and with no ulterior motive in mind set down accurately the doings of his upstart characters.  For instance, when Trimalchio’s chef has three white pigs driven into the dining-room for the ostensible purpose of allowing the guests to pick one out for the next course, with the memory of our own monkey breakfasts and horseback dinners in mind, we may feel that this is a not improbable attempt on the part of a Roman parvenu to imitate his betters in giving a dinner somewhat out of the ordinary.  Members of the smart set at Rome try to impress their guests by the value and weight of their silver plate.  Why shouldn’t the host of our story adopt the more direct and effective way of accomplishing the same object by having the weight of silver engraved on each article?  He does so.  It is a very natural thing for him to do.  In good society they talk of literature and art.  Why isn’t it natural for Trimalchio to turn the conversation into the same channels, even if he does make Hannibal take Troy and does confuse the epic heroes and some late champions of the gladiatorial ring?

In other words, much of that which is satirical in Petronius is so only because we are setting up in our minds a comparison between the doings of his rich freedmen and the requirements of good taste and moderation.  But it seems possible to detect a satirical or a cynical purpose on the part of the author carried farther than is involved in the choice of his subject and the realistic presentation of his characters.  Petronius seems to delight in putting his most admirable sentiments in the mouths of contemptible characters.  Some of the best literary criticism we have of the period, he presents through the medium of the parasite rhetorician Agamemnon.  That happy phrase characterizing Horace’s style, “curiosa felicitas,” which has perhaps never been equalled in its brevity and appositeness, is coined by the incorrigible poetaster Eumolpus.  It is he too who composes and recites the two rather brilliant epic poems incorporated into the Satirae, one of which is received with a shower of stones by the bystanders.  The impassioned eulogy of the careers of Democritus, Chrysippus, Lysippus, and Myron, who had endured hunger, pain, and weariness of body and mind for the sake of science, art, and the good of their fellow-men, and the diatribe against the pursuit of comfort and pleasure which characterized the people of his own time, are put in the mouth of the same roue Eumolpus.

These situations have the true Horatian humor about them.  The most serious and systematic discourse which Horace has given us, in his Satires, on the art of living, comes from the crack-brained Damasippus, who has made a failure of his own life.  In another of his poems, after having set forth at great length the weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, Horace himself is convicted of being inconsistent, a slave to his passions, and a victim of hot temper by his own slave Davus.  We are reminded again of the literary