shyster lawyer, whose forehead is covered with sebaceous wens, is the
very acme of propriety; our first meeting; with the poet Eumolpus is a
beautiful study in background and perspective. Nineteen centuries have
gone their way since this novel was written, but if we look about us we
will be able to recognize, under the veneer of civilization, the
originals of the Satyricon and we will find that here, in a little corner
of the Roman world, all humanity was held in miniature. Petronius must
be credited with the great merit of having introduced realism into the
novel. By an inspiration of genius, he saw that the framework of
frivolous and licentious novels could be enlarged until it took in
contemporary custom and environment. It is that which assures for him
an eminent place, not in Roman literature alone, but in the literature
of the world.

a--INFLUENCE OF THE SATYRICON UPON LITERATURE. The vagrant heroes of
Petronius are the originals from whom directly, or indirectly, later
authors drew that inspiration which resulted in the great mass of
picaresque fiction; but, great as this is, it is not to this that the
Satyricon owes its powerful influence upon the literature of the world.
It is to the author's recognition of the importance of environment,
of the vital role of inanimate surroundings as a means for bringing out
character and imbuing his episodes and the actions of his characters with
an air of reality and with those impulses and actions which are common to
human experience, that his influence is due. By this, the Roman created
a new style of writing and inaugurated a class of literature which was
without parallel until the time of Apuleius and, in a lesser degree, of
Lucian. This class of literature, though modified essentially from age
to age, in keeping with the dictates of moral purity or bigotry, innocent
or otherwise, has come to be the very stuff of which literary success in
fiction is made. One may write a successful book without a thread of