Qu'on me rend impotent, Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme Je vive, c'est assez; je suis plus que content. His patronage of intellectual men was due to policy as well as inclination. Himself a cultured literary critic, foreseeing the full-winged soar of writers still half-fledged--the "Aeneid" in Virgil's "Eclogues," the "Odes" of Horace in his "Epodes"--he would not only gather round his board the men whom we know to have been his equals, whose wit and wisdom Horace has embalmed in an epithet, a line, an ode; Varius, and Sulpicius, and Plotius, and Fonteius Capito, and Viscus; but he saw also and utilized for himself and for his master the social influence which a rising poet might wield, the effect with which a bold epigram might catch the public ear, a well-conceived eulogy minister to imperial popularity, an eloquent sermon, as in the noble opening odes of Horace's third book, put vice out of countenance and raise the tone of a decadent community. [Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Palace of the Conservators, Rome._ MAECENAS.] To Horace, then, now twenty-seven years old, these imposing doors were opened. The first interview was unsatisfactory; the young poet was tongue-tied and stammering, the great man reserved and haughty: they parted mutually dissatisfied. Nine months later Maecenas sent for him again, received him warmly, enrolled him formally amongst his friends. (Sat. I, vi, 61.) Horace himself tells the story: he explains neither the first coldness, the long pause, nor the later cordiality. But he rose rapidly in his patron's favour; a year afterwards we find him invited to join Maecenas on a journey to Brundusium, of which he has left us an amusing journal (Sat. I, v); and about three years later still was presented by him with a country house and farm amongst the Sabine hills, a few miles to the east of Tibur, or, as it is now called, Tivoli.