Meanwhile, in this Scipionic circle, a new figure had appeared of great originality and force, the founder of a kind of literature which, with justifiable pride, the Romans claimed as wholly native and original. Gaius Lucilius was a member of a wealthy equestrian family, and thus could associate on equal terms with the aristocracy, while he was removed from the necessity, which members of the great senatorian houses could hardly avoid, of giving the best of their time and strength to political and administrative duties. After Terence, he is the most distinguished and the most important in his literary influence among the friends of Scipio. The form of literature which he invented and popularised, that of familiar poetry, was one which proved singularly suited to the Latin genius. He speaks of his own works under the name of Sermones, "talks" —a name which was retained by his great successor, Horace; but the peculiar combination of metrical form with wide range of subject and the pedestrian style of ordinary prose, received in popular usage the name Satura, or "mixture." The word had, in earlier times, been used of the irregular stage performances, including songs, stories, and semi-dramatic interludes, which formed the repertory of strolling artists at popular festivals. The extension of the name to the verse of Lucilius indicates that written literature was now rising to equal importance and popularity with the spoken word.
Horace comments, not without severity, on the profuse and careless production of Lucilius. Of the thirty books of his Satires, few fragments of any length survive; much, probably the greater part of them, would, if extant, long have lost its interest. But the loss of the bulk of his work is matter of sincere regret, because it undoubtedly gave a vivid and detailed picture of the social life and the current interests of the time, such as the Satires of Horace give of Rome in the Augustan age. His criticisms on the public men of his day were outspoken and unsparing; nor had he more reverence for established reputations in poetry than in public life. A great deal of his work consisted in descriptions of eating and drinking; much, also, in lively accounts of his own travels and adventures, or those of his friends. One book of the Satires was occupied with an account of Scipio's famous mission to the East, in which he visited the courts of Egypt and Asia, attended by a retinue of only five servants, but armed with the full power of the terrible Republic. Another, imitated by Horace in his story of the journey to Brundusium, detailed the petty adventures, the talk and laughter by roads and at inns, of an excursion of his own through Campania and Bruttium to the Sicilian straits. Many of the fragments deal with the literary controversies of the time, going down even to the minutiae of spelling and grammar; many more show the beginnings of that translation into the language of common life of the precepts of the Greek schools, which was consummated for the world by the poets and prose-writers of the following century. But, above all, the Satires of Lucilius were in the fullest sense of the word an autobiography. The famous description of Horace, made yet more famous for English readers by the exquisite aptness with which Boswell placed it on the title-page of his Life of Johnson—
Quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis—
expresses the true greatness of Lucilius. He invented a literary method which, without being great, yields to no other in interest and even in charm, and which, for its perfection, requires a rare and refined genius. Not Horace only, nor all the satirists after Horace, but Montaigne and Pepys also, belong to the school of Lucilius.
Such was the circle of the younger Scipio, formed in the happy years—as they seemed to the backward gaze of the succeeding generation—between the establishment of Roman supremacy at the battle of Pydna, and the revolutionary movement of Tiberius Gracchus. Fifty years of stormy turbulence followed, culminating in the Social War and the reign of terror under Marius and Cinna, and finally stilled in seas of blood by the counter-revolution of Sulla. This is the period which separates the Scipionic from the Ciceronian age. It was naturally, except in the single province of political oratory, not one of great literary fertility; and a brief indication of the most notable authors of the period, and of the lines on which Roman literature mainly continued to advance during it, is all that is demanded or possible here.
In oratory, this period by general consent represented the golden age of Latin achievement. The eloquence of both the Gracchi was their great political weapon; that of Gaius was the most powerful in exciting feeling that had ever been known; and his death was mourned, even by fierce political opponents, as a heavy loss to Latin literature. But in the next generation, the literary perfection of oratory was carried to an even higher point by Marcus Antonius and Lucius Licinius Crassus. Both attained the highest honours that the Republic had to bestow. By a happy chance, their styles were exactly complementary to one another; to hear both in one day was the highest intellectual entertainment which Rome afforded. By this time the rules of oratory were carefully studied and reduced to scientific treatises. One of these, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, is still extant. It was almost certainly written by one Quintus Cornificius, an older contemporary of Cicero, to whom the work was long ascribed. It, no doubt, owes its preservation to this erroneous tradition. The first two books were largely used by Cicero in his own treatise De Inventione, part of a work on the principles of rhetoric which he began in early youth.
Latin history during this period made considerable progress. It was a common practice among statesmen to write memoirs of their own life and times; among others of less note, Sulla the dictator left at his death twenty-two books of Commentarii Rerum Gestarum, which were afterwards published by his secretary. In regular history the most important name is that of Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius. His work differed from those of the earlier annalists in passing over the legendary period, and beginning with the earliest authentic documents; in research and critical judgment it reached a point only excelled by Sallust. His style was formed on that of older annalists, and is therefore somewhat archaic for the period, Considerable fragments, including the well-known description of the single combat in 361 B.C. between Titus Manlius Torquatus and the Gallic chief, survive in quotations by Aulus Gellius and the archaists of the later Empire. More voluminous but less valuable than the Annals of Claudius were those of his contemporary, Valerius Antias, which formed the main groundwork for the earlier books of Livy, and were largely used by him even for later periods, when more trustworthy authorities were available. Other historians of this period, Sisenna and Macer, soon fell into neglect—the former as too archaic, the latter as too diffuse and rhetorical, for literary permanence.
Somewhat apart from the historical writers stand the antiquarians, who wrote during this period in large numbers, and whose treatises filled the library from which, in the age of Cicero, Varro compiled his monumental works. As numerous probably were the writers of the school of Cato, on husbandry, domestic economy, and other practical subjects, and the grammarians and philologists, whose works formed two other large sections in Varro's library. On all sides prose was full of life and growth; the complete literary perfection of the age of Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust might already be foreseen as within the grasp of the near future.
Latin poetry, meanwhile, hung in the balance. The first great wave of the Greek impulse had exhausted itself in Ennius and the later tragedians. Prose had so developed that the poetical form was no longer a necessity for the expression of ideas, as it had been in the palmy days of Latin tragedy. The poetry of the future must be, so to speak, poetry for its own sake, until some new tradition were formed which should make certain metrical forms once more the recognised and traditional vehicle for certain kinds of literary expression. In the blank of poetry we may note a translation of the Iliad into hexameters by one Gnaeus Matius, and the earliest known attempts at imitation of the forms of Greek lyrical verse by an equally obscure Laevius Melissus, as dim premonitions of the new growth which Latin poetry was feeling after; but neither these, nor the literary tragedies which still were occasionally produced by a survival of the fashions of an earlier age, are of any account for their own sake. Prose and poetry stood at the two opposite poles of their cycle; and thus it is that, while the poets and prose-writers of the Ciceronian age are equally imperishable in fame, the latter but represent the culmination of a broad and harmonious development, while of the former, amidst but apart from the beginnings of a new literary era, there shine, splendid like stars out of the darkness, the two immortal lights of Lucretius and Catullus.