CHAPTER I.
ANCIENT GRECIAN NOODLES.
"
LD as the days of Hierokles!" is the exclamation of the "classical" reader on hearing a well-worn jest; while, on the like occasion, that of the "general" reader—a comprehensive term, which, doubtless, signifies one who knows "small Latin and less Greek"—is, that it is "a Joe Miller;" both implying that the critic is too deeply versed in joke-ology to be imposed upon, to have an old jest palmed on him as new, or as one made by a living wit. That the so-called jests of Hierokles are old there can be no doubt whatever; that they were collected by the Alexandrian sage of that name is more than doubtful; while it is certain that several of them are much older than the time in which he flourished, namely, the fifth century: it is very possible that some may date even as far back as the days of the ancient Egyptians! It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that honest Joseph Miller, the comedian, was not the compiler of the celebrated jest-book with which his name is associated; that it was, in fact, simply a bookseller's trick to entitle a heterogeneous collection of jokes, "quips, and cranks, and quiddities," Joe Millers Jests; or, The Wit's Vade Mecum. And when one speaks of a jest as being "a Joe Miller," he should only mean that it is "familiar as household words," not that it is of contemptible antiquity, albeit many of the jokes in "Joe Miller" are, at least, "as old as Hierokles," such, for instance, as that of the man who trained his horse to live on a straw per diem, when it suddenly died, or that of him who had a house to sell and carried about a brick as a specimen of it.
The collection of facetiæ ascribed to Hierokles, by whomsoever it was made, is composed of very short anecdotes of the sayings and doings of pedants, who are represented as noodles, or simpletons. In their existing form they may not perhaps be of much earlier date than the ninth century. They seem to have come into the popular facetiæ of Europe through the churchmen of the Middle Ages, and, after having circulated long orally, passed into literature, whence, like other kinds of tales, they once more returned to the people. We find in them the indirect originals of some of the bulls and blunders which have in modern times been credited to Irishmen and Scotch Highlanders, and the germs also, perhaps, of some stories of the Gothamite type: as brave men lived before Agamemnon, so, too, the race of Gothamites can boast of a very ancient pedigree! By far the greater number of them, however, seem now pithless and pointless, whatever they may have been considered in ancient days, when, perhaps, folk found food for mirth in things which utterly fail to tickle our "sense of humour" in these double-distilled days. Of the [Greek: Asteia], or facetiæ, of Hierokles, twenty-eight only are appended to his Commentary on Pythagoras and the fragments of his other works edited, with Latin translations, by Needham, and published at Cambridge in 1709. A much larger collection, together with other Greek jests—of the people of Abdera, Sidonia, Cumæ, etc.—has been edited by Eberhard, under the title of Philogelos Hieraclis el Philagrii Facetia which was published at Berlin in 1869.
In attempting to classify the best of these relics of ancient wit—or witlessness, rather—it is often difficult to decide whether a particular jest is of the Hibernian bull, or blunder, genus or an example of that droll stupidity which is the characteristic of noodles or simpletons. In the latter class, however, one need not hesitate to place the story of the men of Cumæ, who were expecting shortly to be visited by a very eminent man, and having but one bath in the town, they filled it afresh, and placed an open grating in the middle, in order that half the water should be kept clean for his sole use.
But we at once recognise our conventional Irishman in the pedant who, on going abroad, was asked by a friend to buy him two slave-boys of fifteen years each, and replied, "If I cannot find such a pair, I will bring you one of thirty years;" and in the fellow who was quarrelling with his father, and said to him, "Don't you know how much injury you have done me? Why, had you not been born, I should have inherited my grandfather's estate;" also in the pedant who heard that a raven lived two hundred years, and bought one that he should ascertain the fact for himself.