Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the
satire of Lucilius to the special circumstances, the manners, the
literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age. Horace's Satires conform
to Addison's great rule, which he lays down in the _Spectator_, that
the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly
in the dark. There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath
the polished raillery and the good-natured satire. His genial
_bonhomie_ prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his
animadversions.

Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which
in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world,
he was a keen and a close observer. Jealously he noted the
deteriorating influence these foreign elements were exercising on the
grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he
ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those
brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a
place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing
with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he
speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling
frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies.
Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance,
as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to
the absorbing problems of existence.

After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the
domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one
another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our
era, viz.:--Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally
representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal