Both are admirable
pictures of their respective periods. The _Tales_ of the two first are
conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy
blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or
Barry Lyndon. _The Supper of Trimalchio_, by Petronius, reproduces with
unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch.
_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary manners
in the second century, painting in vivid colours the reaction that had
set in against scepticism, and the general appetite that prevailed for
miracles and magic.
Finally, ancient satire may be said to close with the famous
_Dialogues_ of Lucian, which, although written in Greek, exhibited all
the best features of Roman satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and
the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed
in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of
the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it
had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference
towards the Pantheon left the Roman world literally without a rational
creed. As a satire on the old Hellenic religion nothing could be racier
than _The Dialogues of the Gods_ and _The Dialogues of the Dead_.
It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast
chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of
the ancient world and the dawn of humanism.
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