LUCILIUS, GAIUS (c. 18o-1o3 B.c.), the earliest Roman satirist, of whose writings only fragments remain, was born at Suessa Aurunca in Campania. The dates assigned by Jerome for his birth and death are 148 and 103 or 102 B.C. But it is impos sible to reconcile the first of these dates with other facts recorded of him, and the date given by Jerome must be due to an error, the true date being about i8o B.C. He served under Scipio at the siege of Numantra in 134, was an intimate friend of Scipio and Laelius, and devoted some of his satires to the praises of Scipio. He spent the greater part of his life at Rome, and died, according to Jerome, at Naples. Lucilius belonged to the equestrian order, a fact indicated by Horace's notice of himself as "infra Lucili censum." His satires are another expression of the revolutionary forces behind the Gracchan movement.
He may be regarded as the inventor of poetical satire, as he was the first to give to the formless Roman satura that dis tinctive character of critical comment on manners, politics and literature which the word satire still denotes. Unlike other forms of Roman literature, it owes nothing to Greek, being a legitimate development of a native form of entertainment, originally of a dramatic nature. In his style and his choice of subject Lucilius was equally original. His early work was directed to ridiculing the conventional language of epic and tragic poetry, and he used the style of familiar speech, even to the point of frequently em ploying Greek, which was then beginning to be fashionable in educated circles, while for his subjects he abandoned the hack neyed ground of Greek and Roman mythology, and treated of the politics and wars, the business and pleasure, the scandals and vices of his own day. These he handled, not in Juvenal's spirit
of rhetorical stoicism, but, like Horace, from the standpoint of a man of the world, and the associate of men of affairs. But he differed from Horace in being a thoroughly good hater, and also in a savage outspokenness of attack characteristic of the public life of his age.
The fragments of Lucilius number about 'J o°, mostly uncon nected lines, most of them preserved by late grammarians, as illustrative of peculiar verbal usages. He was, for his time, a voluminous as well as a very discursive writer. He left behind him 3o books of satires, mostly written in hexameters, but, so far as an opinion can be formed from a number of unconnected frag ments, he seems to have written the trochaic tetrameter with a smoothness, clearness and simplicity which he never attained in handling the hexameter. The longer fragments produce the im pression of great discursiveness and carelessness, but at the same time of considerable force.
Editions by F. D. Gerlach (1846), L. Muller (1872), C. Lachmann (1876, posthumous), F. Marx (1905) ; see also L. Muller, Leben and Werke des Lucilius (1876) ; "Luciliana," by H. A. J. Munro, in the Journal of Philology, vii. (1877) ; Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, bk. 4 ch. xiii.; "Luciliana," by A. E. Housman, in Classical Quarterly (April, 1907) ; C. Cichorius, Untersuchungen zu Lucilius (1908).