What Satire argues

This is the hexagonal gallery of the laughing mirror: literature that attacks vice and folly by holding them up to ridicule. Satire is the oldest weapon of the moralist who would rather provoke a laugh than preach a sermon — it diminishes the powerful, punctures the pompous, and measures the world against the ideal it only pretends to meet.
Its forms are ancient and many. An Egyptian scribe mocked every trade but his own; Aristophanes turned the Athenian stage into political farce; Horace perfected the genial verse satire and Lucian the fantastic voyage that ridicules belief itself. From these roots grow the two great Renaissance engines of satire — the mock-encomium, in which Erasmus's Folly praises folly, and the imaginary commonwealth, in which More's Utopia indicts the real world by inventing a better one.
In the modern era satire migrates into the novel and even the reference book: Rabelais's giants, Swift's misanthropic traveller, Voltaire's relentlessly optimistic Candide, Twain's Yankee loose in Camelot, and Bierce's poisoned Dictionary. Twelve public-domain works and four millennia of irony — the conscience of literature, armed with a grin.
Each card carries the author's portrait where a likeness survives; the anonymous Egyptian Satire of the Trades, having no author to picture, instead shows an Internet Archive scan of Adolf Erman's translation (imageKind: secondary). All twelve works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Satire (13)

First Plays — Dramatic satire is born on the comic stage. Aristophanes' Old Comedy — The Birds, The Clouds — is the direct ancestor of every satirical play, and the line runs unbroken from the Athenian festival to the modern political farce.
First Novels — Satire's richest modern home is the novel. Gulliver's Travels, Candide, and A Connecticut Yankee are first of all satires — the imaginary voyage and the picaresque turned into instruments for anatomising a whole society.
Wisdom Literature — Satire is wisdom literature inverted: where Ptahhotep and Proverbs teach virtue by precept, Erasmus and More teach it by ridicule — praising folly and sketching utopias so the reader sees his own world's vice by contrast.