The
Satiresof Horace consistently stake out their place as the second effort in Roman verse Satire since its “discovery” (
Sat. 1.10.48) by Lucilius (?180-102/1 BCE), who established the dactylic hexameter as its metrical form. Although Ennius (239-169 BCE) and Varro (116-27 BCE) also wrote poems they called
saturae(Varro’s satires, in a combination of prose and verse, are termed Menippean), these, along with any works of verse Satire no longer extant, were overlooked, and Roman Satire quickly came to be defined as what Lucilius, Horace (Dec. 8th 65-Nov. 27th 8 BCE), Persius (34-62 CE), and Juvenal (active early 2nd C) wrote.
The genre’s preferred self-referential term, satura, encodes a key aspect of it: meaning “stuffed full” and variously derived (see Diomedes, Ars
2302 words
Citation: Ferriss-Hill, Jennifer. "Satires". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 September 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13379, accessed 13 December 2024.]