[75]
As regards making light of a charge, there
are two ways in which this may be done. We may
throw cold water on the excessive boasted of our
opponent, as was done by Gaius Caesar,1 when Pomponius displayed a wound in his face which he had
received in the rebellion of Sulpicius and which he
boasted he had received while fighting for Caesar:
“You should never look round,” he retorted, “when
you are running away.” Or we may do the same
with some charge that is brought against us, as was
done by Cicero when he remarked to those who
reproached him for marrying Publilia, a young unwedded girl, when he was already over sixty, “Well,
she will be a woman to-morrow.”
1 A cousin of the father of C. Julius Caesar.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
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