Then at the time when Caesar had a decree passed for distributing the land in Campania among his soldiers, many of the senators were strongly opposed to it and Lucius Gellius, who was about the oldest of them, declared that so long as he lived it should never be done. 'Let us wait, then,' said Cicero, 'since Gellius does not ask us to postpone things for long.'
...
Then there was a young man who was suspected of having given a poisoned cake to his father. This young man put on a very bold air and said that he proposed to give Cicero a bit of his mind. 'I would much prefer it,' said Cicero, 'to a bit of your cake.'
...
Then there was Marcus Appius who opened his speech in a lawsuit by saying that his friend had begged him to show care, eloquence, and integrity. 'And how can you be so hard-hearted,' said Cicero, 'as not to exhibit a single one of those qualities which your friend demanded of you?'
...
Once too he met Voconius in the company of his three daughters who were extremely ugly and he quoted the verse:
'Apollo never meant him to beget.'
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Ciceronian Humor, Part II
More excerpts from Plutarch's life of Cicero, in Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives by Plutarch, tr. Rex Warner (Penguin, 1958) :
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His sense of humour is sharp and funny but also quite cruel. He is not afraid to descend to the level of mocking his victim's physical attributes or state of health. I suppose that is in part cultural.
ReplyDeleteReading these quotes, it is easy to understand why, for all his charm, Cicero made such deadly enemies.
So much for the old 'sticks and stones' school song. I think it was Fulvia who supposedly stabbed with her hairpin the tongue in his disembodied head.
ReplyDeleteAlso coincidental that his own cognomen (at least in Plutarch's telling) comes from an ancestor's peculiar physical mark.