ou did even at a philosopher.
When the man asked--'Whether anybody wanted to know anything?' you said
you had been wanting to know all day when it would be dinner-time. The
fellow expected you to say you wanted to know how many worlds there were,
or something of that kind".[1]

[Footnote 1: These professional philosophers, at literary dinner-parties,
offered to discuss and answer any question propounded by the company.]

He is said to have been a great laugher. Indeed, he confesses honestly
that the sense of humour was very powerful with him--"I am wonderfully
taken by anything comic", he writes to one of his friends. He reckons
humour also as a useful ally to the orator. "A happy jest or facetious
turn is not only pleasant, but also highly useful occasionally;" but he
adds that this is an accomplishment which must come naturally, and cannot
be taught under any possible system.[1] There is at least sufficient
evidence that he was much given to making jokes, and some of them which
have come down to us would imply that a Roman audience was not very
critical on this point. There is an air of gravity about all courts of
justice which probably makes a very faint amount of jocularity hailed as a
relief. Even in an English law-court, a joke from the bar, much more from
the bench, does not need to be of any remarkable brilliancy in order to be
secure of raising a laugh; and we may fairly suppose that the same was the
case at Rome. Cicero's jokes were frequently nothing more than puns, which
it would be impossible, even if it were worth while, to reproduce to an
English ear. Perhaps the best, or at all events the most intelligible, is
his retort to Hortensius during the trial of Verres. The latter was said
to have feed his counsel out of his Sicilian spoils--especially, there was
a figure of a sphinx, of some artistic value, which had found its way from
the house of the ex-governor into that of Hortensius. Cicero was putting
a witness through a cross-examination of which his opponent could not see
the bearing. "I do not understand all this", said Hortensius; "I am no
hand at solving riddles". "That is strange, too", rejoined Cicero, "when
you have a sphinx at home". In the same trial he condescended, in the
midst of that burning eloquence of which we have spoken, to make two puns
on the defendant's name. The word "_Verres_" had two meanings in
the old Latin tongue: it signified a "boar-pig", and also a "broom" or
"sweeping-brush