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
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