ards; and numerous poetical pleasantries
of that sort not destined for publication probably proceeded at
that time from the rich social and intellectual life of the
better circles of Rome.

Lucilius

Its representative in literature is Gaius Lucilius (606-651) sprung
of a respectable family in the Latin colony of Suessa, and likewise
a member of the Scipionic circle. His poems are, as it were, open
letters to the public. Their contents, as a clever successor
gracefully says, embrace the whole life of a cultivated man of
independence, who looks upon the events passing on the political
stage from the pit and occasionally from the side-scenes; who
converses with the best of his epoch as his equals; who follows
literature and science with sympathy and intelligence without
wishing personally to pass for a poet or scholar; and who, in fine,
makes his pocket-book the confidential receptacle for everything
good and bad that he meets with, for his political experiences and
expectations, for grammatical remarks and criticisms on art, for
incidents of his own life, visits, dinners, journeys, as well as
for anecdotes which he has heard. Caustic, capricious, thoroughly
individual, the Lucilian poetry has yet the distinct stamp of an
oppositional and, so far, didactic aim in literature as well as in
morals and politics; there is in it something of the revolt of the
country against the capital; the Suessan's sense of his own purity
of speech and honesty of life asserts itself in antagonism to the
great Babel of mingled tongues and corrupt morals. The aspiration
of the Scipionic circle after literary correctness, especially in
point of language, finds critically its most finished and most
clever representative in Lucilius. He dedicated his very first
book to Lucius Stilo, the founder of Roman philology,(20) and
designated as the public for which he wrote not the cultivated
circles of pure and classical speech, but the Tarentines, the
Bruttians, the Siculi, or in other words the half-Greeks of Italy,
whose Latin certainly might well require a corrective. Whole books
of his poems are occupied with the settlement of Latin orthography
and prosody, with the combating of Praenestine, Sabine, Etruscan
provincialisms, with the exposure of current solecisms; along with
which, however, the poet by no means forgets to ridicule the
insipidly systematic Isocratean purism of words and phrases,(21)
and even to reproach his friend Scipio in