Satires
Notebook
Horace's Satires (Sermones, published c. 35 and 30 BCE) are two books of conversational hexameter poems that shaped the genre of urbane, self-deprecating Roman satire. Rather than savage attack, they offer genial moral observation—on greed, ambition, friendship, and the art of living—drawn from the poet's own rise in Augustan Rome under the patronage of Maecenas. The verse translation is John Conington's (1869); the two satires he declined to render (I.2 and I.8) are supplied here in Christopher Smart's prose, each marked with a note.
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