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
Bagatelles and Satires Bagatelles and Satires Benjamin Franklin was responsible for writing satirical "comedies". His most notable humorous work is the collection called, "The Bagatelles". "The Bagatelles", or "jeux d'espirit" in French, are a collection of comics produced in Franklin's Passy Press in France. "Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One" is a comedic work Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1773. Franklin wrote it to insult the colonies' secretary of state, but wrote as if giving Machiavellian advice on how to lose an empire. Franklin pretended to advocate the tyranny that many over-imposed rulers desire as necessary to