The poet Horace addressed one of his odes and two of his epistles to a Lollius. It has been generally assumed, on the ground of a misunderstood allusion, that the ode was written for the father, and the two letters for the son; comparison of the three shows that they must have been written to the same person, and that that person could not have been Consul in B.C. 21. Letters and ode alike contain advice which Horace could not have addressed even to a man his equal in rank and of his own age without a risk of putting a summary end to any friendship that might have existed between them, still less to a Consular, and possibly a senior. Horace tells us definitely that he was forty-four years of age in the year when Lollius and Lepidus were consuls; the family of Lollius had been hitherto undistinguished; the name appears on no previous occasion in the consular lists, nor had the man himself done anything to suggest him as a fit recipient of premature honours. The legal age for admission to the Consulship was forty-three, and though the law was frequently broken in times of revolution, or in favour of candidates of the Imperial House, Augustus, whose policy was to restore the old as far as it was not incompatible with the new, was not likely to break the law in favour of a man who was not inevitable. It is not likely that Lollius the Consul was one of those young men who were rapidly pushed through the routine of office, because they had claims which could not be disregarded, or because it was necessary to conciliate their families. Horace could not have written, as he did write, to the man who was Consul in B.C. 21.