This gens is best known from Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, a trusted friend and advisor of Augustus, who was famous for his immense wealth and patronage of the arts.
[2][1] The only family of the Cilnii to achieve prominence under the Republic bore the cognomen Maecenas, sometimes found as Maecaenas or Maecoenas.
They claimed descent from Lars Porsena, the legendary king of Clusium, who played a prominent role in the early history of the Roman Republic.
[3][4] On Etruscan funerary urns, the names of Cilnius and Maecenas occur separately, but never together, from which Müller concludes that these families did not unite until a later period.
It seems to have been a diminutive of procus, a prince or nobleman, although by the time of Varro a popular etymology held that it originally designated a child born when his father was far from home.