illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the
inventor and the most distinguished master--that form of composition,
in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched
strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of satire,
evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may
more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture. As a
natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no
longer are esteemed so indispensable. In this style Juvenal has had
many imitators, but no superiors. His satires represent the final
development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of
exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of
vices, public and private, which were assailing the welfare of the
state. They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and
shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a
sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that
burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the
language for phrases of opprobrium--these were the agents enlisted by
Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.

Persius, on the other hand, was the philosophic satirist, whose
devotion to Stoicism caused him to see in it a panacea for all the
evils which Nero brought on the empire. The shortness of his life, his
studious tastes, and his exceptional moral purity all contributed to
keep him ignorant of that world of evil which, as Professor Sellar has
pithily remarked, it is the business of the satirist to know. Hence he
is purely a philosophic or didactic satirist. Only one of his poems,
the first, fulfils the special end of satire by representing any phase
whatever of the life of his time, and pointing its moral.

Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the