De Quincey,
accordingly, has argued that the more personal it became in its
allusions, the more it fulfilled its specific function. But such a view
is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to
lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling the fact that the
satirist has a reformative as well as a punitive duty to discharge. The
further we revert into the "deep backward and abysm of time" towards
the early history of the world, the more pronounced and overt is this
indulgence in broad personal invective and sarcastic strictures.
The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a
grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of
the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely
personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and
were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric _Margites_. Homer's
character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some
contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities.
But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely
personal invective to satire directed against a class; and Greek
satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved
brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms
the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.),
the author of the famous _Satire on Women_, and Hipponax of Ephesus,
reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.
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