Horace is keenly aware of how different his situation in history and society is from that of his Greek lyric predecessors, and he never engages in comparing himself directly with any of his models, even though this kind of comparison (‘synkrisis’) was a very common mode of criticism in his day. This sensitivity to the importance of historical situatedness is something that Horace owes to the literary history of Cicero, above all in the Brutus.