that they could blunder with impunity, and keep criticism at a distance by their rank." On the other hand, he did not spare plebeian offenders. As one of his successors says, "he bit deep into the town of his day, and broke his jaw-tooth on them." Literature and society also came under his censures. He lashes the new affectation of Greek manners and speech, the passion for quibbling rhetoric, the extravagance of the gluttons and the avarice of the misers. Even the Roman ladies of the time do not wholly escape. He criticises the variations of their toilettes. "When she is with you, anything is good enough; when visitors are expected, all the resources of the wardrobe are taxed." The writings of this trenchant publicist formed the great standing example of free speech for later Roman times. Horace eschews politics; indeed, when he wrote, political criticism had become as futile as it was perilous; but he is evidently anxious to impress on the Roman public that he is true to the old tradition of satire by fearlessly lashing folly and vice. Persius, who died at the age of twenty-eight in the reign of Nero, made Roman Satire a voice of public opinion in a brave and pure sense. Horace had been an accomplished Epicurean, who found his public among easy-going, cultivated men of the world. Persius spoke chiefly to minds of a graver cast: he summoned Roman citizens to possess themselves of a moral and intellectual freedom which no Cæsar could crush, the freedom given by the Stoic philosophy,—that philosophy which had moulded the jurisprudence
