Patronage in scholarship, science, and the arts is the financial support and encouragement offered by individual patrons or institutions to practitioners. The quintessential patron in Greco-Roman antiquity was Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, the friend and advisor to the Emperor Augustus in the 1st century BCE who operated as patron of a circle of poets that included Horace. Maecenas’ name has entered many European languages (but not English) as a common noun with the sense of “patron” or “sponsor” (German Mäzen; F…