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Why did Quintilian describe satire as a Roman literary form?

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Take a look at George Bernard Shaw speaking on the marvels of Movietone — satire George Bernard Shaw speaking about the novelty of technology; excerpt from a Hearst Metrotone newsreel (c. 1930). (29 sec; 2.6 MB)

The Roman rhetorician Quintilian famously declared, "satire is wholly our own" (satura tota nostra est), to emphasize that the genre was a distinctively Roman invention rather than a direct import from Greek literature.1

While Quintilian was familiar with Greek satiric works and authors like Aristophanes, he noted that the Greeks lacked a specific term for the genre. By contrast, the Latin word satura—originally meaning a "medley" or "miscellany"—was used by Quintilian to define a specific poetic form that had been established and refined through Roman practice.1

Specifically, he was referring to the genre of poems written in hexameters that addressed particular themes with a characteristic tone, a style famously "invented" by Gaius Lucilius and later developed by poets such as Horace. Thus, for Quintilian, the claim was a recognition of the unique formal structure and literary tradition that Roman writers had cultivated independently.1