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