He was met on his return to the capital by a man with a tame raven, which he had taught to say “Greetings to Caesar, our victorious commander.” Augustus was so impressed that he gave the man a substantial cash prize. It concerns the period just after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, at which Augustus (then known as Octavian, or just plain Caesar) defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra and effectively gained control of the entire Roman world. One of Macrobius’ anecdotes is, however, much more revealing. “Do you think you are handing a penny to an elephant” might have been a retort of inspired spontaneity to a man who was nervously presenting a petition (“now holding out his hand, now withdrawing it”) but it hardly seems worth the loving preservation that it has enjoyed. Sadly many of these quotations expose the frustrating distance between ancient humor and our own, or at least the difficulty of making good oral quips work in writing. In fact, even four centuries after his death, the scholarly Macrobius devoted several pages of his encyclopedia Saturnalia to a collection of Augustus’ bons mots, very much in the modern “Wit and Wisdom” genre. Their first emperor, Augustus, was particularly renowned for his sense of humor. The ancient Romans liked an emperor who could take-and make-a joke.
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