Institutio Oratoria

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,