Satires (Horace) book's poems are dialogues in which the poet allows a series of pseudo-philosophers, such as the bankrupt art-dealer turned Stoic philosopher Damasippus, the peasant Ofellus, the mythical seer Teiresias, and the poet's own slave, Dama, to espouse their philosophy of life, in satiric contrast to that of the narrator. Although the "Satires" are considered to be inferior to the "Odes", they have been received positively in recent decades. Horace's direct predecessor as writer of satires was Lucilius. Horace inherits from Lucilius the hexameter, the conversational and sometimes even "prosaic" tone of his poetry, and the tradition of personal attack. In
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