[135] De Oratore, lib. ii., lix.: "Perspicitis, hoc genus quam sit facetum, quam elegans, quam oratorium, sive habeas vere, quod narrare possis, quod tamen, est mendaciunculis aspergendum, sive fingas." Either invent a story, or if you have an old one, add on something so as to make it really funny. Is there a parson, a bishop, an archbishop, who, if he have any sense of humor about him, does not do the same? [136] Cicero, Pro Cluentio, l., explains very clearly his own idea as to his own speeches as an advocate, and may be accepted, perhaps, as explaining the ideas of barristers of to-day. "He errs," he says, "who thinks that he gets my own opinions in speeches made in law courts; such speeches are what the special cases require, and are not to be taken as coming from the advocate as his own." [137] When the question is discussed, we are forced rather to wonder how many of the great historical doings of the time are not mentioned, or are mentioned very slightly, in Cicero's letters. Of Pompey's treatment of the pirates, and of his battling in the East, little or nothing is said, nothing of Cæsar's doings in Spain. Mention is made of Cæsar's great operations in Gaul only in reference to the lieutenancy of Cicero's brother Quintus, and to the employment of his young friend Trebatius. Nothing is said of the manner of Cæsar's coming into Rome after passing the Rubicon; nothing of the manner of fighting at Dyrrachium and Pharsalia; very little of the death of Pompey; nothing of Cæsar's delay in Egypt. The letters deal with Cicero's personal doings and thoughts, and with the politics of Rome as a city. The passage to which allusion is made occurs in the life of Atticus, ca. xvi: "Quæ qui legat non multum desideret historiam contextam illorum temporum." [138] Jean George Greefe was a German, who spent his life as a professor at Leyden, and, among other classical labors, arranged and edited the letters of Cicero. He died in 1703.