The author projected by the Ars poetica is, more or less by definition, an authority on the poetic art, a master performer who has earned the right to instruct others. What will concern me in this chapter is less the overt aesthetic content of this instruction than the social lessons that are packaged within it. On the one hand, the Ars is a profoundly normative textbook that not only describes but helps enforce the rules of the game the Piso brothers are about to enter. This game, like the ludus Horace declines to reenter at the start of Epistles I, involves social as well as poetic performance; Horace is teaching the Piso brothers how to fashion their selves as well as their poems. On the other hand, the Ars in no way guarantees that these young men will emerge as winners. As Horace recurrently remarks, success depends on a player's ability not merely to follow the rules (by composing a well-formed iambic line, for example) but, more importantly, to improvise a performance within them and sometimes to break them. The sense of decorum that enables such improvisations is something that can be advertised, as it is throughout the Ars, but that cannot be taught. What Horace teaches the Piso brothers is finally not what to do or not to do but what he can do and they cannot.

Horace's disquisition on the art which is the source of his authority (social and poetic) is addressed to an audience that boasts conventional social advantages Horace cannot claim, and this conjunction of subject matter and audience produces an extremely volatile blend of authority and deference: a “masterwork” which is also a study in self-defacement, an educational essay which is also an exercise in antididaxis.