Mind your language | 1 November 2008

‘I hate jokes,’ said my husband affably, and added: ‘Hwumph!’ The latter was an oral marker as he heaved his body from his armchair to the sideboard where the contents of the whisky bottle needed adjusting. With the former remark, I concurred, for he meant formalised jokes (‘Have you heard the one…?) that emerge from the ether like a flu virus. The internet has changed the dissemination of these, as it has changed the way quotations arrive in waves. A quotation from Cicero has been applied to our economic crisis: ‘The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.’

It is not really by Cicero, and sounds unlike anything an ancient Roman would have said. Rome had no overseas aid budget or unemployment benefit. Fortunately, what the internet mars, the internet can mend. I found a handy discussion at the Snopes website which said that in a letter to The Chicago Tribune (20 April, 1971), Professor John Collins had reported that the quotation originated in A Pillar of Iron (1965) a fiction about Cicero’s life by Taylor Caldwell.

Another classical reference has been bouncing around for a year or so. ‘Gordon reminds me of a quotation from Tacitus about one of the early Roman emperors [Galba],’ wrote a Daily Telegraph reader, Mr Martin Greenwood, shortly after Mr Brown assumed the Prime Ministership: ‘Omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset.’ (‘Everyone thought that he was capable of government, until he tried.’) A letter to the Times made the same point this May, and so did Mr Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail three weeks on (having already used the tag in January).