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