Qu'on me rend impotent,
Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme
Je vive, c'est assez; je suis plus que content.
His patronage of intellectual men was due to policy as well as inclination. Himself a cultured literary critic, foreseeing the full-winged soar of writers still half-fledged—the "Aeneid" in Virgil's "Eclogues," the "Odes" of Horace in his "Epodes"—he would not only gather round his board the men whom we know to have been his equals, whose wit and wisdom Horace has embalmed in an epithet, a line, an ode; Varius, and Sulpicius, and Plotius, and Fonteius Capito, and Viscus; but he saw also and utilized for himself and for his master the social influence which a rising poet might wield, the effect with which a bold epigram might catch the public ear, a well-conceived eulogy minister to imperial popularity, an eloquent sermon, as in the noble opening odes of Horace's third book, put vice out of countenance and raise the tone of a decadent community.
Alinari photo.]
[Palace of the Conservators, Rome.
MAECENAS.
To Horace, then, now twenty-seven years old, these imposing doors were opened. The first interview was unsatisfactory; the young poet was tongue-tied and stammering, the great man reserved and haughty: they parted mutually dissatisfied. Nine months later Maecenas sent for him again, received him warmly, enrolled him formally amongst his friends. (Sat. I, vi, 61.) Horace himself tells the story: he explains neither the first coldness, the long pause, nor the later cordiality. But he rose rapidly in his patron's favour; a year afterwards we find him invited to join Maecenas on a journey to Brundusium, of which he has left us an amusing journal (Sat. I, v); and about three years later still was presented by him with a country house and farm amongst the Sabine hills, a few miles to the east of Tibur, or, as it is now called, Tivoli.