Institutio Oratoria

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,

although he had

always in previous times been regarded as an utter fool, was, after inheriting an estate, asked to speak first on a motion—

1. What men call wisdom is a legacy,

Probably from a lost comedy.

where legacy is substituted for the original faculty. Or again we may invent verses resembling well known lines, a trick styled parody by the Greeks. A neat application of proverbs may also be effective,