Rome's Patron The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas

<p><b>The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and culture</b><br><br>An unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalities of ancient Rome. Yet the traces he left behind are unreliable and tantalizingly scarce. Rather than attempting a conventional biography, Emily Gowers shows in <i>Rome’s Patron</i> that it is possible to tell a different story, one about Maecenas’s influence, his changing identities and the many narratives attached to him across two millennia.<br><br><i>Rome’s Patron</i> explores Maecenas’s appearances in the central works of Augustan poetry written in his name—Virgil’s <i>Georgics</i>, Horace’s <i>Odes</i> and Propertius’s elegies—and in later works of Latin literature that reassess his influence. For the Roman poets he supported, Maecenas was a mascot of cultural flexibility and innovation, a pioneer of gender fluidity and a bearer of imperial demands who could be exposed as a secret sympathizer with their own values. For those excluded from his circle, he represented either favouritism and indulgence or the lost ideal of a patron in perfect collaboration with the authors he championed.<br><br>As Gowers shows, Maecenas had and continues to have a unique cachet—in the fantasies that still surround the gardens, buildings and objects so tenuously associated with him; in literature, from Ariosto and Ben Johnson to Phillis Wheatley and W. B. Yeats; and in philanthropy, where his name has been surprisingly adaptable to more democratic forms of patronage.</p>