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
Carmen Baroja Carmen Baroja Carmen Baroja Nessi (1883, Pamplona- 4 June 1950, Madrid) was a Spanish writer and ethnologist who wrote under the pseudonym "Vera Alzate". She was the sister of the writers Ricardo Baroja and Pío Baroja, and mother of the anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja and film director Pío Caro Baroja. Baroja was the youngest child of Serafin Baroja, a Basque writer and poet who made his living as a mining engineer, and Carmen Nessi y Goñia, a woman of Basque and Italian descent. At the time of her birth, her father was editing "Bai, Juana, Bai", the first (Basque-Castilian) bilingual