Gaius Lucilius, acknowledged as the inventor of Roman satire, is of distinguished family, yet had rejected politics and business, preferring the life of poet and sardonic commentator.

Lucilius spent the greater part of his life at Rome, and died, according to Jerome, at Naples in 103 BCE, leaving his thirty widely admired books of satires.

The remains of Lucilius extend to about eleven hundred, mostly unconnected 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.

There is reason to believe that each book, like the books of Horace and Juvenal, was composed of different pieces.

The order in which they were known to the grammarians was not that in which they were written.

The earliest in order of composition were probably those numbered from xxvi.

to xxix., which were written in the trochaic and iambic meters that had been employed by Ennius and Pacuvius in their Saturae.

In these he made those criticisms on the older tragic and epic poets of which Horace and other ancient writers speak.

In them too he speaks of the Numantine War as recently finished, and of Scipio as still living.

Book i., on the other hand, in which the philosopher Carneades, who died in 128, is spoken of as dead, must have been written after the death of Scipio.