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This chapter examines how Cicero shaped his oratorical persona through the deployment of precise verbal devices (especially diminutives and irony), re-configuring his champions of the past by combining different aspects of their humour so as to construct a unified model of verbal wit that owes much to the tradition of satire at Rome, particularly to the voice of Lucilius. The orator could not adopt wholesale the conventions or persona of the satirist, however. Cicero's self-construction modulates political invective in accordance with the dignitas and auctoritas appropriate to the orator, and with the elegantia and wit of the urbane contemporary Roman.

This chapter focuses on the benchmark metre in ancient poetry, the heroic hexameter. Three poetic forms embodying a contradiction of the epic ethos embodied by the hexameter are considered: saturnians, satirical hexameters, and elegiacs. Saturnians, the celebratory medium displaced by hexameters by Ennius, are probed for their capacity to convey resistance to the hellenization represented by hexameters, and similar implications attach to Lucilius' decision to adopt the hexameter as the default form for satire, but a hexameter which is a travesty of the magnificent vehicle of epic: later satirists offer interesting twists to this combative relationship with their own form. Finally, elegy has an ambivalent relationship with epic hard-wired into it by the uneasy combination of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter in the elegiac couplet, and poetry by a range of elegiac poets is used to show the creative potential of this metrical combination.

This chapter deconstructs the textual evidence adduced by scholars attempting to establish the historical identities of Loukillios and Nikarkhos, and critiques their motivations. Stereotyped situational humour is not autobiography; the chapter argues that the ‘Loukillios’ and ‘Nikarkhos’ encountered in the text are personae, much as in Latin satire. The few quasi-autobiographical details they provide turn out to be allusions to other humorous texts. Loukillios' name must derive (by whatever route) from a Roman Lucilius, but the chapter argues that the identity debate has been unproductive. Attempts to pin down a historical Loukillios (or Loukillos, or Lucilius) are necessarily tenuous, and unnecessarily constrain reading strategies. The chapter also demonstrates that the named targets of their skoptic humour cannot be matched to individuals in the real world: they are stereotypes, and many of the names attached to them are repeatedly re-used in different contexts, for reasons including metrical convenience and humorous incongruity.

Developing further the exploration of what satire actually is, this chapter focuses on Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, setting it in the context of its classical models (Horace, Persius), including the use of an introductory theme, distinct from but related to the main topic of the satire; the power of poetry, awareness of one's social origins and status; suspicion of those who think highly of themselves. Pope is seen to be indebted to Horace, but also to Persius and finally most like Lucilius.

Epic poetry too was performed to an audience, under the Muse’s inspiration; the Romans used the same word, uates, for a poet as for an inspired prophet. Ennius composed his Annales to be ‘famous throughout wide peoples’, and in other poetic genres his impersonation of Greek authors like Euhemerus, Epicharmus, and Archestratus, and his personal style of ‘satire’ (satura), were also a performance. In prose, Cato’s history celebrated ‘the deeds of the Roman People’, who must have been able to hear it, and Polybius took for granted an audience of listeners for history, as well as educated readers of texts. There is good but neglected evidence that Lucilius and Varro, writing satire in the polarized politics of the Gracchan and post-Sullan periods, delivered it directly to the People, from the stage.

This chapter treats the account of the courtroom activities—Q. Mucius Scaevola Augur defending himself when brought to trial for extortion in 119 BC by T. Albucius—in book 2 of Gaius Lucilius’ satires as an example of forensic oratory in post-Gracchan Republican Rome. The fragments of Lucilius’ verse record of the trial are considered in their historical and literary context, with a view to their influence on later satirical tradition. The fragments reveal intimations of force standing in for physical injury, problems resulting from the impact of philosophy on speaking styles, and ironies of mixed identity put to service in courtroom repartee. Lucilius is something of a stenographer, whose take on the trial is slanted towards its relevance for equestrians and its sensational elements redolent of Pacuvian tragedy; finally, the identification of poet and defendant encapsulates the trial’s interest and uniqueness.

This chapter explores the reasons underlying Horace’s justification, as he explains in the Satires, for his role as critic of others’ vices and imperfections. This begins with the poet’s consideration of his version of satire in contrast with that of his predecessor Lucilius, who censured everyone, and proceeds to look more closely at his own approach to criticism, which has everything to do with his upbringing. Horace’s father’s pedagogical method, which, according to Horace, heavily emphasizes the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain as communicated through healthy frankness, is essentially an expression of Epicurean ethics as Philodemus explains in his treatises On Choices and Avoidances and On Frankness. This method results in Horace’s virtuous disposition, which in turn leads to his successful encounter with his patron Maecenas and incorporation into his circle of friends.

This chapter considers whether the acknowledged influence of the satirist Lucilius on Horace’s Satires (notably Book 2) should be extended to the Epodes. The chapter focuses primarily on the first ten poems of the Epodes, which are metrically similar, and can be viewed as ostensibly ‘public’ poems. Beginning with Epode 9, it considers the possible interplay between Horace, Lucilius, and Archilochus, before considering other examples in the Epodes where Lucilius could be said to ‘hover’ in the background. In a discussion that incorporates the study of wolf-similes, the significance of the girt and ungirt belt as a part of invective, and the role of the vegetable sorrel (famed for its laxative properties and thus a symbol for free-flowing poetry), the author argues for interplay between Lucilius and Horace that shows a similar background and iambic tradition at work in both.

Juvenal was fated to be remembered mainly for his beginning, and in a retrospective framework. This concluding chapter shifts our perspective on the poet, illustrating how he was fully engaged with the life of the imperial capital and outlining his relationships with his predecessor Martial and his successors, specifically Horace. Furthermore, just as Juvenal turns out to be an authority on emotions of all kinds, his interest in emotion does not stop with his construction of a persona for himself. He fills the Satires with faces other than his own—some patently expressive, others that invite his audience to fill in the emotions that seem to fit.

After sketching the contours of the Roman literary scene at the start of Horace’s career, this chapter focuses on the two bodies of poetry that Horace produced before turning to the lyric poetry represented by the Odes: satires in two books and iambic poetry (also known as the Epodes). It is suggested that Horace’s relationship to the poetic personality required by those genres—the critic of society in the Satires and the poet of invective in the Epodes—was an ambivalent one. Several passages of Satires 1.1 are analyzed, highlighting this ambivalence and also revealing the early development of the poet’s style.

The English laureate John Skelton (c.1460–1529) contributed to propagation of knowledge of the classics earliest in his translations, of Diodorus Siculus and M. Tullius Cicero, and in his work as a royal tutor to Prince Henry, subsequently King Henry VIII (1491–1547). Skelton was part of the humanist grex poetarum at the Tudor court and a familiar of Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. Skelton's own poetry manifests a broad familiarity with classical Roman writing (he knew some Greek too), from Catullus to the younger Seneca, and his special affinity with the vituperative Roman satirists, especially C. Lucilius (c.180–103 BCE). His distinctive prosodic contribution, the 'Skeltonic', derives from the example of Roman satire.

The chapter focuses on the genre’s potential, widely recognized by ancient practitioners and theorists alike, to cultivate friendship among individuals who for one reason or other are prevented from interacting face to face. Edwards shows how Seneca co-opts this particular aspect of the genre’s ideology, not least to further his educational programme and his self-conscious aspiration to a broad and enduring readership. Specifically, she argues that Seneca posits important parallels between the relationship amongst absent friends on the one hand and the relationship of philosophically minded students to earlier thinkers and practitioners of philosophy on the other, as both invite (indeed require) dialogic interactions mediated by writing and reading. This conversation with the dead in turn anticipates the mode of interaction between Seneca and future generations (including contemporary audiences).