The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

Ivm LIFE OF MAECENAS.
beloved by Maecenas, the latter especially, than any of their coutem.
poraries. Virgil was indebted to him for the recovery of his farm,
which had heen appropriated by the soldiery in the division of lands,
B.C.. 41 ; and it was at the request of MsEcenas that he undertook
the Georgics, the most finished of all his poems. To Horace he was
a still greater benefactor. He not only procured him a pardon for
having fought against Ootavianus at Philippi, but presented hira with
the means of a comfortable subsistence, a farm in the Sabine country,
if the estate was but a moderate one, we learn from Horace him-
self that the bounty of Maecenas was regulated by his own contented
views, and not by his patron's want of generosity {Carm. ii., 18,
14; iii., 16, 38). Nor was this liberality accompanied with any
servile and degrading conditions. The poet was at liberty to write
or not, as he pleased, and lived in a state of independence creditable
alike to himself and to his patron. Indeed, their intimacy was rather
that of two familiar friends of equal station, than of the royally-descended
and powerful minister of Caesar with the son of an obscure
freedman. But on this point we need not dwell, as it has been alresidy
touched upon in the life of Horace.
* Of Maecenas's own literary productions only a few fragments ex-
ist. From these, however, and from the notices which we find of his
writings in ancient authors, we are led to think that we have not
suffered any great loss by their destruction ; for, although a good
judge of literary merit in others, he does not appear to have been an
author of much taste himself. It has been thought that two of his
works, of which little more than the titles remain, were tragedies,
namely, the Prometheus and Octa/via. But Seneca (Ep. 19) calls the
former a book (librwm) ; and Octavia, mentioned in Priscian (lib. 10),
is not free from the suspicion of being a corrupt reading. An hexameter
line supposed to have belonged to an epic poem, another line
thought to have been part of a galliambic poem, one or two epigrams,
and socle other fragments, are extant, and are given by Meibom and
Frandsen in their lives of Maecenas. In prose he wrote a work on
Natural. History, which Pliny several times alludes to, but which
seems to have related chiefly to fishes and gems. Servius {ad Virg.,
JBn., viii., 310) attributes a Symposium to him. If we may trust
the s^me authority, he also composed some memoirs of Augustus ;
and Horace (Carm. ii., 12, 9) alludes to at least some project of the
kind, but which was probably never carried into execution. Mjb-
eenas's prose style was afiected, unnatural, and often unintelligible,
and for these qualities he was derided by Augustus. {Suet., Aug.,
26.) Macrobius (Saturn., ii., 4) has preserved part of a letter of the
emperor's, in which he takes off his minister's way of writinir. The
author of the dialogue De Causis Corrupts Eloquentice (c. 26) enumerates
hira £imong the orators, but stigmatizes his affected style
by the term calamistros Macenatis. Quintilian (Inst. Orat., xi., 4,
§ 28) and Seneca (Ep. 114) also condemn his style; and the lattei
iiiuthor gives a specimen of it which is almost wholly unintelligib'a