The vision of Horatian scholars into the nature of Horace's 'Odes' has for many years been obscured by a number of disputes concerning both his use of Greek literary models, classical and Alexandrian, and his poetic judgment of his Latin predecessors and contemporaries, the neoterics and elegists. It is ironic (though the eclectic Horace might well have found it amusing) that one of the first self-proclaimed literary critics of the Western tradition has left posterity in such doubt about where precisely he himself, as poet, fits into the trends and currents of literary history.