nfluence these foreign elements were exercising on the
grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he
ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those
brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a
place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing
with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he
speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling
frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies.
Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance,
as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to
the absorbing problems of existence.

After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the
domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one
another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our
era, viz.:--Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally
representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal
illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the
inventor and the most distinguished master--that form of composition,
in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched
strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of satire,
evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may
more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture. As a
natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no
longer are esteemed so indispensable. In this style Juvenal has had
many imitators, but no superiors. His satires represent the final
development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of
exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of
vices, public and private, which were assailing the welfare of the
state. They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and
shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a
sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that
burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the
language for phrases of opprobrium--these were the agents enlisted by
Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.

Persius, on the other hand, was the philosophic satirist, whose
devotion to Stoicism caused him to see in it a panacea for all the
evils which Nero brought on the empire. The shortness of hi