Jests
（
ἀστεῖα, σκώμματα,
ioci, iocularia, facete
dicta). In their fun-making, the Greeks and Romans seem to have differed somewhat as do
the French and the English of to-day—the Greeks inclining more to wit and the Romans
to humour. The Greeks admired what was neat in form, terse, pointed, sparkling; the Romans
what was provocative of laughter. This is, in fact, the essential difference between the
sal Atticum and the
acetum Italicum. (See
Epigramma.) The witty sayings of the most famous
Greeks, preserved for us in the pages of Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, have a higher quality
about them than mere fun. Such is that of Diogenes the Cynic, who, when journeying from Sparta
to Athens, was asked where he was going, and replied, “From the men's apartments to
the women's.” The same person, observing the son of a courtesan throwing
stones among a crowd, said to him, “Take care lest you hit your father!” A
stock joke of modern times is told of him, for seeing an unskilful archer practising, he went
and sat by the target, saying, “Now I shall be out of harm's way.” Clever,
also, is the saying of Aristotle on being told that a person had been abusing him in his
absence: “He may even beat me, if he likes, in my absence.” Two of his
sayings anticipate two famous passages of the New Testament. Being asked how we should treat
our friends, he replied, “As we should wish our friends to treat us.” And
to one who inquired how students should get on, he said, “Pressing on upon those who
are before and not waiting for those who are behind.”
Parody and burlesque flourished among the Greeks from very early times, witness the
mockheroics of the
Batrachomyomachia (q. v.) and the other ludicrous imitations
of the Homeric poems, and so in Latin in the pseudo-Vergilian comic epic
Culex.
As early as Epicharmus (in the fifth century B.C.) tragic themes were burlesqued, as in later
times by
Rhinthon (q.v.), who gave his name to this
species of composition (
fabula Rhinthonica); while
Aristophanes (q.v.) has filled his comedies with the richest kind of
drollery based upon the presentation of serious subjects in a comic light. Lucian's dialogues
are remarkable examples of clever burlesque and keen irony, which spares neither men nor gods.
See
Lucianus;
Parodia.
In later times special collections of
facetiae were made, one of the
best known being the
Ἀστεῖα ascribed to Hierocles. This is
the source of many jokes that are professedly modern, and deals principally with the absurd
doings of pedants (
σχολαστικοί), which bear a strong family
likeness to many of the jokes that appear in the
Fliegende Blätter.
The following will serve as specimens of these ancient jests:
“A bookworm, wishing to teach his horse to be a small eater, gave him no food at
all. Finally the horse starved to death, whereupon the bookworm exclaimed, ‘What a
loss I have suffered! Just as he had learned to live without eating, he has gone and
died!’”—a story which reappears in modern fiction in Sir Walter
Scott's
Waverley, where it is put into the mouth of Evan Dhu Maccombich.
“A bookworm, meeting another of his own kind, said, ‘Why, I heard you
were dead!’ ‘And yet,’ replied the other, ‘you see
that I am alive.’ ‘Well,’ said the first, with a puzzled air,
‘I really don't know what to believe, for the party who told me is a much more
reliable person than you are.’”
Quintilian devotes a part of his treatise (vi. 3) to the discussion of humour, giving
copious examples from Roman sources. In it he deprecates the use of puns as being only a cheap
form of wit; yet punning was much practised by the Romans. Cicero was an inveterate punster,
much to the disgust of Pompey when they were associated together in the Civil War. Many of
these cheap jokes of his are preserved by Macrobius (ii. 2), by Plutarch in his life of the
orator, and Quintilian mentions a collection of them as having been made and published (vi. 3,
5) by Cicero's freedman Tiro. Another collection of them was made by C. Trebonius (
Ad
Fam. xv. 21, 1-3). Like books were made of Caesar's
ἀποφθέγματα. (Cf. C. F. W. Müller's ed. of Cicero, iv. 3, 341; and for
examples, the article describing
Puns in this
Dictionary.) Cato the Censor is said to have published a joke-book, but not, however, of his own sayings (
Cat. Mai. 2). For satirical wit, see
Satira.
