In the four centuries which followed Euripides' mimēsis of Homer in the Cyclops, imitative practice in all its senses was refined and theorised by poets, rhetoricians and philosophers. If the major landmarks of the fourth century – Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle – are still visible to us, most of what followed has simply disappeared, though the empty surface is occasionally broken (e.g. by papyri of Philodemus) to suggest some of what we are missing. It is only from the Augustan age onwards that sufficient material in both Greek and Latin survives to make possible an overview of ancient approaches to the subject of mimēsis. The present chapter concerns an Augustan work which seems to look forwards and backwards in multiple senses: it clearly draws on lost Hellenistic work and is itself preserved only in fragments, whereas the scope of its ambition looks forward to the great synthesising works of the imperial period.

In his Letter to Pompeius Dionysius of Halicarnassus refers to a work (or series of essays) of his addressed to one Demetrius on the subject of mimēsis: ‘The first concerns the enquiry into mimēsis, the second deals with which poets, philosophers, historians and orators we should imitate, and the third (which is still unfinished) with how we should practise mimēsis’ (Letter to Pompeius 3.1).