All Ours. "Satire is all ours," wrote Quintilian, by which he seems to mean that this was a competitive arena in which the Romans beat even Greek writers hands down. And indeed, some of the most memorable Latin literature is in this genre. While scholars are not able to agree on the origin of the actual word "satire," one is able to discern two major strains of Roman satire: the Lucilian, that stemming from the tradition established by the early Roman writer Lucilius, and the Menippean, that is, satire written in the style of the Syrian writer Menippus (third century B.C.E.). Menippus wrote in Greek, in a melange of prose and verse, and taking a seriocomic narrative approach; writers such as Varro and the Greek author Lucian worked in this genre, and we might say that the Satyrica of Petronius falls into the...