"Martial, complaining that a fellow poet has copied all his activities, lists the genres in descending order of nobility (and size): epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, elegy, and epigram."
-from Michael Coffey's Roman Satire, p.5
Roman literature began as an imitation of the Greek literary forms, from heroic epic and tragedy to the epigram. It was only in satire that the Romans could claim originality, since the Greeks never split satire off into its own genre.
Satire, as invented by the Romans, had a tendency from the beginning towards social criticism, but its defining characteristic was that it was a medley, like a modern revue.
The Romans produced two types of satire. Menippean satire was frequently a parody, blending prose and verse. The first use of this was the Syrian Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara (fl. 290 B.C.). Varro (116-27 B.C.) brought it into Latin. The Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification of Claudius), attributed to Seneca, a parody of the deification of the drooling emperor, is the only extant Menippean satire. We also have large segments of the Epicurean satire/novel, Satyricon, by Petronius.
The second, and more important type of satire was the verse satire in epic (dactylic hexameter) meter. [See Meter in Poetry.] The founder of this Roman genre is Lucilius, of whom we have only fragments. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal followed, leaving us many complete satires about the life, vice, and moral decay they saw around them.
Attacking the foolish, a component of ancient or modern satire, is found in Athenian Old Comedy whose sole extant representative is Aristophanes. The Romans also borrowed attention-grabbing techniques from the Cynic and Skeptic preachers. Their extemporaneous sermons called diatribes could be embellished with anecdotes, character sketches, fables, obscene jokes, parodies of serious poetry, and other elements also found in Roman satire.
Main Source: Roman Verse Satire - Lucilius to Juvenal
