemblance, that is to say the adaptation to one thing of a circumstance which usually applies to something else, a type of jest which we may regard as being an ingenious form of fiction. For example, when ivory models of captured towns were carried in Caesar's triumphal procession, and a few days later wooden models of the same kind were carried at the triumph of Fabius Maximus, [*]( Legatus of Caesar in Spain. The wooden models were so worthless compared with those of ivory that Chrysippus said they must be no more than the boxes in which Caesar kept the latter. ) Chrysippus [*]( Probably Chrysippus Vettins, a freedman and architeot. Presumably the poet Pedo Albinovanus. ) remarked that the latter were the cases for Caesar's ivory towns. And Pedo [*]( Probably Chrysippus Vettins, a freedman and architeot. Presumably the poet Pedo Albinovanus. ) said of a heavy-armed gladiator who was pursuing another armed with a net and failed to strike him,

He wants to catch him alive.