Horace¿s Satires have a distinctly dialogic quality ¿ not for nothing does Horace himself choose to call these poems sermones, ¿conversations¿. Even when formally presented as monologues, the Satires seem to be speeches actively addressed to their recipients, cognisant of their audiences, and full of the ¿voices¿ of others. This book applies theories on dialogue by the twentieth- century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin to Horace¿s Satires. Bakhtinian key concepts such as polyphony, heteroglossia, addressivity and authoritative discourse are investigated and found to be useful in understanding Horace¿s work. Far from getting bogged down in theory, however, this is a book which uses some of Bakhtin¿s ideas