The Roman satirist approached philosophy warily, first because it was Greek, and secondly because it seemed to set itself up as a rival to the native moral tradition. Satire is basically conservative in outlook, and Roman satire upholds Roman values: change is bad, the foreign is suspect. It is for this reason that Lucilius makes fun, through a persona, of a Roman Hellenomaniac, Albucius (fr. 87-93W), that Persius depicts a centurion bidding a clipped coin for a passel of cheap Greeks (5.189-91), and that Juvenal (again through a persona) expresses loathing of a Hellenized Rome (3.60-1) and of starveling Greeks generally (3.78).

More specifically, philosophy was so quintessentially Greek an activity that its Roman adherents in the ruling élite were open to censure or ridicule. Native hostility could be exploited even by the philosopher-friendly Cicero: in two trial speeches, the Pro Murena (§§60–6) and the In Pisonem, he mocked the ethical paradoxes of the younger Cato’s rigorous Stoicism and scathingly attacked the Epicureanism of L. Calpurnius Piso because he knew he would be sympathetically heard by a Roman jury. This antipathy is parodied by Petronius, Satyricon 71.12: the plutocratic vulgarian, Trimalchio, insists that his epitaph will record that he took no heed of philosophers.