Epodes (Horace) in the context of "Horace"

According to one meaning of the word, an epode is the third part of an ancient Greek choral ode that follows the strophe and the antistrophe and completes the movement.

The word epode is also used to refer to the second, shorter line of a two-line stanza of the kind composed by Archilochus and Hipponax in which the first line consists of a dactylic hexameter or an iambic trimeter. (See Archilochian.) It can also be used (as in Horace's Epodes) to refer to poems written in such stanzas.

Iambus or iambic poetry was a genre of ancient Greek poetry that included but was not restricted to the iambic meter and whose origins modern scholars have traced to the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. The genre featured insulting and obscene language and sometimes it is referred to as "blame poetry". For Alexandrian editors, however, iambus signified any poetry of an informal kind that was intended to entertain, and it seems to have been performed on similar occasions as elegy even though lacking elegy's decorum. The Archaic Greek poets Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax were among the most famous of its early exponents. The Alexandrian poet Callimachus composed "iambic" poems against contemporary scholars, which were collected in an edition of about a thousand lines, of which fragments of thirteen poems survive. He in turn influenced Roman poets such as Catullus, who composed satirical epigrams that popularized Hipponax's choliamb. Horace's Epodes on the other hand were mainly imitations of Archilochus and, as with the Greek poet, his invectives took the forms both of private revenge and denunciation of social offenders.