domination of the Senate; and, in his plays, he treated some of the Senatorian chiefs with satire of a quality which, to judge from the extant specimens, was exceedingly mild. “Who had so quickly ruined the commonwealth?” was a query put in one of his comedies; and the reply was, “New speakers came forward—foolish young men.” In another piece, he alluded to the applauses bestowed on him as proving that he was a true interpreter of the public mind, and deprecated any great man interfering with him. A very slave in one of his comedies, he added, was better off than a Roman citizen nowadays. Contrast these remarks with the indescribable insults which Aristophanes had boldly heaped on the Athenian demagogues. Mild as Naevius was, however, he was not mild enough for the “foolish young men.” Having ventured to observe that the accession of certain nobles of high office was due to a decree of fate, he was promptly imprisoned; he was afterwards banished; and he died in exile. This seems to have been the first and last attempt of Roman Comedy to serve as an organ of popular opinion. The Roman reverence for authority was outraged by the idea of a public man being presented in a comic light on the boards of a theatre. On the other hand, Roman feeling allowed a public man to be attacked, in speaking or in writing, with almost any degree of personal violence, provided that the purpose was seriously moral. Hence the personal criticism of statesmen, which at Athens had belonged to Comedy, passed at Rome into another kind of composition. It became an element of Satire. The name of Satire comes, as is well known, from the _lanx satura_, the platter filled with first-fruits of various sorts, which was an annual thank-offering to Ceres and Bacchus. “Satire” meant a medley, or miscellany, and the first characteristic of Roman satire was that the author wrote in an easy, familiar way about any and every subject that was of interest to himself and his readers. As Juvenal says,— “Men’s hopes, men’s fear—their fond, their fretful dream— Their joys, their fuss—that medley is my theme.”