now being formulated.  If Horace had obeyed his literary instincts alone he would probably have relegated Vergil at this period to the silence he accorded Callus and Propertius if not to the open hostility he expressed towards the Alexandrianism of Catullus.  It is significant of Vergil’s breadth of sympathy that he remitted not a jot in his devotion to Catullus and Gallus and that he won the deep reverence of Propertius while remaining the friend and companion of the courtly group working towards a stricter classicism.  If we may attempt to classify the early Augustans, we find them aligning themselves thus.  The strict classicists are Horace the satirist, Varius a writer of epics, Pollio of tragedy; while Varus, Valgius, Plotius, and Fundanius, though less productive, employ their influence in the support of this tendency as does Tibullus somewhat later.  Vergil is a close personal friend of these men but refuses to accept the axioms of any one school; Gallus, his friend, is a free romanticist, and is followed in this tendency a few years later by Propertius.

[Footnote 6:  Horace had doubtless seen not only the Culex but several of the other minor works that Vergil never deigned to put into general circulation.]

The influences that made for classicism were many.  Apollodorus, the teacher of Octavian, must have been a strong factor, but since his work has been lost, the weight of it cannot now be estimated.  Horace imbibed his love for severe ideals in Athens, of course.  There his teachers were Stoic rhetoricians who trained him in an uncompromising respect for stylistic rules.[7] He read the Hellenistic poets, to be sure, and reveals in his poems a ready memory of them, but it was the great epoch of Greek poetry that formed his style.  Such are the foreign influences.  But the native Roman factors must not be forgotten.  In point of fact it was the classicistic Catullus and Calvus, of the simple, limpid lyrics, written in pure unalloyed every-day Latin, that taught the new generation to reject the later Hellenistic style of Catullus and Calvus as illustrated in the verse romances.  Varus, Pollio, and Varius were old enough to know Catullus and Calvus personally, to remember the days when poems like Dianae sumus in fide were just issued, and they were poets who could value the perfect art of such work even after the authors of them had been enticed by ambition into dangerous by-paths.  In a word, it was Catullus and Calvus, the lyric poets, who made it possible for the next generation to reject Catullus and Calvus the neoteric romancers.

[Footnote 7:  For the stylistic tenets of the Stoic teachers see Fiske, Lucilius and Horace, pp. 64-143.  Apollodorus seems to be the rhetorician whom Horace calls Heliodorus in Sat.  I, 5, see Class.  Phil. 1920, 393.]