atire on Women_, and Hipponax of Ephesus,
reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.

But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from
its surpassing distinction in two domains--in the comico-satiric drama
of Aristophanes, and in the _Beast Fables_ of 'AEsop'. In later Greek
literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate
through expending itself on unworthy objects.

It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and
more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of
ancient satire. The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in
the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and
buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into
quasi-lyrical form. These songs gradually developed a concomitant form
of dialogue styled saturae, a term denoting "miscellany", and derived
perhaps from the _Satura lanx_, a charger filled with the first-fruits
of the year's produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In
Ennius, the "father of Roman satire", and Varro, the word still
retained this old Roman sense.

Lucilius was the first Roman writer who made "censorious criticism" the
prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of
Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire
of modern times, was the principal agent in fixing its present
polemical and urban associations upon a term originally steeped in the
savour of rustic revelry. In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to
be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty,
but, as far as one can yet see, to remain a joy for ever. The great
Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the
satire of Lucilius to the special circumstances, the manners, the
literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age. Horace's Satires conform
to Addison's great rule, which he lays down in the _Spectator_, that
the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly
in the dark. There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath
the polished raillery and the good-natured satire. His genial
_bonhomie_ prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his
animadversions.

Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which
in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world,
he was a keen and a close observer. Jealously he noted the
deteriorating i