Lyric in Rome

But Horace steals the stage not just because, thanks to the vagaries of transmission, his texts are isolated, or because of his outstanding quality and artistic personality. His carmina (poems or songs) are isolated because of authorial choice and conscious, sometimes wily, self-positioning. He is a canonical author because he wants to be canonised. This is clearly a self-conscious difference vis-à-vis his Greek predecessors. Alcaeus and Pindar must have been competitive and aggressive in their own way, but the whole idea of a canon is dependent on a world of letters based on critics, wide readership, book trade, anthologies and schools, something that came into existence through a much later process, in the centuries between Isocrates and Meleager.