After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our era, viz.:--Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal 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 vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpassed brilliance and _verve_. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and literary pretenders either in ancient or modern times. No ancient has more vividly painted the manners of antiquity. If Juvenal enforces the lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer pencil, and from a much more intimate contact with it.