Horace, Swift, Juvenal, satire as Gilbert Highet saw it. Gulliver who? Sophocles and Racine. Socrates dissed. Seneca mocked an emperor, paved way for dissenting Christians.

The Roman poet Horace is a satirist who liked people and wanted to amuse and correct them. The 18th-century Irishman Jonathan Swift detested mankind and wanted to punish people. He's in the Roman poet Juvenal's camp, where if there's laughter it's joyless, without "healing warmth," says Gilbert Highet in his Anatomy of Satire. This kind of writer is close to the tragedian, laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.

Highet, a Scot and immigrant to the U.S., taught at Columbia U. in the '50s & '60s. He was a student and teacher of literature, with emphasis on ancient Greeks and Romans. His Anatomy refers liberally to Jonathan Swift, who wrote Gulliver's Travels, which Highet calls a "terrible book."

It's about the gullible Gulliver, who in 18th-century terminology, can be gulled, or fooled. In his travels Gulliver sees his own (English) society "through distorting lenses." But what he finds are not as bad as some real societies then recently opened up, which were "far more eccentric and far more instructive," namely newly discovered lands across the seas.

Still, Swift's choice is not surprising, says Highet, since satire compares real and ideal society, "noble dream with debased reality." It's not anthropology, in other words, but the mind seeking reconciliation of the real and the ideal.

Few women write or enjoy satire, says Highet, citing one Pamela Hansford Johnson and her husband, the better known C.P. Snow, who had no use for it, he being an admirer of success. Ah. Nothing to joke about, too busy.

But objecting to this tough, even hard-hearted satire is the same as objecting to tragedy itself. As a student asked in class many years ago about stories I had assigned, "Why are there no happy endings?" He spoke for many when he asked that question.

For the tragedians Sophocles and Racine — it’s a street name in Chicago, a city in Wisconsin — life is "the defeat of the best . . . among us," says Highet. For the satirist life is neither comedy nor tragedy but nausea. He is filled with contempt. If the mathematician Euclid saw beauty bare, the satirist sees life raw.

The Christian view is close to this pessimistic satire, which Highet says "smiles a grim smile or curls a contemptuous lip" at the lost human race. The Christian, or the ones Highet knew, believing that most are doomed, sighs. Highet, a Scot, maybe had his fellow Scots Calvinists in mind. Maybe not.

A more liberal view holds that most people can be cured of their wickedness and foolishness. Thus Socrates: "No one errs willingly." Just get it clear and you will do the right thing, said he, but the comic dramatist Aristophanes thought him a fool.

Horace is in the camp of kinder, gentler satirists, persuading more than denouncing, laughing more than sneering, with a minimum of shouting and finger-pointing.

Not so the authors of "black books" producing "feelings of pure hatred and revulsion," such as Faulkner's Sanctuary, says Highet. It isn't satire anyway, but "a negative novel."

Others he names are Marquis de Sade and the 20th-century writer Genet. Because of their pessimism, or pessimistic caricatures, Highet classes them with sweetness-&-light Little Lord Fauntleroy as polar opposites.

Pessimistic satirists, viewing the "world-hell," save their sanity by raging at the world. But they are now pessimistic, now encouraging, as emotions struggle for mastery.

Satire means "mish-mash," or variety. It's related not to satyr, the half-man, half-goat, but to "satura," meaning primarily "full," or later "a mixture full of different things," like a kind of salad or mixed-fruit dish.

In Horace we find a resulting ferment that is "the secret of his mastery and power," he says.

"But there is always one person . . . group . . . class . . . [social] structure on which the satirist focuses most of his amusement and loathing and from whom he derives the strength to generalize and [give life] to his work."

Seneca wrote a mocking account of Emperor Claudius failing to get into heaven as a god but being consigned to hell after a condemnatory speech by his predecessor, the divinized Augustus. In this spoof of an emperor, he paved the way for Christians' refusal to burn incense to the emperor, says Highet.

Once done, such mocking could be repeated. Which is why despots don't put up with that sort of thing.