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Horace’s refusal to return to Rome denies Maecenas the bodily companionship usually anticipated of a protégé or dependent, and stirs or creates in his patron the emotions of desire predicated on absence which might be characteristic of friendship. Cicero’s De amidtia suggests the diploma to which absence of the pal is an integral and defining constituent of ideal amidtia; see the discussion in Leach 1993b. Absence, after all, is the sine qua non of the epistolary genre; as a defining constituent of amidtia it additionally plays a strong position in Epistles 1.10. Such a that means is maybe present in Horace’s use of the word, and it does present a key to an understanding of the poem that focuses on Horace’s modesty and refusal to simply accept any additional items which may oblige him.
