Works
Maecenas also wrote literature himself in both prose and verse. The some twenty fragments that remain show that he was less successful as an author than as a judge and patron of literature.
His prose works on various subjects – Prometheus, dialogues like Symposium (a banquet at which Virgil, Horace and Messalla were present), De cultu suo (on his manner of life) and a poem In Octaviam ("Against Octavia") of which the content is unclear - were ridiculed by Augustus, Seneca and Quintilian for their strange style, the use of rare words and awkward transpositions.
According to Dio Cassius, Maecenas was also the inventor of a system of shorthand.
Read more about this topic: Gaius Maecenas
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.”
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“I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
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“We all agree now—by “we” I mean intelligent people under sixty—that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.”
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