Horace in the sixteenth century: commentators into critics

The first instinct of the humanist interested in formulating a theory of discourse was to go back (as for so much else) to an ancient prototype. As far as poetics was concerned, by far the most influential, as well as the most comprehensive, prototype was the Ars poetica of Horace, in which the humanists had an authoritative text on poetic composition to set beside the old and the newly discovered rhetorical treatises of Cicero. Although widely available in the late Middle Ages, the Ars poetica entered the age of print without much medieval impedimenta but with two sets of mainly explanatory annotations of respectable antiquity – one by Porphyrion from the third or fourth century, the other attributed to Acro and dating from the fifth century. These were frequently reprinted and they set a trend towards a prescriptive reading of Horace's poetics. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries commentaries proliferated. It was primarily in commentaries on texts that humanist scholars evolved, applied, and propagated the modes of reading which underlay the theory and practice of literary composition that they promoted so effectively. It follows that the commentaries they wrote on this, the very model of critical theory, are an integral part of the history of criticism, although the present survey cannot pretend to be more than a superficial sampling of this important material.