His satires were written in thirty Books. The remaining fragments amount to about 1100 lines. Most of these are single lines, preserved by grammarians as illustrative of the use of words. The amount and variety of these, if they had no other value, would at least be suggestive of the industry with which grammatical and philological research into their own language was carried on by Roman writers. Some fragments are found in ancient commentaries on the Satires and Epistles of Horace. The longer passages are quoted by Cicero, Gellius, Lactantius, and others. The Books from i. to xx. were written in hexameters; Book xxii., apparently, in elegiacs, a metre which had hitherto been employed only in short epigrams. Of the intervening Books between xxii. and xxvi. there remains only one line[9]. Books xxvi. and xxix., from which a large number of lines have been preserved, were written in trochaics and iambics. The last Book (xxx.) was written in hexameters. From the fact that the trochaic and iambic metres had been chiefly employed by the older writers of saturae, it seems probable that Lucilius made his first attempts in these metres, that he afterwards adopted the hexameter, and that in one or two of his latest books he attempted to write continuously in elegiacs. The allusions in Book xxvi. to the Spanish wars and to the 'exploits of Cornelius,' and the statement of his reasons for coming forward as an author, render it not improbable that this Book was the earliest in order of composition. It was in this Book that he appeared most conspicuously as the censor and critic of the older writers, a position not unlikely to have been assumed, at the very outset of his career, by one who claimed to initiate a change in Roman literature. The first impression produced by reading these fragments, as they have been arranged by Mueller or Lachmann, is one of extreme desultoriness and discursiveness of treatment. The words applied by Horace to Lucilius,-- Garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem, characterise not his style only but his whole mode of composition. Subjects most widely removed from one another seem to have been introduced into the same book. We have no means of determining whether the separate books consisted of one or several miscellaneous pieces. He seems to start off on some new chase on the slightest suggestion, verbal or otherwise, as in the opening of Book v.-- Quo me habeam pacto, tametsi non quaeri', docebo, Quando in eo numero mansti, quo in maxima nunc est Pars hominum, Ut periise velis quem visere nolueris, cum Debueris. Hoc nolueris et debueris te Si minu' delectat, quod [Greek: technion] Isocratium est, [Greek: Lerodes]que simul totum ac [Greek: symmeirakiodes], Non operam perdo[10].