10 Facts About Gaius Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius was the earliest Roman satirist, of whose writings only fragments remain.

Gaius Lucilius spent the greater part of his life at Rome and died, according to Jerome, at Naples.

Gaius Lucilius belonged to the equestrian order, a fact indicated by Horace's notice of himself as infra Lucili censum.

The reputation which Gaius Lucilius enjoyed in the best ages of Roman literature is proved by the terms in which Cicero and Horace speak of him.

In point of form, the satire of Gaius Lucilius owed nothing to the Greeks.

Gaius Lucilius seems to have commenced his poetical career by ridiculing and parodying the conventional language of epic and tragic poetry, and to have used the language commonly employed in the social intercourse of educated men.

The literary remains of Gaius Lucilius extend to about eleven hundred, mostly unconnected lines, most of them preserved by late grammarians, as illustrative of peculiar verbal usages.

Gaius Lucilius was, for his time, a voluminous as well as a very discursive writer.

Gaius Lucilius left behind him thirty books of satires, and there is reason to believe that each book, like the books of Horace and Juvenal, was composed of different pieces.

Gaius Lucilius appears, in the composition of his various pieces, to have treated everything that occurred to him in the most desultory fashion, sometimes adopting the form of dialogue, sometimes that of an epistle or an imaginary discourse, and often to have spoken in his own name, giving an account of his travels and adventures, or of amusing scenes that he had witnessed, or expressing the results of his private meditation and experiences.