Maecenas

Gaius Maecenas (c70-8 BCE) was a trusted adviser and friend of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, both before and after the latter became emperor. He was also a generous patron of the arts, providing financial assistance to, among others, the poets Virgil and Horace.

Maecenas came from a wealthy Etruscan family. About his early life nothing is known, but throughout the years after Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, when Octavian (Caesar’s great nephew and adoptive son, the future emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony (Caesar’s friend and also a distant relative) were rivals for supreme power, Maecenas was with Octavian as his trusted friend, adviser, and political agent. He accompanied Octavian in the campaign that led to the battle of Philippi in 42 and the deaths of Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius; he represented Octavian in negotiations which attempted to reconcile the competing interests of Octavian and Mark Anthony and resulted in the Treaty of Brundisium in 40 and the Treaty of Tarentum in 37: and, though never holding any public office, he sometimes acted as Octavian’s representative in Rome during the latter’s absence from the city.

Mark Antony and his partner, the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, were decisively defeated at the sea-battle of Actium in 31, and committed suicide in the following year. Octavian thus became undisputed ruler of the entire Roman empire, and in 23 BCE assumed the title Augustus. Maecenas remained close to the emperor, his friend and counsellor, advising him about, among other things, the constitutional changes that would preserve and strengthen his authority.

Throughout his life Maecenas was a generous patron of the arts, which he valued not only for their own sake but for their potentiality to influence public sentiment in favour of the new political order. Amongst his many protégés were Virgil (70-19 BCE), whom he persuaded to write the Georgics, a long didactic poem about farming, and Horace (65-8 BCE), to whom he gave an estate in the Sabine Hills in Central Italy: Maecenas is the dedicatee both of Virgil’s Georgics and of the first three books of Horace’s Odes.

• The name ‘Maecenas’ may be used in English eponymously to refer to any wealthy person who uses their wealth to promote the arts, whether by giving financial assistance to individual artists, writers, or musicians, or in other ways (e.g., by financing music festivals or exhibitions).

Note on pronunciation: the name Maecenas is pronounced in English with the stress on the second syllable, mee-SEE-nas or my-SEE-nas, IPA: /miː 'siː næs or maɪ 'siː næs/.