“Villa Lucani—mox potieris aco.
Rescisso discas componere nomine versum;
Lucilî vatis sic imitator eris[411].”
As to the learning of Lucilius, the opinions of antiquity were different; and even those of the same author appear somewhat contradictory on this point. Quintilian says, that there is “Eruditio in eo mira.” Cicero, in his treatise De Finibus, calls his learning mediocris; though, afterwards, in the person of Crassus, in his treatise De Oratore, he twice terms him Doctus[412]. Dacier suspects that Quintilian was led to consider Lucilius as learned, from the pedantic intermixture of Greek words in his compositions—a practice which seems to have excited the applause of his contemporaries, and also of his numerous admirers in the Augustan age, for which they have been severely ridiculed by Horace, who always warmly opposed himself to the excessive partiality entertained for Lucilius during that golden period of literature—
“At magnum fecit, quod verbis Græca Latinis
Miscuit:—O seri studiorum!”
It is not unlikely that there may have been something of political spleen in the admiration expressed for Lucilius during the age of Augustus, and something of courtly complaisance in the attempts of Horace to counteract it. Augustus had extended the law of the 12 tables respecting libels; and the people, who found themselves thus abridged of the liberty of satirizing the Great by name, might not improbably seek to avenge themselves by an overstrained attachment to the works of a poet, who, living as they would insinuate, in better times, practised, without fear, what he enjoyed without restraint[413].
Some motive of this sort doubtless weighed with the Romans in the age of Augustus, since much of the satire of Lucilius must have been unintelligible, or at least uninteresting to them. Great part of his compositions appears to have been rather a series of libels than legitimate satire, being occupied with virulent attacks on contemporary citizens of Rome—
—— “Secuit Lucilius urbem,
Te Mute, te Lupe, et genuinum fregit in illos[414].”