Maecenas Was Not a Word: He Was a Man

When a bank sponsors a symphony orchestra or a millionaire funds a museum, the Romance languages say he acts as a mecenas — a Maecenas. The word sounds like technical jargon from some ministry of culture. But no: maecenas, like sybarite, is one of those words that used to be somebody. It was once spelled with a capital letter and walked the streets of Rome two thousand years ago: Gaius Maecenas, the richest and most useful friend of the emperor Augustus.

The man who refused every title

Maecenas was an aristocrat of Etruscan origin —he boasted of descending from kings— and one of the two most trusted men of Octavian, the future Augustus, during the civil wars that buried the Republic. While the general Agrippa won the battles, Maecenas won the negotiations: he wove alliances, arranged political marriages, smothered conspiracies and governed Rome whenever the boss was away on campaign. And here is the first of his oddities: though he could have been senator, consul, anything he wished, he never accepted public office. He preferred to remain, formally, a simple knight — no title, operating from his gardens. Real power without the org chart.

The gardens, by the way, deserve their own line: he bought an entire hill of the Esquiline that had been a paupers' cemetery and turned it into Rome's first great gardens, with terraces, a heated swimming pool —said to be the city's first— and a tower from which, decades later, Nero would watch Rome burn. Seneca, who never forgave him his lifestyle, portrayed him as an incurable softie who strolled about with his tunic loose: a sybarite, any Roman would have said.

The best investment in Roman history

But if Maecenas ended up in the dictionary, it was not for his swimming pools — it was for his payroll. He gathered around himself a circle of poets to whom he gave something extremely rare in any era: money, protection, and the freedom to write. He sheltered Virgil when the poet's family lands were confiscated; the Georgics are dedicated to him. To Horace —the son of a freed slave who had, moreover, fought on the losing side of the civil war— he gave a farm in the Sabine hills that solved his life entirely; Horace repaid him with a friendship of a kind no longer manufactured, and with verses that name him in their very first line: “Maecenas, descended of kings...”.

Pure kindness? Not quite, and that is the interesting part. Those poets wrote the works that gave a soul to Augustus' new regime: Virgil's Aeneid made the emperor heir to the heroes of Troy; Horace's odes celebrated the new age of peace. Maecenas invented something we recognize instantly today: investment in image. His genius was understanding that a good poem outlasts a thousand speeches — two thousand years later we are still reading Augustus' propaganda, and it strikes us as sublime literature, because it is.

From proper name to universal trade

Maecenas died in 8 BC, leaving his fortune to Augustus along with the most quoted line of his life, written in one of his letters: “Remember Horace as you remember me.” The poet died a few months later and was buried beside his friend's tomb on the Esquiline. By then his name had already begun its journey toward the lowercase: the Romans themselves lamented not having “a Maecenas” to fund their Virgils. From there it passed into the languages of Europe —mécène in French, mecenate in Italian, mecenas in Spanish— and into the word for arts patronage itself, which today appears even in tax legislation. Not bad for a man who refused to be so much as a senator: his colleagues with the resounding titles are forgotten, and he became a common noun in a dozen languages. In the end, the finest work he ever funded was his own name.

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Enjoy the stories behind words? Continue with why the Panama hat is called Panama if it was born in Ecuador and the chilling origins of the word “defenestrate”, or browse the whole etymology series.