The excellent literary judgment shown by Augustus contributed to encourage a high standard of taste among the rival authors. How weighty the sovereign's influence was may be gathered from the extravagancies into which the Neronian and Flavian authors fell through anxiety to please monarchs of corrupt taste. The advantages of patronage to literature are immense; but it is indispensable that the patron should himself be great. The people were now so totally without literary culture that a popular poet would necessarily have been a bad poet; careful writers turned from them to the few who could appreciate what was excellent. Yet Maecenas, so judicious as a patron, fell as an author into the very faults he blamed. During the years he held office (30-8 B.C.) he devoted some fragments of his busy days to composing in prose and verse writings which Augustus spoke of as "_murobrecheis cincinni_," "curled locks reeking with ointment." We hear of a treatise called _Prometheus_, certain dialogues, among them a _Symposium_, in which Messala, Virgil, and Horace were introduced; and Horace implies that he had planned a prose history of Augustus's wars. [22] He did not shrink from attempting, and what was worse, publishing, poetry, which bore imprinted on it the characteristics of his effeminate mind. Seneca quotes one passage [23] from which we may form an estimate of his level as a versifier. But, however feeble in execution, he was a skilful adviser of others. The wisdom of his counsels to Augustus is known; those he offered to Virgil were equally sound. It was he who suggested the plan of the _Georgics_, and the poet acknowledges his debt for a great idea in the words "_Nil altum sine te meas inchoat_." He was at once cautious and liberal in bestowing his friendship. The length of time that elapsed between his first reception of Horace and his final enrolment of the poet among his intimates, shows that he was not hasty in awarding patronage. And the difficulty which Propertius encountered in gaining a footing among his circle proves that even great talent was not by itself a sufficient claim on his regard. As we shall have occasion to mention him again, we shall pass him over here, and conclude the chapter with a short account of the earliest Augustan poet whose name has come to us, L. VARIUS RUFUS (64 B.C.-9 A.D.), the friend of Virgil, who introduced both him and Horace to Maecenas's notice, and who was for some years accounted the chief epic poet of Rome. [24] Born in Cisalpine Gaul, Varius was, like all his countrymen, warmly attached to Caesar's cause, and seems to have made his reputation by an epic on Caesar's death. [25] Of this poem we have scattered notices implying that it was held in high esteem, and a fragment is preserved by Macrobius, [26] which it is worth while to quote: