Unlike the majority of post-Augustan poets, Juvenal is almost untouched by the Ovidian influence. As far as his metre has any ancestry, it is descended from the Vergilian hexameter, though with the licence of satire it claims greater liberty in its treatment of pauses and of elision. The post-Augustan poet with whom in this respect Juvenal has greatest affinity is Persius. For vigour and variety he far surpasses all other poets of the age; while even Persius, although at his best and in his more declamatory passages he is at least Juvenal's equal, does not maintain the same level of excellence, and his more frequent employment of the traditional dialogue of satire gives him fewer opportunities for striking metrical effect. As regards his diction Juvenal is equally remarkable. He has suffered little from the schools of rhetoric and has gained much. He is pointed and clear, without being either obscure[737] or mechanical. There is no vain striving after antithesis and no epigram for epigram's sake. Grotesque he is not seldom, but the grotesqueness is deliberate and effective, and no mere affectation. His one serious weakness is his lack of constructive power and his incapacity to preserve due proportion between the parts of his satires. The most glaring instances of this failing are to be found in the fourth, twelfth, and fourteenth satires, but except the third there is hardly a satire that can be regarded as wholly successful in point of construction. This defect, it may be admitted, is less serious in satire than in almost any other branch of literature. Such discursiveness was justified by the tradition and by the inherent nature of satire. But Juvenal offends in this respect beyond due reason, and only his extraordinary merits in other directions save him from the penalties of this failing.