De l'Étrurie à Rome

Biography of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas. Although Maecenas is now known primarily as a patron of the arts, he was also the right arm of Augustus, and he played a fundamental political role in the period of the Triumvirate. This work seeks to describe the place of Maecenas as an individual in the society of his time, without treating him as an example or a model, without isolating him from the social frameworks that established his position, nor losing him in the confused mass of societal movements over his lifetime. A study of the social personality constructed by Maecenas, mainly based on an Etruscan ancestry that he largely reworked, places him as an individual within a larger trend of revaluing local identities in Italy, encouraged by Augustus in order to serve the Conjuratio Italiae, on which he based his authority. This work attempts to restore the place of Maecenas not at the heart of a literary circle, but at the intersection of many networks of intellectual, political, and geographic affinities. Through a study of the different facets of a man immersed in the movements that profoundly transformed Rome, we may better understand the rise of Roman imperial society.