During the thousand years that separate Homer from Plotinus, the Greeks and Romans not only created two great literatures and most of our literary genres, they also developed theories of literature and methods of criticism. These, though very different from our own, have nevertheless greatly influenced modem thinking, especially during the early centuries of our modern literatures. Poets like Pindar, Aristophanes, and Horace, philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Philodemus, orators like Cicero and Quintillian, literary scholars like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Longinus, all of these have left us records of their various points of view. In this book, Professor Grube, a recognised authority in this field, gives us a clear, full and reliable analysis of the ancient critical texts and traces the birth and developments of critical thinking throughout the classical centuries.