The satire which these three Ionians, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax, inaugurated in Greece was continued by the Attic comic poets. Satire in the Roman and the modern sense of the term never flourished among the Greeks. The life of the Agora, the Ecclesia, and the Theatre was too complete and free to need the supplement of rhetorical invective intended either for reading or for recitation. Of satirical comments upon individuals and of pasquinades of every kind the Greeks had plenty. We hear, for example, that Alcæus exercised his poetical talent in satirizing Pittacus, and one of the most considerable fragments of Anacreon contains a very ludicrous caricature of Artemon, his rival for the affections of a certain yellow-haired Eurypyle. But their satire did not incline to the form which the earlier writers of iambics had invented. It found its true sphere in the Dorian comedy of Epicharmus and the Athenian comedy of Aristophanes, who combined the personalities of Archilochus and the generalities of Simonides in his own consummate work of dramatic art. Among the lost treasures of Greek literature we have to regret few things more than the plays of the Syracusan Epicharmus, from whom we might have learned directly what now we can only infer--that the Dorians, when uncontrolled by the severe taste of Sparta, indulged a humor for drollery and sarcasm, which, though rougher than that of the Ionians, must have had its own flavor of raciness and fun. Roman satire maintained a strictly moral intention; _facit indignatio versus_ is the motto of Juvenal, while Horace holds the mirror of worldly philosophy to the follies and the vices of his age, and Persius applies the canons of Stoical ethics to the phenomena of society as he observed them. This is the lead which our modern satirists--the Regnier of France, the Dryden or the Pope of England, have followed. Greek literature furnishes no specimen of this species of composition. Wherever in the Comedies of Aristophanes, or the Dialogues of Lucian, or the Epigrams of the Anthology, we meet with satire, we find the simple motives of Archilochus and Simonides at work. Personal animosity gives a barb and a venom to the shaft; or the poet delineates with more or less of comic wit the social anomalies that have struck his fancy. Of serious invective and of moral preaching, the Greeks, in their satiric art at least, knew nothing. Plato himself is only accidentally a satirist in the sense of the term which we moderns have adopted from the Romans. FOOTNOTES: [65] _On the Sublime_, xxxiii. 5. [66] _Rep._, 365, c. [67] _Anth. Pal._, vii. 674. [68] _Philostr. Bioi Soph._, 620. [69] x. 1. 60. [70] It was rage that armed Archilochus with his own iambic. [71] Bergk, _Poetæ Lyrici_, p. 696. [72] _Ib._ p. 689. [73] Bergk, p. 691: Holding a myrtle-rod she blithely moved, And a fair blossoming rose; the flowing hair Shadowed her shoulders, falling to her girdle.