s life, his
studious tastes, and his exceptional moral purity all contributed to
keep him ignorant of that world of evil which, as Professor Sellar has
pithily remarked, it is the business of the satirist to know. Hence he
is purely a philosophic or didactic satirist. Only one of his poems,
the first, fulfils the special end of satire by representing any phase
whatever of the life of his time, and pointing its moral.

Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the
vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with
unsurpassed brilliance and _verve_. Despite his sycophancy and his
fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the
sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his
contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and literary
pretenders either in ancient or modern times. No ancient has more
vividly painted the manners of antiquity. If Juvenal enforces the
lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of
society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer
pencil, and from a much more intimate contact with it.

In the first and second centuries of our era two other forms of satire
took their rise, viz.:--the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and
Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable
pictures of their respective periods. The _Tales_ of the two first are
conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy
blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or
Barry Lyndon. _The Supper of Trimalchio_, by Petronius, reproduces with
unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch.
_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary manners
in the second century, painting in vivid colours the reaction that had
set in against scepticism, and the general appetite that prevailed for
miracles and magic.

Finally, ancient satire may be said to close with the famous
_Dialogues_ of Lucian, which, although written in Greek, exhibited all
the best features of Roman satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and
the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed
in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of
the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it
had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference
towards the Pantheon left the Roman