Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius (fl. c. 130 bce–103/2 bce) was the inventor of Roman satire as we know it. Born of an equestrian family from Suessa Aurunca in Campania, he was an affluent landowner, the great uncle of Pompey the Great, and as such intended for a senatorial career, which he proudly turned down to undertake a career unprecedented for a Roman citizen: Lucilius was the first non-professional poet in Rome. He was a prominent figure in the Middle Republic, a personal friend of Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus, under whom he served in the Numantine War in 134/3 bce, and enjoyed such renown that he was awarded a public funeral, in Naples in 103/2 bce. He had an extensive Greek education and contacts with Greek intellectuals of his time; the skeptic philosopher Clitomachus, Head of the Academy (c. 127/6–110–109 bce), dedicated a work on problems of cognitive theory to him. Variety of themes, independence, and freedom of speech characterize his poetry, which he called sermones, “conversations,” apparently never using the term satura that his predecessor Ennius had given his experiments with miscellaneous verse. Personal poetry at Rome truly begins with Lucilius, whose pronounced subjectivity and unrestrained aggressiveness would become synonymous with satire itself for every subsequent writer in the genre, from Horace to Persius to Juvenal. Of Lucilius’s thirty books of verse satires––initially written in the iambo-trochaic meter of comic dialogue, before he settled on the hexameter––approximately thirteen hundred lines survive through the quotations of later writers from the late Republic through Late Antiquity.