us character of his verses. (Sat. I, x.) It has
been conjectured therefore that his earliest compositions were severe
personal lampoons, written for money and to order, which his maturer
taste destroyed. In any case his writings found admirers. About three
years after his return to Rome his friends Varius and Virgil praised him
to Maecenas; the great man read the young poet's verses, and desired to
see him. (Sat. I, vi, 54.)

It is as an enlightened and munificent patron of letters that Maecenas
holds his place in popular estimation, but he was much more than this.
He had been since Caesar's death the trusty agent and the intimate
adviser of Augustus; a hidden hand, directing the most delicate
manoeuvres of his master. In adroit resource and suppleness no
diplomatist could match him. His acute prevision of events and his
penetrating insight into character enabled him to create the
circumstances and to mould the men whose combination was necessary to
his aims. By the tact and moderation of his address, the honied words
which averted anger, the dexterous reticence which disarmed suspicion,
he reconciled opposing factions, veiled arbitrary measures, impressed
alike on nobles and on populace the beneficence of imperial despotism,
while he kept its harshness out of sight. Far from parading his
extensive powers, he masked them by ostentatious humility, refusing
official promotion, contented with the inferior rank of "Knight,"
sitting in theatre and circus below men whom his own hand had raised
to station higher than his own. Absorbed in unsleeping political toil,
he wore the outward garb of a careless, trifling voluptuary. It was
difficult to believe that this apparently effeminate lounger, foppish in
dress, with curled and scented hair, luxuriating in the novel refinement
of the warm bath, an epicure in food and drink, patronizing actors,
lolling in his litter amid a train of parasites, could be the man on
whom, as Horace tells us, civic anxieties and foreign dangers pressed
a ceaseless load. He had built himself a palace and laid out noble
gardens, the remains of which still exist, at the foot of the Esquiline
hill. It had been the foulest and most disreputable slum in Rome, given
up to the burial of paupers, the execution of criminals, the obscene
rites of witches, a haunt of dogs and vultures. He made it healthy
and beautiful; Horace celebrates its salubrity, and Augustus, when
an invalid, came thither to breathe its air.