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Updated: June 13, 2025
But, Fundanius, I am impatient to know, who were sharers in this feast where you fared so well. I was highest, and next me was Viscus Thurinus, and below, if I remember, was Varius; with Servilius Balatro, Vibidius, whom Maecenas had brought along with him, unbidden guests. After this he informed me that honey-apples were most ruddy when gathered under the waning moon.
Occasionally he succeeded, by diplomatic means, in wreaking vengeance upon European courts in retaliation for the brutal tortures inflicted upon his people. With the generosity of a Maecenas, he assembled Jewish scholars and poets, and surrounded himself with a sunlit atmosphere of intellectuality and talent. All other Jewish communities looked up to that of Constantinople.
The two palaces built by Cardinal Mazarin and the castles built by Cardinal Richelieu served as fine examples for M. Fouquet. He knew that handsome edifices embellished the country, and that Maecenas has always been held in high renown, because Maecenas built a good deal in his day.
Maecenas desired to keep the poet at Rome, and as an inducement provided him with a villa in his own gardens on the Esquiline. The fame of the digitus praetereuntium awaited his coming and going, his Bucolics had been set to music and sung in the concert halls to vehement applause. He seems even to have made an effort to be socially congenial.
Little beyond the fora to the east is the Carinae, a fashionable quarter of beautiful shops and houses, and still further off are the Baths of Titus, extending from the Carinae to the Esquiline Mount. This hill, once a burial-ground, is now covered with the house and gardens of Maecenas, and of the poets whom he patronized. It is not rich in temples, but its gardens and groves are beautiful.
"Probably," he said, "he will write me a charming poem to explain why he cannot do what I ask. I know the tricks of your tribe." With a final laugh and a clasp of the hands the friends parted company. Maecenas went back to his library to reread dispatches from Spain before seeking his few hours of sleep.
It associates itself with the entertainments of the ancients, with the Augustan age, with Horace and Maecenas; with the only elegant but too fleeting period of the modern world; with the nobles and wits of Paris, when Paris had wits and nobles; with Moliere and the warm-hearted Duke who is said to have been the original of Moliere's Misanthrope; with Madame de Sevigne and the Racine whom that inimitable letter-writer denied to be a poet; with Swift and Bolingbroke; with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Garrick.
His attitude is evidently that of the art-loving prince of whom he speaks in the address, a royal Maecenas or di Medici, who gathers artists round him; but he means to use them, not so much perhaps for art's sake, as for the instruction and elevation of his folk.
O Maecenas, thou progeny of Tuscan kings, there has been a long while for you in my house some mellow wine in an unbroached hogshead, with rose-flowers and expressed essence for your hair. Disengage yourself from anything that may retard you, nor contemplate the ever marshy Tibur, and the sloping fields of Aesula, and the hills of Telegonus the parricide.
If he seems now a colorless abstraction, he could hardly have seemed so then to Lepidus' legions, who deserted their own general and paymaster at his simple word of command. Or to Agrippa, or to Maecenas, great men who desired nothing better than to serve him with loyal affection.
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