An extreme instance of this ancient habit is Plutarch’s Greek treatise of the first century, _How Youth Should Read Poetry_. Here the familiar idea that poetry is a means of ethical education is so expounded as to reveal the limits of Plutarch’s conception. He is not merely, as _grammaticus_ commenting Homer in school, offering poetry as a propædeutic to philosophy; he is repeating a narrow and commonplace æsthetic. His treatment of imitation, ignoring Aristotle’s use of that term,[29] has in mind faithfulness to fact. Ignoring also the Aristotelian idea of poetic movement, he repeats the commonplace and misleading analogy from painting[30] with a barren literalness. “We shall still more thoroughly ground the young man, if, on introducing him to poetry, we explain to him that it is an imitative art and agent, analogous to painting. Not only must he be made acquainted with the common saying that poetry is vocal painting, and painting silent poetry, but we must also teach him that when we see a painting of a lizard, an ape, or the face of Thersites, our pleasure and surprise are occasioned, not by the beauty of the object, but by the likeness of the painting to it.... In such instances it is especially important that the young man come to understand that we do not praise the action imitated, but the art, provided the subject is treated accurately.”[31] Poetry is pictorial in this sense not to authors whose creative bent is distinctively dramatic or narrative, but to the describers and expatiators, not to Vergil, but to Ovid. For this narrow conception of poetic truth Plutarch’s recurring terms[32] are not merely narrow; they are distinctly rhetorical. They are the very ones commonly used by rhetoricians to describe success in _prosopopœia_,[33] or characterization according to type. That Plutarch means them so is clear in section x on characterization in Homer. “It is worth while, in this connection, to notice the conduct of Agamemnon; for he passes Sthenelus by without noticing him, yet he does not neglect Odysseus, but answers him, ‘seeing how he was wroth, and took back his saying.’ Had he apologized to all, he would have appeared undignified and servile, and had he disdained all, arrogant and unreasonable.... It is also a good idea to take notice of the difference between the ways in which a discreet man and a pompous soothsayer addresses a crowd. Thus Calchas.... One should notice as well the differences in racial characteristics. For example, the Trojans rush ferociously to battle with savage cries, but the Greeks ‘in silence feared their captains’; for to fear officers in the presence of the enemy is the mark of heroism and obedience.... Hence foresight is Grecian and civil; rashness, barbaric and rude; the one to be emulated, the other to be avoided.”