Satires and Epistles

Exuberantly mocking the vices and pretensions of his Roman contemporaries, Horace's Satires are stuffed full of comic vignettes, moral insights, and his pervasive humanity. Boasting famous episodes such as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse and the grotesque dinner party given by the nouveau-riche Nasidienus, these poems influenced not only contemporaries such as Juvenal, but also English satirists from Ben Jonson to W. H. Auden. In the Epistles, Horace used the form of lette...