Epistles (Horace) he had already written. However, as a rule, the Epistles "are compositions like those which Pope, following the manner of Horace, has made familiar to us as Moral Essays." The "Epistles" were published about four years after the first three books of "Odes," and were introduced by a special address to his patron Maecenas, as his "Odes," "Epodes," and "Satires" had been. The form of composition may have been suggested by some of the satires of Lucilius, which were composed as letters to his personal friends... "From the "Epistles"... we gather that [Horace] had gradually adopted a more retired and
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