Page:Cicero (Collins 1871).djvu/124

112 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 Quintilian 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."

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 Lacedæmon who appeared as witnesses to the character of his client.