L. Annaeus Cornutus and the Reception of Horace’s Ars poetica

Abstract

Horace became a school author who has been read and quoted much in late antiquity. However, his place in the Roman literary canon has not been always so solid, for—and this can be inferred from the fact that in the oeuvre of significant authors of the early imperial era we either did not or hardly find any reference to it—there was a period, a few decades, when the poet was not one of the important and cited authors. However, there was a significant shift in Horace’s judgment in Nero's time. Suddenly he becomes one of the most cited and imitated authors, his satires and lyrical poems all becoming literary patterns, as evidenced by the poetry of Aules Persius Flaccus and Caesius Bassus and Petronius’s novel Satyricon. Horace’s thoughts in his poem Ars poetica also seem to have found her way into Virgil’s commentaries, and the inauguration of this work into a poetic handbook is presumably also related to Horace’s Renaissance of Nero’s time. And all these threads ultimately lead to L. Annaeus Cornutus, the Silver Age Stoic philosopher and literary critic, who, in my opinion, may have played a decisive role in making Horace one of the dominant authors of the Roman literary canon from the middle of the 1st century AD.