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AUTHOR AND PUBLIC
was of humble or non-citizen status he might well need protection in case his
writings gave offence. Again, more especially in the period down to the end of
the Republic, when literary culture was less unified and organized than it later
became, his work would in the first instance make itself known only through
the channels of personal recommendation: patron to friends, friends to their
friends, and so on. Accordingly it is not surprising to find patronage playing
a prominent part in the lives of Republican writers such as Ennius and the
dramatists.
Under the centralized and autocratic administration of Augustus it became
possible to think of using literary patronage as an effective instrument of policy.
To what extent this actually happened is disputed. 1 It certainly cannot be
assumed that all ' Augustanism' in Augustan literature represents a 'party line'
laid down from above; Livy, •who belonged to no coterie and had no patron,
-wrote a history which in many of its fundamental characteristics is quite as
'Augustan' as the Aeneid. However, there are clear signs in the literature of the
period that poets such as Virgil, Horace and Propertius were aware of an
expectation on the part of the Princeps and his lieutenants that literature had a
part to play in the establishment of the new order, whether through straightforward
celebration of the achievements of the Princeps or more subtly by
canonizing, so to say, the Augustan mytihs. The frequency in contemporary
poetry of the motif of the recusatio — the formal, courtly rejection of certain epic
or official themes — is sufficient evidence of these pressures. Among the myths
seeking poetical recognition may perhaps be reckoned that of Maecenas as
typifying the golden age of liberal and disinterested patronage; but the evidence
of Horace's Satires and Epistles is enough to show that the legend of the
'me'ce'nat', though it was exaggerated and embellished during the Neronian
and Flavian periods, had a substantial core of truth.
After Augustus Roman emperors displayed little constructive interest in
literature. The most important exception was Nero, under whom there occurred
something approaching a minor renaissance of Latin poetry, characterized by
a neo-Augustan effusion of pastoral. Private patronage, which under Augustus
had still flourished in the 'opposition' circle of writers round M. Valerius
Messalla Corvinus, which included Ovid and Tibullus, deteriorated during the
first century A.D. into a relationship of dependence and degradation: 'Le
"mecenat" fit place a la clientele.' 2 As seen from the writer's point of view the
position is vividly depicted in Juvenal's first, fifth and seventh Satires. The
letters of Pliny suggest at first sight a more roseate picture, but they refer in the
main to the activities of learned amateurs such as Pliny himself, the motto of
whose life might have been Horace's strenua inertia, 'busy idleness'. Between
the worlds of Juvenal and Pliny, though they were contemporaries, there is
1 Andr£ (1967) 102.
z Guillemin (1937) 96; cf. Vessey (1973) 16—17.
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