Yes, ancient Latin grammarians noted the unusual accusative construction found in Horace's line (Rufillus pastillos olet), as well as a striking, innate asymmetry among the verbs governing the five senses (verba percipiendi).

---

1. Grammarians on Olere with the Accusative

In standard Latin, intransitive verbs do not take a direct object in the accusative case. However, Horace's pastillos olet ("smells of lozenges") violates this rule. Ancient and late-antique grammarians categorized this exception under a few specialized descriptions: [1]

• Priscian (Institutiones Grammaticae): Priscian noted that verbs of smelling and tasting (olere, redolere, sapere, resipere) can take an accusative of "what the smell or taste is". He interpreted this as an extension of the internal or cognate accusative (akin to vitam vivere, "to live a life"). The noun in the accusative defines the nature or quality of the intrinsic sensory state being emitted, effectively acting as an adverbial qualifier. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• Servius and the Scholiasts (e.g., Porphyrio): Commenting directly on Horace, scholiasts called this usage a figurative transitive swap. They observed that olere shifts its meaning from an intransitive state ("to have an odor") to a quasi-transitive effect ("to exhale an odor of...").

---

2. The Asymmetry of the Five Senses (Verba Percipiendi)

Latin grammarians, rhetoricians, and philosophers recognized a profound asymmetry among the sensory verbs. They separated them based on whether they were active/extroverted or passive/introverted, and whether they accepted intellectual abstraction.

Syntax Asymmetry: Active vs. Passive Emission

Grammarians noted that the five senses are divided grammatically by how the human subject interacts with the object:

• Sight and Hearing (Highly Transitive): Video (I see) and audio (I hear) always take a direct accusative of the external object being perceived (video hominem).
• Smell and Taste (Symmetric/Inverted): Olere and sapere are structurally erratic. They can either mean the act of perceiving ("I smell something") or the quality of being perceived ("I smell like something"). Because Latin lacked separate active/passive lexical pairs for smelling and tasting (unlike video / videorfor sight), olere and sapere had to do double duty. This forced the use of the unusual accusative noted above (pastillos olet) to balance the language. [1, 2]

Conceptual Asymmetry: Intellectual Worth

Latin culture—codified by grammarians like Varro (De Lingua Latina) and philosophers like Cicero—strictly ranked the five senses: [1]

• The Superior Senses (Sight & Hearing): Video and audio were labeled the "rational" senses. They are heavily used in metaphors for intellectual understanding (e.g., videor meaning "it seems to me"). They easily govern complex grammatical structures like the Accusative and Infinitive for indirect speech (audio te venire, "I hear that you are coming"). [1]
• The Inferior Senses (Smell, Taste, Touch): Oleo, sapio, and tango were viewed as purely physical, internal, or animalistic. They cannot govern indirect statement clauses. You cannot say "oleo te venire"to mean "I smell that you are coming."

Because of this asymmetry, the verbs for smell and taste remained confined to local concrete objects or brief, figurative idioms of character, such as Cicero's doctrinam redolet ("it smacks of schoolbook learning"). [1]

---

If you are examining the grammar of these texts for a linguistic paper, would you like to explore Priscian's exact terminology for cognate accusatives, or look at how Varro traces the etymology of these perception verbs?