Maecenas #2

The Gaius Maecenas mentioned in Cicero (Pro Cluentio, 56) as an influential member of the equestrian order in 91 B.C. may have been his grandfather, or even his father. The testimony of Horace (Odes III.8.5) and Maecenas's own literary tastes imply that he had profited by the highest education of his time. His great wealth may have been in part hereditary, but he owed his position and influence to his close connexion with the emperor Augustus.

Maecenas himself wrote in both prose and verse. The few fragments that remain show that he was less successful as an author than as a judge and patron of literature. His prose works on various subjects — Prometheus, Symposium (a banquet at which Virgil, Horace and Messalla were present), De cultu suo (on his manner of life) — were ridiculed by Augustus, Seneca and Quintilian for their strange style, the use of rare words and awkward transpositions. According to Dio Cassius, Maecenas was the inventor of a system of shorthand.