Note 32 — Chapter VIII

The chief social vices which Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone, rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality in using it32. These were opposite results of a sudden influx of wealth among a people trained through many generations to habits of thrift and self-restraint, and, through this accumulated vital force, unaccompanied, as it was, with much capacity for refined enjoyment, animated by a strong craving for the coarser enjoyments of life. The intensity and concentrativeness of the Roman temperament also tended to produce those one-sided types of character, which are the favourite objects of satiric portraiture. The parasites and spendthrifts, the misers and money-makers of Horace's Satires and Epistles, Maenius and Avidienus for instance, are among the most strongly marked of his personal sketches. Lucilius witnessed the same tendencies in his time and exposed them with greater freedom. The names which are typical of certain characters in Horace, such as Nomentanus, Pantolabus (probably a nickname) Maenius and Gallonius, had first been taken by Lucilius from the streets and dinner-tables of Rome. This indifference to the claims of personal feeling, in which Lucilius emulates the license of the old Greek comedy, although sanctioned by the approval of Horace in a poet of an earlier age, would probably have been forbidden by the greater urbanity and decorum of the Augustan age.