ABSTRACT
BY the time of Horace, the preliminaries had been settled—or were settled by Horace himself. As we have seen, the Roman poets followed their Greek originals with just so much modification or selection as was due to the difference of language and nationality. They would no doubt have been content to follow the Greeks to the end, if a new phase in literature had not suddenly arisen. The outburst of Augustan poetry, in which Horace himself played no small part, but which later critics chiefly identified with Virgil, had no Greek analogy, and could not therefore be explained on purely Greek lines. Post-Augustan criticism was faced with an unprecedented phenomenon.
