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 under the principate satire had to be employed with caution; under the first two dynasties it was compelled to be general in tone: it was not until after the fall of Domitian, under the enlightened rule of Nerva and Trajan, that it found a freer scope and was at least allowed to lash the vices of the present under the names of the past.