William Young Sellar and an anonymous author

“ His character and tastes were much more akin to those of Horace than of either Persius or Juvenal. But he was what Horace was not, a thoroughly good hater; and he lived at a time when the utmost freedom of speech and the most unrestrained indulgence of public and private animosity were the characteristics of men who took a prominent part in affairs. Although Lucilius took no active part in the public life of his time, he regarded it in the spirit of a man of the world and of society, as well as a man of letters. ”

“ It is in the highest degree improbable that Lucilius served in the army at the age of fourteen; it is still more unlikely that he could have been admitted into the familiar intimacy of Scipio and Laelius at that age. It seems a moral impossibility that between the age of fifteen and nineteen—i.e. between 133 and 129, the year of Scipio’s death—he could have come before the world as the author of an entirely new kind of composition, and one which, to be at all successful, demands especially maturity of judgment and experience. ”

“ For students of Latin literature, the chief interest of studying the fragments of Lucilius consists in the light which they throw on the aims and methods of Horace in the composition of his satires, and, though not to the same extent, of his epistles. They are important also as materials for linguistic study ”