ABSTRACT
It is the 130s BCE, and Rome has rapidly filled with a new literature: some original, some stolen from colonized peoples, some adapted into Latin from other models. With these new libraries incorporated under imperium Romanum, what constitutes a liber, a charta, or a poema? By examining the earliest fragments of the first Roman satirist, Gaius Lucilius, whose piecemeal and scattered lines reflect not only the social but also intellectual culture of second century BCE, we will capture a better understanding of textuality, technology, and techniques of crafting Roman poetry in the times of turbulence and change that presaged the end of the republic.