early writings of this kind have perished; and the first
extant Latin satirist, Lucilius, who lived in the second century B.C.,
devoted his pen to castigating the vices of contemporary society
and of living individuals. This style of writing, together with his
six-foot measure, called hexameter, was adopted by the ethical writers
who followed him, Horace, Persius, Juvenal; and so gave to the word
satire a meaning which it retains to-day. In more than one passage
Horace recognizes Lucilius as his master, and imitates him in what is
probably the earliest, certainly the coarsest and least artistic of his
poems; but maturer judgement, revolting later against the censorious
spirit and bad taste of the older writer, led him to abandon his model.
For good taste is the characteristic of these poems; they form a comedy
of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of
vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted
lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante
to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness
and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a
fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic.
"Conversations" we may rather call them; the polished talk of a
well-bred, cultured, practised worldling, lightening while they point
the moral which he ever keeps in view, by transitions, personalities,
ironies, anecdotes; by perfect literary grace, by the underlying
sympathy whereby wit is sublimed and softened into humour.

So he tells stories; often trivial, but redeemed by the lightness of
his touch, the avoidance of redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the
culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day
by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from
the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239), that he might enjoy
drinking at one draught a million sesterces, near a thousand pounds.
More than once he returns to castigation of the gluttony, which, though
not yet risen to the monstrosity described by Juvenal, was invading the
houses of the wealthy. He tells of two brothers--"a precious pair"--who
used to breakfast daily upon nightingales: of one Maenius, who ruined
himself in fieldfares (Ep. I, xv, 41). In a paper on the "Art of Dining"
he accumulates ironical gastronomic maxims (Sat. II, iv): as that oblong
eggs are to be preferred to ro