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
Cynic epistles letters, probably date from the 1st century CE. It is not known who wrote the letters, but they seem to have been written by multiple authors. Written in Koine Greek, the Epistles are among the few Cynic writings which have survived from the time of the Roman empire. In addition to these letters, there are 10 epistles attributed to Anacharsis and 9 epistles attributed to Heraclitus. The letters of Anacharsis may have been written in the 3rd century BCE, whereas the Heraclitean letters probably date from the 1st century CE. Anacharsis and Heraclitus predate the Cynics, but they were both