If _oratores_ be substituted for _poetæ_ we have the familiar _docere_, _delectare_ of rhetoric, as we have it in the summary _miscuit utile dulci_ (343); and with Horace the _movere_ that remains hardly suggests a different technic. _Si vis me flere, dolendum est_ (102) will be found in Cicero and Quintilian. The counsel of congruity with which he begins, and to which he reverts again and again, is a preoccupation of ancient rhetoric. No better phrase has been found for the progress of a speech than _lucidus ordo_ (41); and the _iunctura_ (47) to which it is immediately applied is a term of _compositio_. In the thought of Horace’s circle the distinction between rhetoric and poetic as two movements, two ways of composing, seems to have been inactive. Rather Horace seems to think of composition as generally constant throughout various forms, and as involving mainly the control of conception by congruity and plan, of expression by adaptation and finish. That such ideas were salutary when _declamatio_ had begun to threaten both rhetoric and poetic, and that they are salutary still, no one should deny; but they make no contribution to the distinctive development of poetic. Grammarians, rhetors, philosophers, men of letters seem thus to converge under the Empire toward a poetic strongly tinged with rhetoric, no longer distinct as a movement having its own technic. The inference, though not conclusive, is suggestive as an hypothesis. Less conclusive, but still suggestive, is the further inference that this habit of critical thought was intensified in the specifically Latin tradition. In sustained emotional movement the _Æneid_ is solitary; and even while it was revered, its poetic seems less influential than that of Ovid. Vergil had turned for his poetic from the newer Greek ways adopted by his countrymen to the tradition interpreted by Aristotle. That older tradition is no longer active in the poetic descending from the Roman Empire through the Holy Roman Empire.