At an important transition within the Ars Poetica Horace announces that he himself will abandon poetry, because (thanks to appropriate purges) he does not suffer from inspired madness; instead he will become a Professor of Creative Writing:

Horace here plays, as he does in the Satires, with the allegedly ‘un-poetic’ nature of verse, particularly didactic verse, on banal or technical subjects, but what might strike a modern reader is the strongly educational, not to say moralising flavour of Horace's treatment both of the writing of poetry and of his rôle as a teacher. Horace's attitude, as we shall see throughout this book, is not in fact untypical for antiquity, but, typically also, Horace's is no conventional handling of traditional material.

By Horace's day poetry had been the basis of the early stages of education for several centuries and was to continue in this rôle; it was, as for example Plutarch's essay ‘How the young man should study poetry’ clearly demonstrates, poetry which ‘taught’ young men their munera et officia, and which thus ‘nurtured’ and ‘shaped’ them.