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.

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

Master sparrow, pay what you owe.

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,

You are right, it is quite true.

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.

although he had

1. What men call wisdom is a legacy,

Probably from a lost comedy.

as when one man replied to another, a worthless fellow, who had fallen down and asked to be helped to his feet,

Let someone pick you up who does not know you.

I do not understand these riddles.

You ought to, then,

as you have got the Sphinx at home.

Effects of mild absurdity are produced by the simulation of folly and would, indeed, themselves, be foolish were they not fictitious. Take as an example the remark of the man who, when people wondered why he had bought a stumpy candlestick, said,

It will do for lunch.

He has sold his house.

as the man did who asked a witness, who alleged that lie had been wounded by the accused, whether he had any scar to show for it. The witness proceeded to show a huge scar on his thigh, on which lie remarked,

I wish he had wounded you in the side.

You judge my character by your own

Yes, Sir, and the handwriting is genuine, too!

Such I have either learned from others or discovered from my own experience to be the commonest sources of humour. But I must repeat that the number of ways in which one may speak wittily are of no less infinite variety than those in which one may speak seriously, for they depend on persons, place, time and chances, which are numberless.

I have, therefore, touched on the topics of humour that I may not be taxed with having omitted them; but with regard to my remarks on the actual practice and manner of jesting, I venture to assert that they are absolutely indispensable. To these Domitius Marsus, who wrote an elaborate treatise on Urbanity, adds several types of saying, which are not laughable, but rather elegant sayings with a certain charm and attraction of their own, which are suitable even to speeches of the most serious kind: they are characterized by a certain urbane wit, but not of a kind to raise a laugh.

And

Urbanity is a certain quality of language compressed into the limits of a brief saying and adapted to delight and move men to every kind of emotion, but specially suitable to resistance or attack according as the person or circumstances concerned may demand.

since in the same book he asserts that many speakers have revealed their urbanity in narrative. And a little later he gives the following definition, which is, as he says, based on the views expressed by Cato:

Urbanity is the characteristic of a man who has produced many good sayings and replies, and who, whether in conversation, in social or convivial gatherings, in public speeches, or under any other circumstances, will speak with humour and appropriateness. If any orator do this, he will undoubtedly succeed in making his audience laugh.