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”.  One of Verres’s friends, who either was or had the reputation of being a Jew, had tried to get the management of the prosecution out of Cicero’s hands.  “What has a Jew to do with pork?” asked the orator.  Speaking, in the course of the same trial, of the way in which the governor had made “requisitions” of all the most valuable works of art throughout the island, “the broom”, said he, “swept clean”.  He did not disdain the comic element in poetry more than in prose; for we find in Quinitilian [2] a quotation from a punning epigram in some collection of such trifles which in his time bore Cicero’s name.  Tiro is said to have collected and published three volumes of his master’s good things after his death; but if they were not better than those which have come down to us, as contained in his other writings, there has been no great loss to literature in Tiro’s ‘Ciceroniana’.  He knew one secret at least of a successful humourist in society:  for it is to him that we owe the first authoritative enunciation of a rule which is universally admitted—­“that a jest never has so good an effect as when it is uttered with a serious countenance”.

[Footnote 1:  De Orat.  II. 54.]

[Footnote 2:  ‘Libellus Jocularis’, Quint. viii. 6.]

Cicero had a wonderful admiration for the Greeks.  “I am not ashamed to confess”, he writes to his brother, “especially since my life and career have been such that no suspicion of indolence or want of energy can rest upon me, that all my own attainments are due to those studies and those accomplishments which have been handed down to us in the literary treasures and the philosophical systems of the Greeks”.  It was no mere rhetorical outburst, when in his defence of Valerius Flaccus, accused like Verres, whether truly or falsely, of corrupt administration in his province, he thus introduced the deputation from Athens and Lacedaemon who appeared as witnesses to the character of his client.