An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals - pg. 111

When I was twenty, says a FRENCH poet, OVID was my favourite: Now I am forty, I declare for HORACE. We enter, to be sure, more readily into sentiments, which resemble those we feel every day: But no passion, when well represented, can be entirely indifferent to us; because there is, none of which every man has not, within him, at least the seeds and first principles. It is the business of poetry to bring every affection near to us by lively imagery and representation, and make it look like truth and reality: A certain proof, that, wherever that reality is found, our minds are disposed to be strongly affected by it.

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - Annotations

The use of Homer and Roman poet Virgil (1st C. BC) as models of storytelling was popular when Hume wrote. By 'oblique narration' Hume means the telling of a story, not through the narrator, but through a character in retrospect. In the Odyssey the story is framed around Odysseus' struggles to return home after the end of the Trojan War. In Virgil's Aeneid the divine origins of the Romans are presented through the adventures and struggles of Aeneas in his attempt to reach home after the Trojan War. The action of both the Odyssey and the Aeneid involves central figures in the midst of their journeys.