“Old as the days of Hierokles!” is the exclamation of the “classical” reader on hearing a well-worn jest; while, on the like occasion, that of the “general” reader—­a comprehensive term, which, doubtless, signifies one who knows “small Latin and less Greek”—­is, that it is “a Joe Miller;” both implying that the critic is too deeply versed in joke-ology to be imposed upon, to have an old jest palmed on him as new, or as one made by a living wit.  That the so-called jests of Hierokles are old there can be no doubt whatever; that they were collected by the Alexandrian sage of that name is more than doubtful; while it is certain that several of them are much older than the time in which he flourished, namely, the fifth century:  it is very possible that some may date even as far back as the days of the ancient Egyptians!  It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that honest Joseph Miller, the comedian, was not the compiler of the celebrated jest-book with which his name is associated; that it was, in fact, simply a bookseller’s trick to entitle a heterogeneous collection of jokes, “quips, and cranks, and quiddities,” Joe Millers Jests; or, The Wit’s Vade Mecum.  And when one speaks of a jest as being “a Joe Miller,” he should only mean that it is “familiar as household words,” not that it is of contemptible antiquity, albeit many of the jokes in “Joe Miller” are, at least, “as old as Hierokles,” such, for instance, as that of the man who trained his horse to live on a straw per diem, when it suddenly died, or that of him who had a house to sell and carried about a brick as a specimen of it.

The collection of facetiae ascribed to Hierokles, by whomsoever it was made, is composed of very short anecdotes of the sayings and doings of pedants, who are represented as noodles, or simpletons.  In their existing form they may not perhaps be of much earlier date than the ninth century.  They seem to have come into the popular facetiae of Europe through the churchmen of the Middle Ages, and, after having circulated long orally, passed into literature, whence, like other kinds of tales, they once more returned to the people.  We find in them the indirect originals of some of the bulls and blunders which have in modern times been credited to Irishmen and Scotch Highlanders, and the germs also, perhaps, of some stories of the Gothamite type:  as brave men lived before Agamemnon, so, too, the race of Gothamites can boast of a very ancient pedigree!  By far the greater number of them, however, seem now pithless and pointless, whatever they may have been considered in ancient days, when, perhaps, folk found food for mirth in things which utterly fail to tickle our “sense of humour” in these double-distilled days.  Of the [Greek:  Asteia], or facetiae, of Hierokles, twenty-eight only are appended to his Commentary on Pythagoras and the fragments of his other works edited, with Latin translations, by Needham, and published at Cambridge in 1709.  A much larger collection, together with other Greek jests—­of the people of Abdera, Sidonia, Cumae, etc.—­has been edited by Eberhard, under the title of Philogelos Hieraclis el Philagrii Facetia which was published at Berlin in 1869.