Iocosus Maecenas: Patron As Writer

Maecenas as discoverer and supporter of the literary luminaries of his day achieved a name virtually synonymous with patronage. Less well known, however, even to many students of Augustan literature is Maecenas, prose stylist and poet. Explicably, the obscurity ofhis reputation as a writer is due in large part to the failure ofmost of his writing to survive, but fortunately the handful of fragments still extant is enough to afford an intriguing glimpse into one of the most colorful and contradictory figures of the Augustan Age.1 Though scanty, the nine fragments of prose and eight of poetry provide a coherent picture ofMaecenas' literary output, and several are of importance to students of Vergil and Horace because they reveal the mutual influence from patron to poet and poet to patron. Furthermore, interesting as the fragments are in themselves, they are also valuable for the judgments passed upon them by Maecenas' own contemporaries and by ancient literary critics. Thus, the comments of contemporaries like Agrippa, Horace, and Augustus and the considered judgments of Seneca, Quintilian, and Tacitus form a significant page in the history of Roman literary criticism. This paper, besides aiming to provide an introduction to the fragments of Maecenas, will also suggest that many ofthe quotations, though dissected by grammarians and philologists into their syntactical and lexical components, stand in need of further illumination as to their tone and purpose. It will be argued that Maecenas' language, admittedly vexing and obscure, is in the main such because of the author's intentional efforts at humor and, in several instances, at self-parody. The fragments themselves and the testimonia of commentators attest that Maecenas worked in a number of genres both in prose and in verse. In these