Probably in no other aristocratic or courtly society has there been so large a number of men possessing the ability and knowledge, the accomplishments and leisure, required for the appreciative enjoyment of a literature based on so fine and elaborate a culture. There are some circumstances which made the patronage of the earlier half of the Augustan Age more favourable to letters than that of other periods in which the same influence has been exercised. The chief literary patrons then were men who had played a prominent part in a revolutionary era,--men indeed of ancient birth or hereditary distinction, yet owing their pre-eminence to their talent, energy, and aptitude for the time, and thus open to new influences, and free from the prejudices of an old-established nobility. They had the culture and careful education of an aristocratic class, combined with the liberal tendencies of revolutionary leaders. The distance which in the preceding age would have kept apart men born into a high social and political position from men of genius of humble origin was easily passed in a time immediately succeeding that in which the great C. Julius had practically proclaimed the doctrine of 'an open career to every kind of merit.' Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially marked:--
Cum referre negas quali sit quisque parente Natus, dum ingenuus(51).
The new men at the court of Augustus were naturally attracted to the new men in literature, sprung from quite a different class from that to which Lucretius, Catullus, or Calvus belonged, and yet, in respect of education, refinement, and even early associations, in no respect their inferiors.
Another bond of union between them was that they were nearly all of the same age, born with one or two exceptions between the years 70 B.C., and 60 B.C., and that several of them had studied under the same masters. The distinguished men of the Ciceronian Age had passed away, with the exception of one or two, such as Varro and Atticus, living in retirement, and consoling themselves with their farms and libraries for the changes they had witnessed. The leaders in action, as in literature, were all young men, beginning their career together in an altered world, the characters and destinies of which they were called upon to mould. One by one they dropped away, most of them before passing the period of middle life, leaving the Emperor almost the sole survivor among a younger generation who had grown up under the new order of things, and, while acquiescing in it as complacently, sharing neither in the energy nor in the enthusiasm of the early years (from about 27 B.C. to about 10 B.C.) during which the Empire left its greatest and happiest impression.