regard to proper times, moderation and forbearance in jesting, and a
limitation in the number of jokes, will distinguish the orator from the
buffoon;" who says that "indelicacy is a disgrace, not only to the
forum, but to any company of well-bred people," and that neither great
vice nor great misery is a subject for ridicule. From all this we may
gather that Cicero was full of graceful and clever jocosity, but did not
indulge in what was vapid and objectionable. Both by precept 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
Cæsar'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