“It will matter much whether a god speak or a hero, ripe age or the ardor of budding youth, a matron of authority or an anxious nurse, a traveling merchant or a farmer bound to his field, a Colchian or an Assyrian, a Theban or an Argive. Follow tradition, or invent what fits each character. If perchance your poem revives time-honored Achilles, let the active, touchy, stubborn, fierce hero think that laws were not made for him, and rest his claim on arms. Let Medea be cruel and unconquered, Ino tearful, Ixion faithless, Orestes gloomy.” (114-124.) “Each time of life demands your study of its habits. As natures and years move on, you must assign to each what is appropriate. The boy who is old enough to answer when he is spoken to, and steps off firmly, yearns to play with his mates, takes offense as quickly as he lays it by, and changes from hour to hour. The beardless youth....” (156-178.) and so on through Horace’s seven ages of man. Thus stripped of their style, these counsels might have come from any classical rhetoric. Nothing was more firmly fixed in the tradition of the schools than characterization according to age, sex, race, occupation. Such characterization by type suffices for _prosopopœia_ in school, for the fathers and sons and pirates of _declamatio_, for even the spendthrifts and slaves and parasites of Latin comedy; it does not suffice for Œdipus or Neoptolemus, for Medea or Dido. Nor is the difference merely in degree; it is in the distinctively poetic habit of creating. Poetic movement, if Horace indeed glimpses it as distinct from that of rhetoric, he does not fully define; poetic characterization he seems not to regard as distinct at all. Indeed, most of the _Ars Poetica_ applies equally to _ars rhetorica_. Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetæ, Aut simil et iucunda et idonea dicere vitæ (333-4).