[73]
Sometimes we rebut a
[p. 479]
charge openly, as Cicero did when he refuted the
extravagant lies of Vibius Curius about his age:
“Well, then,” he remarked, “in the days when you
and I used to practise declamation together, you
were not even born.” At other times we may rebut
it by pretending to agree. Cicero, for example, when
Fabia the wife of Dolabella asserted that her age was
thirty, remarked, “That is true, for I have heard it
for the last twenty years.”
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
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