Or the words may be slightly altered, as in the line quoted against the senator who,Had not Ulysses Lartius intervened.
The author, presumably a tragic poet, is unknown. Lartis= Luertius, son of Laertes.
[96]
Apt quotation of verse may add to the effect of
wit. The lines may be quoted in their entirety
without alteration, which is so easy a task that Ovid
composed an entire book against bad poets out of
lines taken from the quatrains of Macer.1 Such a
procedure is rendered specially attractive if it be
seasoned by a spice of ambiguity, as in the line
which Cicero quoted against Lartius, a shrewd and
cunning fellow who was suspected of unfair dealing
in a certain case,
1 Aellilius Macer, a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. The work presumably consisted of epigrams, four lines long.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
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