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Updated: June 26, 2025
Knows no more of the art than that fellow," pointing to the Irishman, who was at that instant grinding the colours asy as he described himself. "And lets me languish here in obscurity!" continued the enraged painter. "Now I'll never put another stroke to his Dutch beauty's portrait, if I starve if I rot for it in jail! He a Mecaenas!"
Between this and other calculations, we find a difference of three or four years; but allowing the utmost latitude of variation, there intervened, from the death of Mecaenas to the banishment of Ovid, a period of eleven years; an observation which fully invalidates the conjecture above-mentioned.
He is the son of a steward in Lancashire, and received an attorney's education; but being a humorous, noisy fellow, he became a great favourite with his father's employer, who was a sort of Mecaenas to cudgel players, boxers, and horse jockies.
Of his estate, which was very considerable by the liberality of his friends, he left the greater part to Valerius Proculus and his brother, a fourth to Augustus, a twelfth to Mecaenas, besides legacies to L. Varius and Plotius Tucca, who, in consequence of his own request, and the command of Augustus, revised and corrected the Aeneid after his death.
You must know, I always even in the midst of the wildest of my wild oats had a taste for the belles-lettres, and philosophy, and the muses, and the literati, and so forth always a touch of the Mecaenas about me.
It was the ambition of this emperor to reign in the hearts as well as over the persons of his subjects; and with this view he was desirous of endearing himself to their imagination. Both he and Mecaenas had a delicate sensibility to the beauties of poetical composition; and judging from their own feelings, they attached a high degree of influence to the charms of poetry.
Nothing more is known with certainty, than that Propertius lost his father at an early age, and being deprived of a great part of his patrimony, betook himself to Rome, where his genius soon recommended him to public notice, and he obtained the patronage of Mecaenas.
Augustus offered to appoint him his secretary, signifying his wishes to Mecaenas in a letter to the following effect: "Hitherto I have been able to write my own epistles to friends; but now I am too much occupied, and in an infirm state of health.
He betroths himself oftener to the devil in one day than Mecaenas did in a week to his wife, that he was married a thousand times to. His discourse is inlaid with oaths as the gallows is with nails, to fortify it against the assaults of those whose friends have made it their deathbed.
History relates, that after the overthrow of Antony, Augustus held a consultation with Agrippa and Mecaenas about restoring the republican form of government; when Agrippa gave his opinion in favour of that measure, and Mecaenas opposed it.
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