Horace’s two books of Satires have always lurked in the shadow of the Odes. Aside from such favourite anecdotes as the much-translated encounter with a literary gatecrasher on the Via Sacra, or the “granny’s tale” of the town mouse and the country mouse, they have for the most part been found strange, profoundly unsatisfying poems, whose self-deprecating tone has condemned them to neglect. They are also, by most standards, astonishingly unsatirical. The first book, published in 36/5 bce, is Horace’s poetic debut, an “integrational” book in which a freedman’s son marks his miraculous arrival in society (after being proscribed and fighting on the wrong side at Philippi), and justifies his envied niche as a civil servant (scriba quaestorius) and poet in the “pure house” of the millionaire Maecenas. The second, published in 30 bce after the battle of Actium, is tense with all the increasing restrictions of the new regime; Horace virtually gives up the right to speak, and directs his satire mostly against himself.