". One of Verres's friends, who either was or had the
reputation of being a Jew, had tried to get the management of the
prosecution out of Cicero's hands. "What has a Jew to do with
_pork_?" asked the orator. Speaking, in the course of the same trial,
of the way in which the governor had made "requisitions" of all the most
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 Quinitilian [2] 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".

[Footnote 1: De Orat. II. 54.]

[Footnote 2: 'Libellus Jocularis', Quint. viii. 6.]

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

"Athenians are here to-day, amongst whom civilisation, learning, religion,
agriculture, public law and justice, had their birth, and whence they have
been disseminated over all the world: for the possession of whose city,
on account of its exceeding beauty, even gods are said to have contended:
which is of such antiquity, that she is said to have bred her citizens
within herself, and the same soil is termed at once their mother, their
nurse, and their country: whose importance and influence is such that the
name of Gre