rudiments of their poetry, were written before they had any communication with the Greeks, or indeed any knowledge of that people.

And here it will be proper to give the definition of the Greek satiric poem from Casaubon before I leave this subject.  “The ‘satiric,’” says he, “is a dramatic poem annexed to a tragedy having a chorus which consists of Satyrs.  The persons represented in it are illustrious men, the action of it is great, the style is partly serious and partly jocular, and the event of the action most commonly is happy.”

The Grecians, besides these satiric tragedies, had another kind of poem, which they called “silli,” which were more of kin to the Roman satire.  Those “silli” were indeed invective poems, but of a different species from the Roman poems of Ennius, Pacuvius, Lucilius, Horace, and the rest of their successors.  “They were so called,” says Casaubon in one place, “from Silenus, the foster-father of Bacchus;” but in another place, bethinking himself better, he derives their name ὰπὸ τοῦ σιλλαίνειν, from their scoffing and petulancy.  From some fragments of the “silli” written by Timon we may find that they were satiric poems, full of parodies; that is, of verses patched up from great poets, and turned into another sense than their author intended them.  Such amongst the Romans is the famous Cento of Ausonius, where the words are Virgil’s, but by applying them to another sense they are made a relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets.  Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque, and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous meaning.  Thus in Timon’s “silli” the words are generally those of Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns.  But the Romans not using any of these parodies in their satires—sometimes indeed repeating verses of other men, as Persius cites some of Nero’s, but not turning them into another meaning—the “silli” cannot be supposed to be the original of Roman satire.  To these “silli,” consisting of parodies, we may properly add the satires which were written against particular persons, such as were the iambics of Archilochus against Lycambes, which Horace undoubtedly imitated in some of his odes and epodes, whose titles bear sufficient witness of it: I might also name the invective of Ovid against Ibis, and many others.  But these are the underwood of satire rather than the timber-trees; they are not of general extension, as reaching only to some individual person.  And Horace seems to have purged himself from those splenetic reflections in those odes and epodes before he undertook the noble work of satires, which were properly so called.