Who influenced Horace?

Horace's most famous poems, the Odes, were strongly influenced by the ancient Greeks. Here as elsewhere, a Roman artist appropriated Greek forms and adapted them for a domestic audience. The Odes show clear similarities in both structure and content to Greek choral poetry from the sixth and seventh centuries BC. In particular, Horace shows the influence of Alcaeus, the female poet Sappho of Lesbos, and Anacreon of Teos. In Odes 1.1, Horace makes explicit reference to the lyre of Lesbos, expressing a special debt to Alcaeus in terms of both poetic meter and theme.
Arguably the biggest single influence on Horace, however, was Pindar, the ancient Greek lyrical poet of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. As the great Roman rhetorician Quintillian wrote, it was the richness and exuberance of Pindar's language and what he described as his "rolling flood of eloquence" that particularly impressed itself upon Horace's poetic imagination. Nevertheless, Horace departed considerably from his Greek forebear in writing poems that were a good deal simpler—much less complex in their construction than Pindar's victory odes and paeans of praise to great men.