Of all the forms of Roman poetry, satire was least indebted to the works of the Greeks. Quintilian claims it altogether for his countrymen--'satira tota nostra est.' Horace characterises it as 'Graecis intacti carminis.' While the names by which they are known at once betray the Greek invention of the other great forms of poetic art, the name of satire alone indicates a Roman origin. It is true that Lucilius, like every educated man of his time, was acquainted with the Greek language and literature. It is true also that the critical spirit in Greece had found vent for itself in the works of the early iambic writers, Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgos, and Hipponax, of the great authors of the old political comedy of Athens, and apparently in later writings such as the satiric discourses of Bion of Borysthenes, mentioned in Horace's line-- Ille Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro. But Roman satire sprang up and flourished independently of any of those kinds of composition. In national spirit and moral purpose it was unlike the personal lampoons of the Greek satirists. It was perhaps not less personal, but was more ethical; it professed at least to be animated not by private enmity but by public spirit. It embraced also a much greater variety of topics. Horace finds a closer parallel to the satire of Lucilius in the old Athenian comedy. These two kinds of literature have this in common, that they are the expression of public, not of personal feeling. But though Lucilius probably, like Horace after him, studied the old comic poets 'Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes,' to catch something of their spirit and manner in his satire, Roman satire was not an imitation of Greek comedy. Where Roman literature professes to be an imitation of Greek, it is the form and the metre much more than the spirit and matter that are reproduced. Greek comedy and Roman satire were the independent results of freedom of speech and criticism in different ages and countries. Their difference in form arose out of fundamental differences in the character as well as in the genius of the two nations. Although Roman speakers and writers exercised a license of speech and of personal criticism equal to that which prevailed in the Athenian democracy, and beyond what the spirit of personal honour tolerates in modern times, yet the exposure of public men to ridicule on the stage was utterly repugnant to the instincts of an aristocratic republic in which one of the great bonds of union was respect for outward authority[1]. The tendency of the Roman mind to reduce all things to rule and to express itself in abstract comments on life, rather than to represent human nature in living forms, also favoured the assumption by Lucilius of a mode of literature addressing itself to the understanding of readers, and not to the curiosity of spectators.