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
Carmen Balcells Carmen Balcells Carmen Balcells Segala (9 August 1930 – 20 September 2015) was a literary agent of Spanish-language authors from Spain and Latin America, including six Nobel Prize–winning authors. She led her agency from 1956 to 2000, during which time she was one of the driving forces behind the 1960s boom of Latin American literature. After her retirement she was awarded with an honorary doctorate, besides other awards, but returned to the agency in 2008. Authors who have published with Balcells have dedicated novels to her and included her as characters in her work; she is praised as "one of