Augustan poets turned Bacchus into a principal source of poetic inspiration. They had, of course, precedents in Greek culture, where Dionysus had always had close links with the Muses and with the ‘secret knowledge’ which poets possessed. Plato, with his own rationalist agenda, made his Socrates compare poets to possessed Corybants (a frenzied cult with strong links to Dionysus, cf. Propertius 3.17.35–6) and to bacchants (Ion 533e–4a); poets did not, on this scheme, compose ‘as a result of their skill’ (ἐκ τέχνης), but rather because they were possessed by higher forces. Greek poets themselves had, of course, never abandoned claims to sophia and technē, whatever they might owe to the Muses, and Callimachus at least was to put technē at the centre of his poetic claims (fr. 1.17), perhaps in direct confrontation with the assertions of Socrates in the Ion. Plato's picture is, of course, an exaggerated development from traditional ideas, which exploits the polyvalence inherent in the standard notion of a poet as a ‘servant (θεράπων) of the Muses’. Nevertheless, Plato's amused picture of poets ‘with the god in them’ (ἔνθεοι) was to recur in Roman poetry as part of the new sacral language and context in which Augustan poets sited themselves and their work (with greater or lesser degrees of seriousness). Horace wrote two odes (2.19, 3.25) in which, like Plato's poets, he presented himself as plenus deo, and in which it is the god's power which is responsible for the poem and which in turn the poem celebrates.