Circle of Maecenas: summary and description of literary circles in the Augustan age and the end of Maecenas.
Augustus surrounded himself with faithful and capable men, like Agrippa in architecture, he gave Maecenas the task of taking care of the relationship between the principate and the literati. Maecenas did not impose a single cultural line, rather he tried to safeguard personal inspiration and intellectual independence à not pure patronage but friendship and soliditas. After his marginalization and his death the relationships began to deteriorate to the point of becoming real intolerance à Augustus had lost all his most trusted collaborators.
Maecenas (Arezzo, 70) remains an eques , carries out important diplomatic tasks. Epicurean, nonconformist, dissolute in his customs, indolent and eccentric. He had neoteric tastes and used a mannered and precious tone. Works: Symposion in the form of a dialogue, De cultu suo (responds to the accusations of softness). His circle was the center of irradiation of a large cultural project , mobilizes writers, architects, artists and he acts as a mediator because he has the same tastes as his protégés and respects them. He focuses on private relationships, establishing links with individual writers. He begins to act in 39 with Virgil, then with Varius Rufus they introduce him to Horace and a sincere and deep friendship is born. Then Propertius, Domitius Marsus, Quintilius Varus and Plotius Tucca.
Pollione (76 Teate/Rome) He frequents the poetae novi , is Caesar’s supporter and protector of Virgil. On the eve of Actium he refuses to follow the contenders and relies on the generosity of the winner, no public office. Real and lively interest in literary activity, praised by Horace, Virgil. He composes the Historiae in which he narrates the events of the first triumvirate up to Philippi. Harsh literary judgments. Almost in competition with the Augustan circles, he initially protects Virgil and remains on good terms with Horace . He opens the first public library at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, shortly after Augustus opens one on the Palatine. He promotes the recitationes (preview reading of poetic texts for selected groups of guests) with enormous success.
Moral legitimacy towards Augustus for his pro-Caesarian past. Messalla Corvinus (64/8), in 20 organizes a circle antagonistic to that of Maecenas. Caesar’s killer, he goes over to Antony and then to Octavian, consul in 31 and in 26 ends his political career. Republican sympathies lead to a prudent distance towards Augustus and his politics. He had been a neoteric , with activist tendencies, clarity and purity of expression. In his circle there were: Tibullus, Propertius as a young man, Ovid, Valgius Rufus, Aemilius Macro and the poets of the Tibullianum corpus (Sulpicia and Lygdamus). He prefers a poetry of private themes and lighter tones (neoteric and Alexandrian).
END OF PATRONAGE
The second Augustan generation, which had not experienced the civil wars, felt only a lukewarm gratitude towards the prince who had re-established social peace, showed intolerance for the literature that had given its support and consent to the program of moral and political restoration and preferred a light literature, of Hellenistic taste . The disappearance of Maecenas caused a definitive separation between the political power and the intellectual elite. The crisis of patronage became evident with Tiberius, who did not even consider the problem of organizing a program of cultural hegemony .
A historiography developed that was contrary to the principate (the historian Cremutius Cordus committed suicide in 25 AD) and which was grafted onto the republican tradition of the senatorial elite.
Hostility towards the Julio-Claudian dynasty influenced Tacitus (55–117) and Suetonius (70–122) and shaped the image of the rulers of that family transmitted to posterity. The situation did not improve with Claudius, who, however, personally had an excellent reputation as a scholar and had written several works, both in Greek and Latin. Claudius wrote a historical work in Latin, starting from the death of Caesar, barely mentioning the period of the civil wars and instead dwelling on that of the principate of Augustus.
Still in Latin, Claudius had composed a work in defense of Cicero’s style in response to a pamphlet of opposite content, written by Asinius Gallus, son of Pollio, who maintained that his father’s style was preferable to that of Cicero, and a grammatical one, in which he proposed the introduction of three new letters into the Latin alphabet .
Only Nero , in the initial years of his principate, under the guidance of Seneca and Burrus , attempted to recover the consensus of the senate and a resumption of patronage. A brief classicist season was inserted into this project, aiming at a new literary flowering and of which only a few modest products remain in which the dominant influence of Virgil is clearly felt.
Nero himself was a poet , with a predilection for the epic genre of Trojan subjects and promoted artistic activities in various ways: in 60 he established a public poetic contest, the Neronia , a five-yearly competition of singing, music, poetry and oratory. The initiative documents, in addition to the ambition to give life to a new patronage, also the public and spectacular nature of such cultural events. The same traditional image of Nero as an histrionic emperor, lover of theatrical shows and the circus, an actor himself and moved by a conception of the whole existence as an artistic exhibition (even the construction of the immense Domus Aurea ), responded to precise intentions of cultural policy.
The Hellenizing impulses responded to the widespread need for a renewal of customs and recognized tastes and tendencies that were now widespread among the popular masses and opposed as dangerous for the stability of the social order by the senatorial aristocracy, who saw Nero as an enemy of Roman tradition. The fashion of public poetic competitions, on the occasion of certain celebrations, spread under the principate of the Flavians , but the advent of the new imperial dynasty marked a reversal of Nero’s cultural orientations. To his Hellenizing openings they opposed a program of moral and civil restoration, strong in the favor obtained by restoring peace after the serious crisis that had accompanied the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
On the literary level there was a return to traditional values , the revival of epic poetry inspired by Virgil, and, in prose, the rise of Cicero to the model of a style and education based on rhetoric. The first state chairs of rhetoric were established under Vespasian who entrusted this discipline with the training of the ruling class, that is, of imperial officials. Traces of the taste that had established itself in the first part of the 1st century AD remained strong in the literature of the Flavian age, especially in poetry.
