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
John Ker (Latin poet) John Ker (Latin poet) John Ker (died 1741) was a Scottish schoolteacher and academic, a classical scholar known as a neo-Latin poet. Ker was born at Dunblane, Perthshire, and was for a time schoolmaster at Crieff. About 1710, after examination by ministers and professors, he became a master in the Royal High School, Edinburgh. In 1717 he was appointed professor of Greek in King's College, Aberdeen, the first specialist teacher of the subject there, despite his admiration for the uncompromising Jacobite Archibald Pitcairne. On 2 October 1734 Ker succeeded Adam Watt in the Latin chair at Edinburgh University. He studied