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
Latin literature in writing as a means of influencing public opinion. Early Latin literature ended with Gaius Lucilius, who created a new kind of poetry in his 30 books of "Satires" (2nd century BC). He wrote in an easy, conversational tone about books, food, friends, and current events. Traditionally, the height of Latin literature has been assigned to the period from 81 BC to AD 17, although recent scholarship has questioned the assumptions that privileged the works of this period over both earlier and later works. This period is usually said to have begun with the first known speech of Cicero and