genuinely national. Next, it is the only one which has a continuous development, extending from the vigorous age of the Commonwealth into the second century of the Empire. Satire is pre-eminently the Roman literary organ of public opinion. The tone of the Roman satirist is always that of an ordinary Roman citizen who is frankly speaking his mind to his fellow-citizens. An easy, confidential manner in literature—as of one friend unbosoming himself to another—seems to have been peculiarly congenial to the ancient Italian taste. We may remember how the poet Ennius introduced into his epic a picture of the intimate converse between himself and the Roman general Servilius Geminus—a picture not unworthy of a special war-correspondent attached to head-quarters. Then Satire profited by the Italian gift for shrewd portraiture of manners. Take, for instance, the picture of a coquette, drawn some twenty centuries ago by Naevius:—
- "Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another she winks; she makes love to one, clings to another To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs[1]
The man who first established Satire as an outspoken review of Roman life was essentially a slashing journalist. This was Lucilius, who lived in the latter years of the second century B.C. He attacked the high-born statesmen who, as he put it, "thought
- ↑ Professor Sellar's rendering, Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 55.
