which presents a great variety of characters and shows no regard for conventional morals.  It is especially interesting to notice the element of parody, which we have already observed in Petronius, in both kinds of literary productions.  The theory that Petronius may have had the composition of his Satirae suggested to him by plays of this type is greatly strengthened by the fact that the mime reached its highest point of popularity at the court in the time of Nero, in whose reign Petronius lived.  In point of fact Petronius refers to the mime frequently.  One of these passages is of peculiar significance in this connection.  Encolpius and his comrades are entering the town of Croton and are considering what device they shall adopt so as to live without working.  At last a happy idea occurs to Eumolpus, and he says:  “Why don’t we construct a mime?” and the mime is played, with Eumolpus as a fabulously rich man at the point of death, and the others as his attendants.  The role makes a great hit, and all the vagabonds in the company play their assumed parts in their daily life at Croton with such skill that the legacy-hunters of the place load them with attentions and shower them with presents.  This whole episode, in fact, may be thought of as a mime cast in the narrative form, and the same conception may be applied with great plausibility to the entire story of Encolpius.

We have thus far been attacking the question with which we are concerned from the side of the subject-matter and tone of the story of Petronius.  Another method of approach is suggested by the Menippean satire,[87] the best specimens of which have come down to us in the fragments of Varro, one of Cicero’s contemporaries.  These satires are an olla podrida, dealing with all sorts of subjects in a satirical manner, sometimes put in the dialogue form and cast in a melange of prose and verse.  It is this last characteristic which is of special interest to us in this connection, because in the prose of Petronius verses are freely used.  Sometimes, as we have observed above, they form an integral part of the narrative, and again they merely illustrate or expand a point touched on in the prose.  If it were not aside from our immediate purpose it would be interesting to follow the history of this prose-poetical form from the time of Petronius on.  After him it does not seem to have been used very much until the third and fourth centuries of our era.  However, Martial in the first century prefixed a prose prologue to five books of his Epigrams, and one of these prologues ends with a poem of four lines.  The several books of the Silvae of Statius are also preceded by prose letters of dedication.  That strange imitation of the Aulularia of Plautus, of the fourth century, the Querolus, is in a form half prose and half verse.  A sentence begins in prose and runs off into verse, as some of the epitaphs also do.  The Epistles of Ausonius of the same century are compounded of prose and a