t and
practice he approved good verbal humour. The better class of puns was
used in the literature of the time, as we find by St. Paul and others,
not in levity, but merely as embellishments.[22]

Cicero replied to Vibius Curius, who was telling a falsehood about his
age: "Then when we declaimed at the schools together, you were not
born;" and to Fabia, Dolabella's wife, who said she was thirty, "No
doubt, for I have heard you say so twenty years." When he saw Lentulus,
his cousin--a little man girt with a big sword: "Who," he asked, "has
fastened my cousin to that sword?" and on being shown a colossal bust of
his brother, who was also small, he exclaimed, "The half of my brother
is greater than the whole." One day Cicero had supped with Damasippus,
and his host had said--putting some inferior wine before him--"Drink
this Falernian, it is forty years old!" "It bears its age well," replied
Cicero.

We have a most interesting collection of good sayings in "The Orator,"
which although not spoken by Cicero himself, were those which he had
from time to time noticed, and probably jotted down. Here is one of
Caesar's (Strabo). A Sicilian, when a friend made lamentation to him that
his wife had hanged herself upon a fig tree: "I beseech you," he said,
"give me some shoots of that tree that I may plant them." Some one asked
Crassus whether he should be troublesome if he came to him before it was
light. Crassus said, "You will not." The other rejoined, "You will order
yourself to be awakened then." To which Crassus replied, "Surely, I said
that you would not be troublesome."

To return to the Caesars. The humorous vein which we have traced in the
family descended to Augustus--the great nephew of Julius. Some of his
sayings, which have survived, show him to have been as pleasant in his
wit as he was proverbially happy in his fortunes.

When the inhabitants of Tarraco made him a fulsome speech, telling him
that they had raised an altar to him as their presiding deity, and that,
marvellous to relate, a splendid palm tree had grown up on it: "That
shows," replied the Emperor, "how often you kindle a fire there." To
Galba, a hunchback orator, who was pleading before him, and frequently
saying, "Set me right, if I am wrong," he replied, "I can easily correct
you, but I cannot set you right."

The following will give a slight idea of the variety of his humour.

When he heard that, among the children under two years old whom Herod