oppressive. For men of second-rate talent it served to give their work
a spurious air of depth and originality to which it was not entitled.
The necessity of patronage engendered a fulsome flattery, while the
false tone of the schools of rhetoric,[82] aided perhaps by the
influence of the Stoical training so fashionable at Rome, led to a
marvellous conceit and self-complacency, of which a lack of humour was
a necessary corollary. These symptoms are seen at their worst during
the extravagant reign of Nero, though the blame attaches as much to
Seneca as to his pupil and emperor. Traces of a reaction against this
wild unreality are perhaps to be found in the literary criticism
scattered tip and down the pages of Petronius,[83] but it was not till
the extinction of Nero and Seneca that any strong revolt in the
direction of sanity can be traced. Even then it is rather in the sphere
of prose than of poetry that it is manifest. Quintilian headed a
Ciceronian reaction and was followed by Pliny the younger and for a
time by Tacitus. But we may perhaps trace a similar Vergilian reaction
in the verse of Silius, Statius, and Valerius.[84] Their faults do not
nauseate to the same extent of those of their predecessors. But the
mischief was done, and in point of extravagance and meretricious taste
the differense is only one of degree.

Satire alone attains to real eminence: rhetoric and epigram are its most
mordant weapons, and the schools of rhetoric, if they did nothing else,
kept those weapons well sharpened: the gross evils of the age opened an
ample field for the satirist. Hence it is that all or almost all that is
best in the literature of the Silver Age is satirical or strongly tinged
with satire. Tacitus, who had many of the noblest qualifications of a
poet, almost deserves the title of Rome's greatest satirist; the works
of Persius and Juvenal speak openly for themselves while many of the
finest passages in Lucans are most near akin to satire. It is true that