Siscia, the modern Sissek.

Though Horace was probably best known in Rome in these early days as a
writer of lampoons and satirical poems, in which the bitterness of his
models Archilochus and Lucilius was aimed at, not very successfully--
for bitterness and personal rancour were not natural to the man--he
showed in other compositions signs of the true poetic spirit, which
afterwards found expression in the consummate grace and finish of his
Odes. To this class belongs the following poem (Epode 16), which, from
internal evidence, appears to have been written B.C. 40, when the
state of Italy, convulsed by civil war, was well calculated to fill
him with despair. Horace had frequent occasion between this period and
the battle of Actium, when the defeat and death of Antony closed the
long struggle for supremacy between him and Octavius, to appeal to his
countrymen against the waste of the best blood of Italy in civil fray,
which might have been better spent in subduing a foreign foe, and
spreading the lustre of the Roman arms. But if we are to suppose this
poem written when the tidings of the bloody incidents of the Perusian
campaign had arrived in Rome,--the reduction of the town of Perusia by
famine, and the massacre of from two to three hundred prisoners,
almost all of equestrian or senatorial rank,--we can well understand
the feeling under which the poem is written.

TO THE ROMAN PEOPLE.

Another age in civil wars will soon be spent and worn,
And by her native strength our Rome be wrecked and overborne,
That Rome, the Marsians could not crush, who border on our lands,
Nor the shock of threatening Porsena with his Etruscan bands,
Nor Capua's strength that rivalled ours, nor Spartacus the stern,