Those who succeeded to the imperial purple proved very different from their illustrious predecessor, and in Persius the severity of Roman satire re-appears.  We could scarcely expect a man who lived under Nero, and after the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius to write with the mild placidity of the Augustan poet.  Moreover, the satires of Persius were written at an early age—­twenty-eight, and youth always feels acutely, and expresses strongly.  Some of his attacks are evidently aimed at Nero, but his principal object is to denounce the vices of the times.  Hence, indolence and prurient literature are stigmatised.  He ridicules the extremes of extravagance, and of that parsimony by which it is usually accompanied.  “Am I on a festive day to have a nettle dressed for me, and a smoked pig’s cheek with a hole in its ear, in order that that grandson of yours may be surfeited with goose liver, and indulge in patrician amours.  Am I to be a living anatomy that his pope’s stomach may shake with fat."[23] Alluding to the absurdity of the prayers generally offered up, he uses language worthy of a Christian.  “You ask for vigour, but rich dishes and fat sausages prevent the gods from granting your behest.  You ask what your fleshly mind suggests.  What avails gold in sacrifice?  Offer justice to God and man—­generous honour, and a soul free from pollution.”

In Persius we miss the light geniality of Horace and the pure language of the Augustan age, but we mark the complexity and finesse of a later date, a form of thought bespeaking a comprehensive grasp, and suitable to subtle minds.  But as regards his humour it depends much on exaggeration, and is proportionably weak, and beyond this we have little but the coining of some words,[24] the using others in unaccustomed senses, and a large seasoning of severity.  He evidently aimed rather at being corrective than amusing, and his covert attacks upon Nero were, no doubt, well understood.  Humour of a poor kind was evidently fashionable at the day—­the Emperor himself wrote Satires and was so fond of comic performances that he first encouraged and rewarded a celebrated pantomimic actor named Paris, and then put him to death for being his rival in the mimetic art.  Even Seneca could not resist the example of his contemporaries, and we find the sedate philosopher attacking his enemy with severe ridicule.  Claudius had him sent into exile for eight years to the picturesque but lonely Island of Corsica; and Seneca who liked something more social and luxurious, held him up in a satire bordering upon lampoon.  The fanciful production was called the Apolokokyntosis of Claudius; that is his apotheosis, except that, instead of the Emperor being deified, he is supposed to be “gourdified,” changed not into a god, but into a pumpkin.  Seneca, after deriding Claudius’ bodily defects, accuses him of committing many atrocities, and finally sends him down from heaven to the nether world, where a new punishment is invented for him—­he is to be always trying to throw dice out of an empty box.