The emphasis in this new collection of essays is on contextualisation. The 1,300 or so lines that remain from Lucilius’ thirty-volume enterprise, a multifarious collection of poems that he may or may not have named Saturae, have, with few exceptions, come down to us as free-floating snippets, devoid of their original context. Ancient writers who cited the poems did so not in order to explain or preserve them, but to get things done with them. Jarring pieces loose from their original contexts, they invested these disiecti membra poetae with new contexts by having them perform new cultural tasks. This volume seeks to restore some of what has been lost, by building a sense of the social environment from which the poems emerged.

The volume's introductory essay by the editors (Breed, Keitel, Wallace) offers an incisive review of the main scholarly approaches to Lucilius that have emerged since the appearance of Friedrich Marx's two volume C. Lucilii Carminum Reliquiae in 1904–5. The essay's first section describes how hard it is to place Lucilius on any standard map of the history of Latin literature, and makes a case not for jettisoning categories that are only somewhat reliable and revealing, but for acknowledging their limits, and for letting Lucilius both adhere to and defy those limits. The essay's second section treats the culture wars of the late second century b.c.e. that are the political backdrop of Lucilius’ satires (regrettably, no individual chapter in the volume is devoted to this topic), and the third section discusses how complete editions of the fragments were gathered up from a wide range of ancient sources. Sections four and five point ahead to the topics to be explored in subsequent chapters of the book.

In his essay ‘Lucilius and the poetae seniores’ (ch. 2), Sander Goldberg examines the way Lucilius engages with the tragedies and the Annales of Ennius, in an age when Ennius had become well established as a literary icon, and when the lines between satire and the higher generic forms that established Ennius’ reputation were not altogether obvious. Keenly sensitive to the importance of Ennius to Lucilius, Goldberg explores the strange disappearance of Ennius’ satires in the critical reception of satire in the first century b.c.e. and beyond. Brian Breed's chapter on ‘Lucilius’ books’ looks at the book culture of late second-century Rome that emerges from the fragments of Lucilius, showing how the satires exploit the workings of that culture to constitute themselves as a special kind of criticism and social promotion that operates ‘at that important place where discourse and social practice and text all meet’ (78). Paolo Poccetti's long chapter on ‘Language variation and the aims of Lucilius’ satires’ fleshes out the linguistic basis for the highly contradictory receptions of Lucilius, lauded by some as a master of ‘thin and plain expression’ (gracilitas), while for others he is careless and muddy, dashing off poems that are a chaotic blend of different languages, and that intermix wildly divergent levels of style. This chapter, taken together with the three that follow (Anna Chahoud on ‘Speech patterns and generic stylization in Lucilius’, Giuseppe Pezzini on ‘Lucilius and the language of the Palliata’ and Angelo Mercado on ‘Accent in Lucilius’ hexameters’), constitutes the best study now available (by far) of the stylistic range and habits of Lucilius’ satires, and the multifarious cultural workings of that style. Horace would have his readers believe that Lucilius’ grab-bag approach to writing was the result of carelessness rather than a strategic choice. But these chapters conspire to tell a far more compelling story about the ‘style as contents’ of Lucilian satire (i.e. a knowing Lucilius who sets out to seem careless, in order to exemplify freedom through the style he chose to develop) by both demonstrating, and more importantly by respecting, the many culturally infused communicative powers that saturate his motley and unrestrained style.

Catherine Keane's chapter on ‘Conversations about sermo’ looks at the large amount of conversation (sermo) that takes place in Books 26–30 of the satires, the earliest books in the collection, and she smartly connects the noteworthy prominence of lively verbal exchanges within these poems to the formulation of sermo as a generic concept, where they function as contents establishing the genre's form, and vice versa. In ‘Assessments of value and the value of assessments in Lucilius’ (ch. 9), Cynthia Damon looks at fragments dealing with assessments of value, quantitative evaluations, shifting prices and bizarre equivalences. In a deft critical move, she posits a connection between the unusually large number of these fragments and the critical work that the satires perform, focusing on their use of bold metaphors as specimens of assessment (i.e. figures assigning values to persons and their activities). In his chapter on ‘Pikes, peacocks, and parasites’, Ian Goh shows that, despite his reputation as an uncompromising moral censor, Lucilius was no enemy of high living. His satires take readers inside the triclinia of the rich and ridiculous, opening a window onto the gross excesses of the period, but they do so for comic purposes, not to excoriate. In many instances, Goh points out, the Lucilian scolder (whether the satirist or one of his characters) displays an awareness of the self-serving politics that went into the making of sumptuary laws; laws that few took seriously, but that garnered serious political power for those who made them. In the final chapter of the volume, Luca Grillo shows how Lucilius evokes specific moral loci of oratory in order to create comparisons between the praise and blame of his satires and the moral performances of Roman statesmen. At the chapter's end, Grillo suggests that the Albinus named in the virtus fragment (1196–1208W) may not be the consul of either 110 or 109 b.c.e., but an old enemy of Scipio who was consul in 151 b.c.e. (Aulus Postumius Albinus, RE 33). This is a fine attempt to connect the satires to the history of the period in a new way, but it raises a serious question about timing: one has to wonder what the point would be. Why throw back so far for a target of immorality? What would targeting the misdeeds of Albinus, so many years after the fact, say about the purposes, principles and social conduct of Lucilian satire?

The big takeaway of this volume is not to be found in any radically new insights into the fragments themselves. Rather it is to be found in the new image of Lucilius that emerges from the essays taken as a whole: of a poet who, rather than flailing his way towards fame, is the by-product of his own, highly crafted literary invention. A writer who knows the rules of Latinitas but chooses to flout them. A man of deep literary learning who knows just how silly and pretentious such learning can often be. An author who is as wide-ranging in his linguistic dexterity (Greek, Oscan, Latin, etc.) as he is in the travels he describes — everything from the mansions and back street taverns of Rome, to the tip of Italy's toe. And yet, he somehow manages to come off as ‘one of us’ wherever he goes. In so doing, he exemplifies Rome's newly consolidated control over the whole of Italy in the self that he writes.