Lucilius, and the word has our modern sense of 'Satire,' the censorious criticism of life and manners of which Lucilius had set the type. In Sat. 2. 6. 17 he employs the plural of the separate poems: 'Quid prius illustrem satiris?' and it may be noticed that there he has in view another aspect of Satire, familiar also to Lucilius (as he points out in Sat. 2. 1. 30-36), but descending to him from the older 'Satura' or medley, of Satire namely as a vehicle for autobiographical details and the expression of personal likes as well as dislikes.

2. But it is noticeable that in the Epistles, when he looks back at the Satires and ranks them with his other kinds of composition he drops entirely the term 'Satirae.' His classification is 'Iambi,' 'Carmina,' ' Sermones.' In Epp. 1. 4. I the first place where he uses this term,-' sermonum nostrorum candide iudex,'-he is probably speaking of the Satires only; and so too in Epp. 2. 2. 60, where he qualifies it,—' Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro.' On the other hand in Epp. 2. 1. 250 'sermones... repentis per humum' seems meant to cover the Epistles as well 1.

The term had in the first place a self-depreciatory meaning, and is explained by the words in Sat. 1. 4. 39 f., where he declines the name of 'poemata ' for his writings, and designates them as 'sermoni propiora,' comparing them in this respect to Comedy, which is, nisi quod pede certo Differt sermoni, sermo merus.' They were poems, if poems at all, on the level of common conversation. But it was a deliberate substitution not only for 'poemata,' but also for the natural name, which he had at first given, of 'Satirae. It was meant to describe the poems as Horace wished them to be regarded, and if 'sermo' be taken in its common sense of 'talk,' it describes them very well 2. Whatever else they

1 The Scholiast's statement is 'Quamvis Satiram esse opus hoc suum Horatius ipse confiteatur, "sunt quibus in Satira videar nimis acer," tamen proprios titulos ei voluit accommodasse; nam hos priores duos libros Sermonum posteriores Epistularum inscripsit.' (Porph. on Sat. 1. I. I.) This speaks of Horace's ultimate distinction of titles for the Satires and Epistles, and is not inconsistent with his coupling the two together under the common title while the Epistles were still in process of composition. Keller's MSS. know of no title for the Satires but 'Sermones,' and it is the term used by the grammarians.

2 It is just possible that the term drew a further colour from its use of philosophical conversations (cp. 'Socratici sermones' Od. 3. 21. 9) and

are, they are imitations of conversation-'talks,' 'causeries'imitations of the best talk of a polished time-in its ease, its diversity of topic, its graceful transitions, its spice of personality, its play of repartee, its irony, its anecdotes, fables, quotations, allusions'. But the talk had a definite scope. It was such talk as Horace indicates in Sat. 2. 6. 71 f., on subjects of the highest interest, even if treated with a light hand. It was talk on the art of living. Even literature has an incidental rather than a primary place in it. He has to make his 'apologia' both for venturing to follow Lucilius and for venturing to differ from him; and this raises the question, which will occupy so much of his later writings, of the taste of the day in its unqualified preference of the older writers to the new classical school to which he attaches himself. He is also at first the conscious 'freedman's son,' the mark of envious tongues, and he has to justify his right to 'open his mouth' as though his ancestors as well as himself had 'had three names 2.' But the talk comes back again always to life and conduct, men's tastes and inconsistencies, the true path of happiness. We have sketches of life in Rome, of different phases of it from the point of view of bystanders, the honest countryman, the Stoic lecturer, the slave, the man of letters at the supper table of the rich upstart; sketches of talk as it shouldn't be, talk about eating and drinking; sketches of personal and social vices, of avarice and the transparent excuses for it, of censoriousness, of vulgar pushing, of legacyhunting.

Politics we miss altogether. Political satire belongs to the age before the proscriptions, to the age when power belonged to an oligarchy, cultivated at least enough to read and to be amused, not to the two masters, or the one master, of legions. And Horace was not by nature a politician. He had had an enthusiasm and especially by Cicero of his Dialogues. Dialogue plays a large part in all Horace's Satires, and in Book II we have almost entirely dramatic scenes in which Horace himself plays no part or a subsidiary one.

A characteristic feature of conversation is markedly imitated in the endings of the Satires, and of the Epistles which approach most nearly to this type. They end generally abruptly; but just as talk is ended, when the topic threatens to become wearisome, with a jest or personal sally, or again with an epigram, fable, or story, which sums up the matter and leaves no more to be said.

2 Juv. S. 5. 127.

a disappointment. He never became a turncoat ready at command to bespatter his old party. He was attracted by what promised to be an epoch of order and refinement. The régime of Octavianus meant to him the régime of Maecenas, with Virgil and Varius in the background. On the other hand his most continuous attraction was in moral questions. His standard was not ours; but he had been brought up well by a manly and virtuous father. He was an acute observer of life, he had good taste, strong sense, a natural shrinking from excess of every kind. The professed teachers of the day seem to have repelled rather than attracted him. The Stoic lecturers survive for us in his gibes at their tediousness and dogmatism and in his caricature of their paradoxical teaching. Epicureanism was recommended to him by having found an exponent in a great poet; and accordingly, in Sat. I at least, the influence of Lucretius dominates his philosophical views as well as his diction and rhythms. But he plays with Epicureanism as he does with Stoicism. His heart is with the 'abnormis sapiens.' He is beginning to feel, what he asserts more roundly in the Epistles, that Homer is a better teacher than any of the schools. He feels, no doubt, another influence in the treatises of Cicero, of whom he was a diligent student, but Cicero again teaches him to be interested in all philosophies, and to bind himself to none.

The term 'Sermones,' then, was part of the eipwveía, natural and assumed, which marks so deeply the Satires as well as the rest of Horace's writings. They were 'talks,' not 'Satires.' He was preaching, but he would preach in the least obtrusive way. He misdoubts his right to preach. He is always inclined to turn the laugh upon himself. He would escape more and more into the background and let others seem to speak. He is an interested, amused, hearer and learner, not a Stoic, nor even an Epicurean, dogmatist.

No one interfered with his patent to the title. Persius, who, even when in his Stoic fervour he departs furthest from Horace's spirit, copies his form most closely, gives no name to his own composition. Juvenal, to whom there are no uncertainties, no lights and shades in his confident and ruthless declamation, returned to the name of Satires1.

1 Dryden gives the palm to Juvenal as a satirist, but he professedly takes

B

§ 6. Personal names in the Satires.

If the Satires are imitations of conversation, they have naturally a personal element. Conversation starts from persons and incidents, it prefers concrete instances to abstract descriptions, a flavour of innocent malice is not out of place in it, its greatest adornment is the art of telling stories vividly and at the happy moment. As a whole it must be allowed that Horace's writing has this effect in a singular degree after the lapse of nineteen centuries. Even if Nomentanus and Opimius had no life outside his verses, he gives them life enough for his purpose. The interest of going behind what he has told us and seeing how far his characters can be identified with particular persons historically known, lies not so much in any gain of point to the Satire that may be looked for,— the persons are too obscure, as well as the results too uncertain, for that,—but in the light which it may throw on the methods of the poet, on his personal motives, and on his relations to his contemporaries.

The Scholiasts are prepared in most cases to tell us who each person named is. They had access to earlier sources of information, and no doubt in some cases they have preserved for us a true tradition. But they evidently blunder. They differ from one another, showing that the tradition itself was unsettled. They betray that they are merely paraphrasing the context, sometimes the context misunderstood. They are not trustworthy on the question on which they had the greatest advantage over us, viz. the question whether a name is borrowed or not from some earlier writer. An instance which seems to combine several of these defects is to be found in their notes on the 'causa Petilli,' a cause célèbre of the time, or one still remembered, to which Horace alludes in Sat. 1. 4. 94, and again in 1. 10. 26. In the first passage he gives him the fuller name of Petillius Capitolinus, and speaks of Satire in the narrower sense. When Pope' imitates Horace' he copies and even improves upon the wit of individual lines and passages, but he misses always much of the play, the delicacy, the inner unity of thought, and he puts Horace to very un-Horatian purposes. English 'Satire' has always had at its heart a personal bitterness which is entirely absent in Horace. The truest representation of his spirit in English literature is to be found in the gentler prose-satire of Steele and Addison.

the charge brought against him as that of theft, and of his having been acquitted. The Scholiasts write of this as with perfect knowledge, and say that Petillius was a friend of Augustus, who had charge of the Capitol, and was accused of having stolen the crown of Jupiter, but was acquitted by favour of Caesar. It has been pointed out however, as conclusively discrediting this story, (1) that a coin has been found with a temple on the obverse and the inscription Petillius Capitolinus, which seems to show that Capitolinus was a cognomen of the gens Petillia, and traced by them to some honourable origin; (2) that the crime of robbing Capitoline Jove of his crown was proverbial as early as Plautus: see Trin. I. 2. 46, Menaechm. 5. 5. 38.

It has been already suggested that, in looking for real names, a distinction is probably to be drawn between Horace's earlier Satires (represented chiefly by Sat. 1. 2) and the later ones. In the greater part of them his purpose was general. He was assailing follies, not gibbeting individuals', and we have no indications or traditions of his having vented personal dislikes by making his enemies 'slide into verse and hitch . . . in a rhyme.' At the same time he enforces his lessons by anecdotes, and sums up classes in individual names. He even justifies the method humorously by tracing it to the example of his good father, who taught him morals in a concrete shape, not by describing the character he was to aim at or avoid, but by pointing, as they passed in the street, to one and another as models or warnings (Sat. 1. 4. 105 f.). There are many cases in which we can imagine no motive for reticence, and in which the particularity of designation would lose all point if the particulars were not real. Such names are Sisyphus 2 and Turbo 3 the dwarfs; Fufius and Catienus, the actors; Lepos" the dancer; Horace's neighbours in his old Apulian home, Flavius the schoolmaster at Venusia, Servius Oppidius of Canusium, Ofellus 8,

1 We must exclude the bad poets and critics with whom he has both a personal and a literary quarrel, and whom he undoubtedly satirizes by name, Fannius, Hermogenes Tigellius, Demetrius, Furius Bibaculus, also the Stoic lecturers who bored him, Fabius and Crispinus. We exclude also the mysterious Canidia.

2 Sat. I. 3. 47. 5 Sat. 2. 6. 72.

8 Sat. 2. 2. 2, &c.

3 Sat. 2. 3. 310.
6 Sat. 1. 6. 72.

Sat. 2. 3. 60, 61.
Sat. 2. 3. 168.