CAECUS, a Roman knight, who is generally considered the inventor of satirical composition,—at least of that new form adopted by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Of his personal history we can collect only a few facts. He was born 148 B.C. at Suessa (Sessa), a city of the Aurunci, in Latium (Juv. i. 20). He attended Scipio Africanus in the war against Numantia, B.C. 134, at an age when he could scarcely be expected to serve in arms, and at that time he acquired the friendship of the younger Scipio, and of Lucilius (Vell. Pat. ii. 9). Lucilius died at Naples in 103 B.C. His works consist of thirty satires, epodes, hymns, a comedy entitled Numulariae, and a Life of Scipio the Elder. Of his Satires, upwards of 800 fragments remain, the longest of which, however, amounts only to thirteen verses. Yet even in these stray remnants we can detect traces of that pungent wit and merciless rebuke which are mentioned by Juvenal (i. 165) as causing the victims of Lucilius to tremble. His blows were openly aimed at vice and folly in whatever rank or under whatever dignity they appeared. More marked, however, by strength than by purity and finish, his poetry is compared by Horace to a river bringing down particles of gold and mud mingled together; a criticism which is probably just, in spite of the protest made against it by Quintilian in his Institutions. Of the thirty satires of Lucilius, the first twenty and the thirtieth seem to have been written in hexameters, and to have been the first specimens of that measure among the Romans. In the rest, the iambus and trochees appear to have been used. The fragments of Lucilius have been published by Douss, with learned notes, Leyden, 1597, Amsterdam, 1661; and reprinted by Volpi, Padua, 1735. They are included in Maittaire's Corpus Poetarum Latinorum, London, 1713, and are appended to the Persius of Achaintre, 8vo, Paris, 1811.