Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/48

 full development in the hands of his distinguished successors. Juvenal has no hesitation in acknowledging him as its father;—

Cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo Per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnus; Sat. i. 19-20.

Horace says of him that he was the first to compose poems in this style;—

Quid cum est Lucilius ausus Primus in hanc operis componere carmina morem, Sat. ii. i. 63.

Like Quintilian, Horace proclaims Lucilius as a writer in a style unknown to Greece;—

Graecis intacti carminis auctor (Sat. i. x. 66).

He was a man of good social position; Horace speaks of himself as "infra Lucili censum" (Sat. II. i. 75). He served in the Numantine war, and seems to have been on intimate terms with Scipio, and the literary society which gathered round him. He was a prolific writer, having written no less than thirty books of Satires, each book probably containing several pieces. The subjects treated were of the most miscellaneous kind, embracing questions of religion, morals, politics, and literary criticisms; some of them even touched on questions of grammar, Living in the days of the xliv