The word satura has been afterwards applied to many other sort of mixtures; as Festus calls it a kind of olla, or hotchpotch, made of several sorts of meats. Laws were also called leges saturæ, when they were of several heads and titles, like our tacked bills of parliament: and per saturam legem ferre, in the Roman senate, was to carry a law without telling the senators, or counting voices, when they were in haste. Sallust uses the word,—per saturam sententias exquirere; when the majority was visible on one side. From hence it may probably be conjectured, that the Discourses, or Satires, of Ennius, Lucilius, and Horace, as we now call them, took their name; because they are full of various matters, and are also written on various subjects, as Porphyrius says. But Dacier affirms, that it is not immediately from thence that these satires are so called; for that name had been used formerly for other things, which bore a nearer resemblance to those discourses of Horace. In explaining of which, continues Dacier, a method is to be pursued, of which Casaubon himself has never thought, and which will put all things into so clear a light, that no farther room will be left for the least dispute.

During the space of almost four hundred years, since the building of their city, the Romans had never known any entertainments of the stage. Chance and jollity first found out those verses which they called Saturnian, and Fescennine; or rather human nature, which is inclined to poetry, first[Pg 52] produced them, rude and barbarous, and unpolished, as all other operations of the soul are in their beginnings, before they are cultivated with art and study. However, in occasions of merriment they were first practised; and this rough-cast unhewn poetry was instead of stage-plays, for the space of an hundred and twenty years together. They were made extempore, and were, as the French call them, impromptùs; for which the Tarsians of old were much renowned; and we see the daily examples of them in the Italian farces of Harlequin and Scaramucha. Such was the poetry of that savage people, before it was turned into numbers, and the harmony of verse. Little of the Saturnian verses is now remaining; we only know from authors, that they were nearer prose than poetry, without feet, or measure. They were ένρυθμοι, but not έμμετροι. Perhaps they might be used in the solemn part of their ceremonies; and the Fescennine, which were invented after them, in the afternoon's debauchery, because they were scoffing and obscene.

[Pg 52]

The Fescennine and Saturnian were the same; for as they were called Saturnian from their ancientness, when 

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