e in the drama, and the prosimetrum of the Menippean satire and of
Petronius, may be explained, and we see a possible line of descent from
comedy and this form of satire to the _Satirae_.

These various theories of the origin of the romance of Petronius--that it
may be related to the epic, to the serious heroic romance, to the
bourgeois story of adventure developed out of the rhetorical exercise, to
the Milesian tale, to the prologue of comedy, to the _verse-melange_ of
comedy or the mime, or to the prose-poetical Menippean satire--are not, of
necessity, it seems to me, mutually exclusive. His novel may well be
thought of as a parody of the serious romance, with frequent reminiscences
of the epic, a parody suggested to him by comedy and its prologue, by the
mime, or by the short cynical Milesian tale, and cast in the form of the
Menippean satire; or, so far as subject-matter and realistic treatment are
concerned, the suggestion may have come directly from the mime, and if we
can accept the theory of some scholars who have lately studied the mime,
that it sometimes contained both prose and verse, we may be inclined to
regard this type of literature as the immediate progenitor of the novel,
even in the matter of external form, and leave the Menippean satire out of
the line of descent. Whether the one or the other of these explanations of
its origin recommends itself to us as probable, it is interesting to note,
as we leave the subject, that, so far as our present information goes, the
realistic romance seems to have been the invention of Petronius.

Diocletian's Edict and the High Cost of Living

The history of the growth of paternalism in the Roman Empire is still to
be written. It would be a fascinating and instructive record. In it the
changes in the character of the Romans and in their social and economic
conditions would come out clearly. It would disclose a strange mixture of
worthy and unworthy motives in their statesmen and politicians, who were
actuated sometimes by sympathy for the poor, sometimes by a desire for
popular favor, by an honest wish to check extravagance or immorality, or
by the fear that the discontent of the masses might drive them into
revolution. We should find the Roman people, recognizing the menace to
their simple, frugal way of living which lay in the inroads of Greek
civilization, and turning in their helplessness to their officials, the
censors, to protect them from a demoralizat