“Urbicus Exodio risum movet Atellanæ Gestibus Autonoes. Hunc diligit Ælia pauper(378).”
Joseph Scaliger, in his Commentary on Manilius, gives his opinion, that the _Exodia_ were performed at the end of the principal piece, like our farces, and were so called as being the issue of the entertainment, which is also asserted by a scholiast on Juvenal(379). But the elder Scaliger and Salmasius thought that the _exodium_ was a sort of interlude, and had not necessarily any connection with the principal representation. The _Exodia_ continued to be performed with much license in the times of Tiberius and Nero; and when the serious spirit of freedom had vanished from the empire, they often contained jocular but direct allusions to the crimes of the portentous monsters by whom it was scourged and afflicted.
It has been much disputed among modern critics, whether the
of the Romans was derived from the Greeks, or was of their own invention. The former opinion has been maintained by the elder Scaliger(380), Heinsius(381), Vulpius(382), and, among the most recent German critics, by Blankenburg(383), Conz, and Flogel(384); the latter theory, which seems to have been that of the Romans themselves, particularly of Horace and Quintilian(385), has been supported by Diomedes(386), Joseph Scaliger, Casaubon(387), Spanheim(388), Rigaltius(389), Dacier(390), and Dryden, and by Koenig(391), and Manso, among the Germans. Those who suppose that satire descended directly from the Greeks to the Romans, derive the word from _Satyrus_, the well-known mythological compound of a man and goat. Casaubon, on the other hand, and most of those who have followed him, deduce it from the adjective _Satura_, a Sabine word, originally signifying a medley, and, afterwards,—full or abundant. To this word the substantive _Lanx_ was understood, which meant the platter or charger whereon the first fruits of the earth were offered to Bacchus at his festivals,—
“Ergo rite suum Baccho dicemus honorem Carminibus patriis, lancesque et liba feremus(392).”
The term _Satura_ thus came to be applied to a species of composition, originally written in various sorts of verse, and comprehending a _farrago_ of all subjects,—
“Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus(393),” &c.