Canidia (gens) Canidia (gens) The gens Canidia was a Roman family of the late Republic. It is best known from a single individual, Publius Canidius Crassus, consul "suffectus" in 40 B.C., and the chief general of Marcus Antonius. "Canidia" was also a sobriquet bestowed upon Gratidia, a Neapolitan perfumer (according to Pomponius Porphyrion) who had deserted the poet Horace. He primarily describes her in his fifth and seventeenth epodes, and the eighth satire of his first book of Satires; she is mentioned in passing at Epode 5, Satire 2.1 and Satire 2.8. The "Palinodia" in the sixteenth ode of the first book
Horace borrowed from Archaic Greece, employing hexameters in his "Satires" and "Epistles", and iambs in his "Epodes", all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms. His "Odes" featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modeled in the work of Callimachus. In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience