Laat of te Laat? Ouderdom in de laat Latijnse Elegieën van Maximianus (6e eeuw n.Chr.)

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetry of Maximianus, a late Latin author whose work was published around the 6th century AD. His corpus is to be situated within the genre of the elegy; typically, these are written by a young and virile male poet, dedicated to the woman he loves and who dominates his life. However, the six elegies written by Maximianus (686 lines in total) are unique within the whole of Latin literature since they do not have love and youth as central subject. They explicitly put the motif of old age on the foreground. By combining a close reading with the methodological framework of “ageing studies”, this article proposes an analysis of some crucial passages taken from the opening poem of the corpus, in order to show how Maximianus interacts with the topic of old age within the boundaries of the elegy.