Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet of the age of Augustus, living from 65 BC to 8 BC. He wrote the Odes, which the rhetorician Quintilian judged the only Latin lyrics worth reading, as well as the hexameter Satires and Epistles and the sharper iambic Epodes. His career coincided with Rome's change from republic to empire: he was an officer in the republican army defeated at Philippi in 42 BC, was then befriended by Maecenas, the right-hand man of Octavian in civil affairs, and became a spokesman for the new regime. Commentators disagree about how independent he stayed, since some see a delicate balance while John Dryden called him a well-mannered court slave. His Ars Poetica is written in the form of an epistle.