Maecēnas, Gaius Cilnius in Harpers Dictionary
A famous statesman, courtier, and patron of literature of
the Augustan Age at Rome. The date of his birth is
uncertain, but is to be placed between the years B.C. 73 and
63, on the 13th of April (Hor. Carm. iv. 11). His family was
of Etruscan origin-a great subject of boasting in a society
where Etruscomania was as great a fad as is Anglomania in
certain American communities to-day-and was even traced to
Porsena, so that we find Augustus addressing him in his
somewhat ironical style as berylle Porsenae (Macrob. Sat.
ii. 4).
He received a careful education, and was well versed in both
Greek and Roman literature, to which he himself contributed
in verse as well as prose. He is thought to have been with
Octavius in Apollonia at the time of the assassination of
Iulius Caesar, perhaps as the director of his studies; and
from this time his name appears continually in conjunction
with that of the future emperor. He assisted in arranging a
marriage between Augustus and Scribonia, the daughter of
Libo, and negotiated the peace of Brundisium by which Antony
and Augustus were temporarily reconciled, and which led to
the marriage of Antony with Octavia, the sister of Augustus
(Dio Cass. xlviii. 16; B. C. v. 64). In B.C. 36 he
accompanied Augustus to Sicily in the campaign against
Sextus Pompeius, from which he was twice sent back to Rome
to suppress revolts that had there broken out. So well did
he discharge the task that he was soon after placed in
charge first of Rome and then of the administration of all
Italy. In this capacity he crushed out the dangerous
conspiracy of the younger Lepidus, which contained the germs
of a disastrous civil war; and in every way he so justified
the confidence reposed in him as to have received from
Augustus his seal and a commission to act with Agrippa as
the personal representative of the young Caesar in all
negotiations with the Senate.
After the establishment of the Empire he continued for a
long time to exercise a supreme influence in the counsels of
Augustus. By his advice, against that of Agrippa, Augustus
decided not to restore the Republic (Dio Cass. lii. 14); and
it was Maecenas who brought about the marriage of Iulia, the
daughter of Augustus, with Agrippa. The influence of
Maecenas over his master continued undiminished until about
the year B.C. 18, when by his own choice the former withdrew
from any active participation in matters of State. This
withdrawal was coincident with a coolness that arose between
the two men, which rendered their personal intercourse one
of much restraint, and which, though it has been often
explained as due to the predominance of Agrippa in the
favour of the emperor, is much more certainly to be ascribed
to the seduction by Augustus of Terentia, the wife of
Maecenas. This woman, beautiful and accomplished, was the
object of her husband's passionate love, and to a nature
such as his-sensitive, ardent, and honourable-the thought of
her continued infidelity was not to be endured with the
complaisant toleration that so many Roman husbands appear to
have exhibited. The city was filled with the pasquinades in
which the wits of the day jeered at the progress of this
amour. Even Augustus, who was remarkably thick-skinned, is
said by Tacitus to have made a journey to Gaul on one
occasion (B.C. 16) to escape the shower of epigrams, jests,
and lampoons, and it is easy to surmise what torture they
must have inflicted upon the statesman who felt himself to
be at once injured and made a public laughing-stock. (See
Dio Cass. liv. 19; lv. 7; Suet. Aug. 68, in which last
passage the Terentilla alluded to in Antony's indecent
letter is undoubtedly Terentia.) Maecenas died in B.C. 8,
leaving no children.
Maecenas is best known as the fosterer of literature and
literary men, so much so that his very name has passed into
all languages as a generic term for a munificent patron of
letters. His enormous fortune (Tac. Ann. xiv. 53, 55） made
it possible for him to give a princely protection and
support to poets, wits, and, in fact, to all the virtuosi of
distinction, who were received with magnificent hospitality
at his mansion on the Esquiline, with its beautiful gardens,
in which he spent nearly all the year, visiting the country
but seldom
（Tac. Ann. xiv. 53). So lavish was his entertainment that
it became open to the charge of being too indiscriminate, so
that Augustus called his table mensa parasitica (Vit.
Horat.). It must be recollected, however, that he drew the
line very sharply between his general hospitality and his
private friendship, which last was reserved for the select
few, such as Vergil and Horace, who were possessed of the
fine culture and delicate feeling so essential to familiar
intercourse among gentlemen.
Much of the personal eccentricity which Maecenas exhibited
must be ascribed to the condition of his health. He suffered
for many years from insomnia and nervous prostration, and
resorted to many devices to secure sleep, listening to soft
music and to the plash in his house of artificial
waterfalls; and his luxurious indolence was perhaps only the
self-indulgence of an invalid, seeking distraction from the
thought of his own condition. His passionate clinging to
life is best expressed in a short verse of his that has come
down to us in the pages of Seneca, and whose frantic
eagerness is at once pathetic and repulsive:
"Debilem facito manu
Debilem pede, coxa;
Tuber adstrue gibberum
Lubricos quate dentes:
Vita dum superest, bene est.
Hanc mihi vel acuta
Si sedeam cruce sustine."
The life of Maecenas has been many times written: in Latin
by Meibom (Leyden, 1653), Lion (Göttingen, 1846); in Italian
by Cenni (Rome, 1684), Dini (Venice, 1704), Santa Viola
(Rome, 1816); in German by Bennemann (Leipzig, 1744),
Frandsen (Altona, 1843); in French by Richer (Paris, 1746);
and in English by Schomberg (London, 1766). See, also,
Weber's Horaz (Jena, 1844); Friedländer, Sittengeschichte
Roms (iii. 389). His poetical fragments are collected in the
Fragmenta Poetarum Romanorum by Bährens (Leipzig, 1886). See
also Harder, Fragmente des Mäcenas (Berlin, 1889); and the
article Horatius.
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