Abstract

The modern admirers of Horace who take him seriously as a moralist are inclined to attribute an undue degree of originality to his views on the moral function of poetry. The conception of the poet as teacher was, of course, the traditional Greek view. But Professor A. Y. Campbell thinks—in spite of ‘passages from Strabo and Plutarch’ —that this conception ‘after the days of Plato and Aristophanes lapsed as completely as did the production of the sort of literature that had justified it.’ Strabo and Plutarch, he asserts, merely provide evidence that the older Greek view revived; the forces inspiring this ‘revival’ were ‘not Greek, but Roman.’ ‘The Greeks got it from the Romans, Strabo from the spirit of the Augustan age.’