[54]
Such puns are more successful with things
than names. It was, for example, a neat hit of
Afer's when he said that Manlius Sura, who kept
rushing to and fro while he was pleading, waving
his hands, letting his toga fall and replacing it, was
not merely pleading, but giving himself a lot of
needless trouble.1 For there is a spice of wit about
the word satagere in itself, even if there were no
resemblance to any other word.
1 This pan cannot be reproduced. Watson attempts to express it by “doing business in pleading” and “overdoing it.” But “overdoing it” has none of the neatness of salagere, which is said to have “a spice of wit about it,” since it means lit. “to do enough,” an ironic way of saying “to overdo it.”
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