Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/47

 preserved, are enough to show the variety and humorous character of their contents, which covered many different subjects, social, philosophic, and political. Among them are the following;, apparently an attack upon the Cynics, the "Prohibitionists" of their day; , "the three-headed monster," perhaps an attack upon the First Triumvirate; , on suicide; ; , the ass who pretends to a taste for music; ; Tithonus, on old age; (the subject of Juvenal's fourteenth Satire); and Pransus paratus, which seems to have suggested the lines of our modern poet,

Serenely full, the epicure may say "Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."

We now come to the last and greatest form of Satura, which has stamped its name on the history of literature and the world, the Satire of Lucilius and Horace, of Persius and of Juvenal. 



C. Lucilius, proclaimed by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal as the founder of Roman Satire, was born at Suessa Aurunca, in Campania, in B.C. 148; he died in B.C. 103. If not actually the inventor of Roman satire, he was the first to mould it into that form which subsequently acquired consistency and xliii