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I disagree with your premise, particularly because I think that your definition of mimetic is so broad that it applies to modern literature just as much as it applies to ancient literature.
*All literature* (or all literature with characters, anyway) provides examples for people to imitate or mimic - this is as true of the Iliad as it is of anything by Jane Austen or J.K. Rowlings. But the Iliad was certainly not written to provide heroic models for people to imitate, as the characters are really pretty flawed...Harry Potter or Miss Bennet are much better role models than Achilles, who spends a lot of time sulking in his tent while his fellow countrymen are out doing the fighting. It is not designed to "show people how to live."
And it's even harder to see who we would imitate in "The Clouds" or "The Frogs" - there aren't really any good models there, either. I really think that the only point of these works was for entertainment, and not to show people how to live.
And I think that this pattern largely continues to the modern period - I don't think that there are a lot of good models in The Decameron, for example (and certainly not the monk who teaches the girl how to "put the devil back into hell"); and while I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, I don't think that his play are explicitly moral works at all. You will find much more morality in a Star Trek novel than in either Shakespeare or the Decameron, as far as that goes.
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