Satires (Horace) similes, and the fiction of an anonymous interlocutor whose objections the speaker easily refutes. In addition, Horace alludes to another inspiration, the poet Lucretius whose didactic epic "De rerum natura" ("On the Nature of Things"), also written in hexameters, popularized Epicurean physics in Rome. For example, Horace's comparison of his satires with cookies that a teacher uses to encourage his students to learn their letters, reminds of Lucretius' more traditional comparison of his poetry with the sugar that sweetens the bitter medicine of philosophy. Moreover, Lucretian stock phrases such as "nunc ad rem redeo" ("now I return to the matter
Epistles (Plato) to stamp the treatises with Plato's authority. The "Thirteenth Letter" is addressed to Dionysius II of Syracuse, and appears to be private in character. The portrait of Plato offered here is in sharp contrast to that the disinterested and somewhat aloof philosopher of the "Seventh Letter", leading Bury to doubt its authenticity. Epistles (Plato) The Epistles (Greek: Ἐπιστολαί; Latin: "Epistolae") of Plato are a series of thirteen letters traditionally included in the Platonic corpus. Their authenticity has been the subject of some dispute, and scholarly consensus has shifted back and forth over time. They were "generally accepted as genuine until