Exegi monumentum aere perennius.--Carm. iii. 30.
More durable than brass a monument I've raised.

In Greece, and other countries, the Ode appears to have been the most
ancient, as well as the most popular species of literary production.
Warm in expression, and short in extent, it concentrates in narrow bounds
the fire of poetical transport: on which account, it has been generally
employed to celebrate the fervours of piety, the raptures of love, the
enthusiasm of praise; and to animate warriors to glorious exertions of
valour:

Musa dedit fidibus Divos, puerosque Deorum,
Et pugilem victorem, et equum certamine primnm,
Et juvenum curas, et libera vina referre.--Hor. De Arte Poet.

The Muse to nobler subjects tunes her lyre;
Gods, and the sons of Gods, her song inspire;
Wrestler and steed, who gained the Olympic prize,
Love's pleasing cares, and wine's unbounded joys.--Francis.

Misenum Aeoliden, quo non praestantior alter
Aere ciere viros, Martemque accendere cnatu. [275]
Virgil, Aeneid, vi.
. . . . . . . . . . . .

Sed tum forte cava dum personat aequora concha
Demens, et canto vocat in certamina Divos.--Ibid.

Misenus, son of Oeolus, renowned
The warrior trumpet in the field to sound;
With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms,
And rouse to dare their fate in honourable arms.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

(175) Swollen with applause, and aiming still at more,
He now provokes the sea-gods from the shore.--Dryden

There arose in this department, among the Greeks, nine eminent poets,
viz. Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibicus, Sappho, Stesichorus,
Simonides, and Pindar. The greater number of this distinguished class
are now known only by name. They seem all to have differed from one
another, no less in the kind of measure which they chiefly or solely
employed, than in the strength or softness, the beauty or grandeur, the
animated rapidity or the graceful ease of their various compositions. Of
the amorous effusions of the lyre, we yet have examples in the odes of
Anacreon, and the incomparable ode of Sappho: the lyric strains which
animated to battle, have sunk into oblivion; but the victors in the
public games of Greece have their fame perpetuated in the admirable
productions of Pindar.

Horace, by adopting, in the multiplicity of his subjects