The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric _Margites_. Homer's character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities. But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely personal invective to satire directed against a class; and Greek satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.), the author of the famous _Satire on Women_, and Hipponax of Ephesus, reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic. But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from its surpassing distinction in two domains--in the comico-satiric drama of Aristophanes, and in the _Beast Fables_ of 'AEsop'. In later Greek literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate through expending itself on unworthy objects. It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of ancient satire. The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into quasi-lyrical form. These songs gradually developed a concomitant form of dialogue styled saturae, a term denoting "miscellany", and derived perhaps from the _Satura lanx_, a charger filled with the first-fruits of the year's produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In Ennius, the "father of Roman satire", and Varro, the word still retained this old Roman sense.