But to trace these ideals in their contact with Vergil’s mental development, we must look back for a moment to the tendencies of the Catullan age from which he was emerging.  In a curious passage written not many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart.  He mentions first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard.  Then there are Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful directness he does approve.  In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents a homely plainness which he commends, while Vergil stands for gentleness and urbanity (molle atque facetum).

[Footnote 4:  Sat.  I. 10, 40 ff.]

The passage is important not only because it reveals a contemporaneous view of Vergil’s position but because it shows Horace thus early as the spokesman of the “classical” coterie, the tenets of which in the end prevailed.  In this passage Horace employs the categories of the standard text-books of rhetoric of that day[5] which were accustomed to classify styles into four types:  (1) Grand and ornate, (2) grand but austere, (3) plain and austere, (4) plain but graceful.  The first two styles might obviously be used in forensic prose or in ambitious poetic work like epics and tragedies.  Horace would clearly reject the former, represented for instance by Hortensius and Pacuvius, in favor of the austere dignity and force of the second, affected by men like Cornificius in prose and Varius and Pollio in verse.  The two types of the “plain” style were employed in more modest poems of literature, both, in prose and in such poetry as comedy, the epyllion, in pastoral verse, and the like.  Severe simplicity was favored by Calvus in his orations, Catullus in his lyrics 5 while a more polished and well-nigh precieuse plainness was illustrated in the speeches of Calidius and in the Alexandrian epyllion of Catullus’ Peleus and Thetis and in Vergil’s Ciris and Bucolics.

[Footnote 5:  E.g.  Demetrius, Philodemus, Cicero; of. Class.  Phil. 1920, p. 230.]

In choosing between these two, Horace, of course, sympathizes with the ideals of the severe and chaste style, which he finds in the comedies of Fundanius.  Vergil’s early work, unambitious and “plain” though it is, falls, of course, into the last group; and though Horace recognizes his type with a friendly remark, one feels that he recognizes it for reasons of friendship, rather than because of any native sympathy for it.  By his juxtaposition he shows that the classical ideals of the second and third of the four “styles” are to him most sympathetic. Mollitudo does not find favor in any of his own work, or in his criticism of other men’s work.  Vergil, therefore, though he appears in this Augustan coterie as an important member, is still felt to be something of a free lance who adheres to Alexandrian art[6] not wholly in accord with the standards which are