Ancient texts on Greek/Latin poetic techniques

[Callaina]

Not sure this is quite the right place for this thread, but I couldn't find a better one.

I'm looking for ancient or early medieval texts that explicitly discuss poetic techniques. By this I mean things such as meter, alliteration and assonance, word-painting, subtleties of word order, etc. I.e. texts like Horace's Ars Poetica.

Texts that discuss the *philosophy* of poetics (like Aristotle's Poetics) are also of interest, but ultimately I'm looking for the sort of practical resource which an aspiring poet in Greek/Latin times might read in order to discover how to write "good" poetry.

Any ideas?

 

[Callaina]

Ancient criticism of poetry (as poetry) would also be helpful.

 

[Bitmap]

Quintilian discusses such things, I suppose ... but I don't know if he ever really touches on poetic techniques (I haven't read him in detail).
There certainly must have been some conventions among Augustean poets (you can even see a certain poetic progression in Propertius), but I can't think of any old source that clearly described them. Maybe Dantius has come across something like that (he's very well-read).

 

[Dantius]

I'm not familiar with any such things. There's metrical treatises by folks like Caesius Bassus and Terenti(an)us Maurus but I don't believe they discuss poetic techniques, just the nature of various meters.

 

[Iáson]

I think it might be a mistake to discount Aristotle. The bits that I've read of the Poetics seem much more focused on poetic techniques, in a very prescriptive manner, than on the philosophical aspects of poetry. There's similar stuff in Ps.-Longinos On the Sublime.

As others have pointed out above, there are lots of works on techniques in rhetoric: Ps.-Demetrios On Style, Cicero, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, Quintilian... some of them probably have some bearing on poetic technique. There are also various relevant bits in the grammarians - eg. Consentius, who discusses and categorises the use of poetic forms/archaisms etc. But I haven't heard of any specifically about writing poetry, except Horace; which is not to say that they don't exist. It's possible that such treatises did exist but do not survive; or that ancient poets simply used their predecessors combined with rhetorical training; or that they do exist and I simply haven't heard of them yet or can't think of them right now.

There's probably also a lot of relevant material in the scholia to literary texts (and of course ancient readers would have used them or their ancestors - it's established that eg. Vergil was aware of ancient literary scholarship on the Iliad, for example, when alluding to it).

 

[Callaina]

Thank you all (particularly Iáson!) That's very useful.