Horace (65 BC-8 BC), or Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman lyric poet, satirist, and literary critic. He is generally considered one of the greatest lyric poets of the world.

Horace's boast was to have been "the first to have brought over Aeolian song to Italian measures," that is, to have used the forms and themes of the great lyric poets of Greece in Latin. Although this is not technically correct (Catullus preceded him by a generation), it was nevertheless true that he was the first consistently to imitate and emulate the poets of the great classical age of the Greek lyric, that is, Alcaeus and Sappho, and to adapt the lyric form to patriotic and philosophical themes, rather than to the expression of feelings of love and other personal emotions. The almost total loss of the early lyric poetry of Greece has left Horace as the main transmitter...