Institutio Oratoria

There is also a form of misrepresentation which has its basis in irony, of which a saying of Gaius Caesar will provide an example. A witness asserted that the accused attempted to wound him in the thighs, and although it would have been easy to ask him why he attacked that portion of his body above all others, he merely remarked,

What else could he have done, when you had a helmet and breastplate?

Best of all is it when pretence is met by pretence, as was done in the following instance by Domitius Afer. He had made his will long ago, and one of his more recent friends, in the hopes of securing a legacy if he could persuade him to change it, produced a fictitious story and asked him whether he should advise a senior centurion who, being an old man, had already made his will to revise it; to which Afer replied,

Don't do it: you will offend him.

But the most agreeable of all jests are those which are good humoured and easily digested. Take another example from Afer. Noting that an ungrateful client avoided him in the forum, he sent his servant [*](Lit. the slave employed to name persons to his master.) to him to say,

I hope you are obliged to me for not having seen you.

Again when his steward, being unable to account for certain sums of money, kept saying,

I have not eaten it: I live on bread and water,

he replied,

Master sparrow, pay what you owe.

Such jests the Greeks style ὑπὸ τὸ ἦθος [*]( The meaning is dubious and the phrase cannot be paralleled and is probably corrupt. ) or adapted to character.

It is a pleasant form of jest to reproach a person with less than would be possible, as Afer did when, in answer to a candidate who said,

I have always shown my respect for your family,

he replied, although he might easily have denied the statement,

You are right, it is quite true.

Sometimes it may be a good joke to speak of oneself, while one may often raise a laugh by reproaching a person to his face with things that it would have been merely bad-mannered to bring up against him behind his back.

Of this kind was the remark made by Augustus, when a soldier was making some unreasonable request and Marcianus, whom he suspected of intending to make some no less unfair request, turned up at the same moment:

I will no more grant your request, comrade, than I will that which Marcianus is just going to make.

Apt quotation of verse may add to the effect of wit. The lines may be quoted in their entirety without alteration, which is so easy a task that Ovid composed an entire book against bad poets out of lines taken from the quatrains of Macer. [*]( Aellilius Macer, a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. The work presumably consisted of epigrams, four lines long. ) Such a procedure is rendered specially attractive if it be seasoned by a spice of ambiguity, as in the line which Cicero quoted against Lartius, a shrewd and cunning fellow who was suspected of unfair dealing in a certain case,

1. Had not Ulysses Lartius intervened.

The author, presumably a tragic poet, is unknown. Lartis= Luertius, son of Laertes.

Or the words may be slightly altered, as in the line quoted against the senator who,