ABSTRACT
The impression that Horaces ode to Grosphus makes on a competent and cultivated reader demands analysis, because the poem poses in a particularly sharp form some crucial problems about Horatian lyric. The Odes have no real parallel in the ancient world, though they have a multiplicity of models, their themes and subject-matter a multiplicity of sources. What moved Horace to write them is in some respects a puzzle, and particularly what decided him to recreate the lyric of Alcaeus. Generations of the learned have nodded assent to Horaces sententious maxims, schoolmasters have inculcated them, statesmen quoted them, men of all kinds found strengthening and consolation in them. Horace's problem was like that of Cicero when he wrote his philosophical works: the fit audience to listen to what he had to say did not exist, and the author had to create it, first in imaginative presentation, hoping thus to cajole and flatter it into real existence.
