Satire, more than any other species of poetry, is the offspring of the time in which it has its birth, and which furnishes it with the aliment whereon it feeds. The period at which Lucilius appeared was favourable to satiric composition. There was a struggle existing between the old and new manners, and the freedom of speaking and writing, though restrained, had not yet been totally checked by law. Lucilius lived amidst a people on whom luxury and corruption were advancing with fearful rapidity, but among whom some virtuous citizens were still anxious to stem the tide which threatened to overwhelm their countrymen. The satires of Lucilius were adapted to please these staunch “_laudatores temporis acti_,” who stood up for ancient manners and discipline. The freedom with which he attacked the vices of his contemporaries, without sparing individuals,—the strength of colouring with which his pictures were charged,—the weight and asperity of the reproaches with which he loaded those who had exposed themselves to his ridicule or indignation,—had nothing revolting in an age when no consideration compelled to those forbearances necessary under different forms of society or government(402). By the time, too, in which Lucilius began to write, the Romans, though yet far from the polish of the Augustan age, had become familiar with the delicate and cutting irony of the Greek comedies of which the more ancient Roman satirists had no conception. Lucilius chiefly applied himself to the imitation of these dramatic productions, and caught, it is said, much of their fire and spirit: “Eupolis, atque Cratinus, Aristophanesque, pöetæ, Atque alii, quorum comœdia prisca virorum est, Si quis erat dignus describi, quod malus, aut fur, Quod mœchus foret, aut sicarius, aut alioqui Famosus, multa cum libertate notabant. Hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus, Mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque(403).” —— The Roman language, likewise, had grown more refined in the age of Lucilius, and was thus more capable of receiving the Grecian beauties of style. Nor did Lucilius, like his predecessors, mix iambic with trochaic verses. Twenty books of his satires, from the commencement, were in hexameter verse, and the rest, with exception of the thirtieth, in iambics or trochaics. His object, too, seems to have been bolder and more extensive than that of his precursors, and was not so much to excite laughter or ridicule, as to correct and chastise vice. Lucilius thus bestowed on satiric composition such additional grace and regularity, that he is declared by Horace to have been the first among the Romans who wrote satire in verse:— “Primus in hunc operis componere carmina morem.”