the choice of his
subject and the realistic presentation of his characters. Petronius seems
to delight in putting his most admirable sentiments in the mouths of
contemptible characters. Some of the best literary criticism we have of
the period, he presents through the medium of the parasite rhetorician
Agamemnon. That happy phrase characterizing Horace's style, "curiosa
felicitas," which has perhaps never been equalled in its brevity and
appositeness, is coined by the incorrigible poetaster Eumolpus. It is he
too who composes and recites the two rather brilliant epic poems
incorporated into the _Satirae_, one of which is received with a shower of
stones by the bystanders. The impassioned eulogy of the careers of
Democritus, Chrysippus, Lysippus, and Myron, who had endured hunger, pain,
and weariness of body and mind for the sake of science, art, and the good
of their fellow-men, and the diatribe against the pursuit of comfort and
pleasure which characterized the people of his own time, are put in the
mouth of the same _roue_ Eumolpus.

These situations have the true Horatian humor about them. The most serious
and systematic discourse which Horace has given us, in his Satires, on the
art of living, comes from the crack-brained Damasippus, who has made a
failure of his own life. In another of his poems, after having set forth
at great length the weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, Horace himself is
convicted of being inconsistent, a slave to his passions, and a victim of
hot temper by his own slave Davus. We are reminded again of the literary
method of Horace in his Satires when we read the dramatic description of
the shipwreck in Petronius. The blackness of night descends upon the
water; the little bark which contains the hero and his friends is at the
mercy of the sea; Lichas, the master of the vessel, is swept from the deck
by a wave, Encolpius and his comrade Giton prepare to die in each other's
embrace, but the tragic scene ends with a ridiculous picture of Eumolpus
bellowing out above the roar of the storm a new poem which he is setting
down upon a huge piece of parchment. Evidently Petronius has the same
dread of being taken too seriously which Horace shows so often in his
Satires. The cynical, or at least unmoral, attitude of Petronius is
brought out in a still more marked way at the close of this same passage.
Of those upon the ill-fated ship the degenerates Encolpius, Giton, and
Eumolpus, who have wronged Lichas i