Patron
Caius Cilnius Mæcenas , whose francized name is Mécène (v. 70 av. J. - C. - 8 av. J. - C.), is a politician Roman and a close relation of the emperor Auguste, famous to have devoted its fortune and its influence to promote the Arts and the Lettres. Virgile, Properce and Horace returned to him in homages what they had received in benefits. It made its studies in Greece and lived with Rome in second half of the {{Ier}} century before the Christian era.
The relations between Patron and Auguste were certainly more complex and more difficult than it is generally said. One should not lose sight of the fact that Mécène was completely under the charm of his Térentia wife, and that this one was not obstructed to publicly mislead it with Auguste. In addition, it is obvious which Mécène enters and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, which was the son-in-law of Auguste and his lieutenant, reigned a frank animosity. Clutched showed Mécène, one knows it by Suétone-Donat (Life of Virgile, 185-188), to be, with Virgile, “the initiator of a new kind of cacozélie, neither swollen nor thin, but founded on the ambiguity of the language ( ex communis uerbis ), and thus made invisible”. Owner of the poets, Mécène very frequently appears in theirs towards, either with discovered face, or under various masks, and it is always to be opposed like a model of elegance, taste, humanity, and painful sensitivity, with a violent Auguste, coarse, dominating, and threatening, that it falls to the reader to identify under his various misadventures.
The bonds of friendship between Patron and Horace were particularly close.
Sources
- J. there. Maleuvre, Sets of masks in the Latin elegy: Tibulle, Properce, Ovide , Peeters editions - Company of the Traditional Studies, Leuwen - Namur, 1998 (the masked presence of Patron in the elegy).
See too