Horace's Satires and Epistles

Early in his life and again in maturity Horace sought to turn his poetic skills to the uses of moral and aesthetic discussion in the series of didactic works translated here. In the Satires Horace adopts one persona after another each of which reduces himself to absurdity in the process of trying to argue a point of view about the ethical or artistic life. The form of the Epistles permits Horace to write with particular intimacy addressing moral issues in a persuasive yet informal way. The third epistle The Art of Poetry on the other hand is a formal poem addressed to the emperor Augustus and seeks to educate the poetic taste of the ruler of the western world. Jacob Fuchs is Associate Professor of English at California State University Hayward. He is the editor of Virgil: The Aeneid (Pengiun Classics 1991) and author of Reading Horace (Edinburgh UP 1967) The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Edinburgh UP 1969 reprint Bristol CP 1994).