At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events.

History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any moral to be derived from the _Secchia Rapita_ we have it here.

At the end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an empty bucket:[201] Riserbando ne' patti a i Modanesi La secchia, e 'l re de'Sardi ai Bolognesi.
Such is the main subject of the _Secchia Rapita_; and such is Tassoni's irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent contempt for human circumstance.

But the poem has another object.

It was written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini.