Mock Epic in Augustans
The Augustans were really into playing around with classical genres like the ode and the epic. Sometimes, they added a surprise twist to them—like how they turned the epic into the mock epic.
When you think about epics, you probably think about grand battles, heroic warriors, and valiant sword-wielders like Achilles and Hector in the Iliad. The Augustans took on the epic genre but used all the conventions to talk about silly, trivial things. Basically, they wrote about silly things in a grand way, in order to make fun of these silly things.
The most famous example of a mock epic is Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. It's about a guy stealing a lock of hair from a woman, but it's written in the style of an epic: the language is grand, there are "wars" (though they take place in drawing rooms, rather than on battlefields), and there are heroes and heroines aplenty.
Shmoops:
Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock is full of classical and epic imagery. Delve into a discussion of this imagery here.
Pope also uses the mock-epic style in the Rape of the Lock to comment on how superficial and materialistic he thought Augustan society was. Here's an analysis of this theme in the poem.