Horace Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (December 8, 65 BC – November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his "Odes" as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words." Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses ("Satires" and "Epistles") and caustic iambic poetry ("Epodes"). The hexameters are amusing yet serious works, friendly in
Horace themes throughout his poetic career, including politics, love, philosophy and ethics, his own social role, as well as poetry itself. His "Epodes" and "Satires" are forms of 'blame poetry' and both have a natural affinity with the moralising and diatribes of Cynicism. This often takes the form of allusions to the work and philosophy of Bion of Borysthenes but it is as much a literary game as a philosophical alignment. By the time he composed his "Epistles", he was a critic of Cynicism along with all impractical and "high-falutin" philosophy in general. The "Satires" also include a strong element of