External links
- Maximiani Elegiarum Liber at the Latin Library
- Review of A. M. Juster's edition and translation at The Medieval Review
- Another review of Juster's work at Eclectica Magazine
Maximianus or Maximian (sometimes referred to as Maximianus Etruscus) was a Latin elegiac poet of the 6th century, who has been called "in some sort, the last of the Roman poets". [1]
Nothing is known of Maximianus's life save what can be inferred from his poetry. [2] In it, he claims Etruscan descent (me ... Etruscae gentis alumnum [5.5]); describes his youth and manhood, [3] including his friendship with Boethius, whom he apostrophizes as the "greatest investigator of great matters" (magnarum scrutator maxime rerum [3.47])—leading most scholars to date his work roughly to the middle of the sixth century [4] —and says that in his old age he was sent as an ambassador to the emperor's court at Constantinople (5.1–4). [5] Some scholars, however, have maintained that the poetry represents the utterances of one or more personae and that nothing therein, including the name Maximianus, is to be taken as reliable information about the poet. [6] The name "Maximianus" could thus be understood as a speaking pseudonym, literally meaning "descendant of the greatest". [7]
Maximianus's poetry, usually divided into six separate elegies, deals with the contrast between the infirmities of age and the vigor and amours of youth. Some scholars have noted a connection with the topos of the senex amans found in classical comedy and in Ovid. [8]
The first, and longest, elegy presents in detail the miseries of the "prison", the "living death", that is old age. The second tells of the poet's long love for Lycoris, who abandoned him as he began to grow old; the third and fourth, of his youthful passions for Aquilina and Candida. The fifth recounts his abortive tryst with a Greek girl during his embassy in the East, along with her reaction to his impotence. (When she begins to weep and he apologizes for his erotic failure, she sobs, "It is not that! It is the general chaos of the world." [9] ) The sixth, consisting of only twelve lines, again expresses the horror of approaching death. Throughout, "the imminence of death and the sadness of growing old are seen as representing the end of pagan culture and its joy in living". [10]
Despite its erotic content, Maximianus's verse was part of the corpus of texts used in the 11th and 12th centuries to teach schoolboys the rudiments of Latin [11] (perhaps because he discouraged the foolish desire for long life [12] ), though its use for this purpose was criticized by Alexander of Villedieu:
quamvis haec non sit doctrina satis generalis,
proderit ipsa tamen plus nugis Maximiani. [13](Although this [that is, Alexander's] instruction is not wholly sufficient,
it is more profitable than the trifles of Maximianus.)
Perhaps because of this use of the poetry in elementary education, echoes of and references to it are found in a wide variety of medieval writers, including Hugh of Saint Victor, Giraldus Cambrensis, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Nigel Wireker, Alain de Lille, and Walter of Châtillon. [14] A Middle English poem entitled "Le Regret de Maximian" was based on Maximianus's first elegy, [15] and Chaucer's use of the Latin poet's work has been investigated by various scholars. [16] Later, Montaigne would quote the first elegy several times in his last essay, "On Experience". [17]
Although one or more printed editions of the work had appeared in the 15th century, it was the 1501 edition by the Neapolitan teenager Pomponius Gauricus that attracted the most attention among Renaissance scholars. Gauricus, suppressing the distich in which the name Maximianus appears and altering the reference to Boethius, published the verse as the work of the first-century-BC poet Cornelius Gallus, whose elegies had been thought to be entirely lost. This enthusiastic error (or deliberate fraud) caused Maximianus's poetry to be widely misattributed to Gallus for hundreds of years. Gauricus also appears to be responsible for the division of the verse, which in almost all the manuscripts appears as a continuous poem, into six elegies—a division that has been followed by subsequent editors. [18]
The first published English translation, by Hovenden Walker, was titled The Impotent Lover: Accurately Described in Six Elegies upon Old Age, with the Old Doting Letcher's Resentments on the Past Pleasures and Vigorous Performances of Youth. [19] A full English translation with commentary was published by the American poet A. M. Juster in 2018.
On the Consolation of Philosophy, often titled as The Consolation of Philosophy or simply the Consolation, is a philosophical work by the Roman philosopher Boethius. Written in 523 while he was imprisoned and awaiting execution by the Ostrogothic King Theodoric, it is often described as the last great Western work of the Classical Period. Boethius' Consolation heavily influenced the philosophy of late antiquity, as well as Medieval and early Renaissance Christianity.
The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and sound symbolism, to produce musical or incantatory effects. Most poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow a rhythmic or other deliberate pattern. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym for poetry.
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature, the Greek lyric, which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on a stringed instrument known as a kithara, a seven-stringed lyre . It is not equivalent to song lyrics, though song lyrics are often in the lyric mode, and it is also not equivalent to Ancient Greek lyric poetry, which was principally limited to song lyrics, or chanted verse.
In Roman mythology, Vertumnus is the god of seasons, change and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees. He could change his form at will; using this power, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiv), he tricked Pomona into talking to him by disguising himself as an old woman and gaining entry to her orchard, then using a narrative warning of the dangers of rejecting a suitor to seduce her. The tale of Vertumnus and Pomona has been called "the first exclusively Latin tale."
Claudius Claudianus, known in English as Claudian, was a Latin poet associated with the court of the Roman emperor Honorius at Mediolanum (Milan), and particularly with the general Stilicho. His work, written almost entirely in hexameters or elegiac couplets, falls into three main categories: poems for Honorius, poems for Stilicho, and mythological epic.
Theognis of Megara was a Greek lyric poet active in approximately the sixth century BC. The work attributed to him consists of gnomic poetry quite typical of the time, featuring ethical maxims and practical advice about life. He was the first Greek poet known to express concern over the eventual fate and survival of his own work and, along with Homer, Hesiod and the authors of the Homeric Hymns, he is among the earliest poets whose work has been preserved in a continuous manuscript tradition. In fact more than half of the extant elegiac poetry of Greece before the Alexandrian period is included in the approximately 1,400 lines of verse attributed to him, though several poems traditionally attributed to him were composed by others, e.g. Solon and Euenus. Some of these verses inspired ancient commentators to value him as a moralist yet the entire corpus is valued today for its "warts and all" portrayal of aristocratic life in archaic Greece.
Albius Tibullus was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to him are of questionable origins.
The goliards were a group of generally young clergy in Europe who wrote satirical Latin poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries of the Middle Ages. They were chiefly clerics who served at or had studied at the universities of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and England, who protested against the growing contradictions within the church through song, poetry and performance. Disaffected and not called to the religious life, they often presented such protests within a structured setting associated with carnival, such as the Feast of Fools, or church liturgy.
A skald, or skáld is one of the often named poets who composed skaldic poetry, one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry in alliterative verse, the other being Eddic poetry. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed to honor kings, but were sometimes extempore. They include both extended works and single verses (lausavísur). They are characteristically more ornate in form and diction than eddic poems, employing many kennings, which require some knowledge of Norse mythology, and heiti, which are formal nouns used in place of more prosaic synonyms. Dróttkvætt metre is a type of skaldic verse form that most often use internal rhyme and alliteration.
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC.
Bragi Boddason, known as Bragi the Old was a Norwegian skald active in the first half of the 9th century, the earliest known skald from whom verses have survived. Portions of his Ragnarsdrápa are preserved in Snorri Sturluson's Edda.
Gaius Cornelius Gallus was a Roman poet, orator, politician and military commander, at one time appointed by the Emperor Augustus as prefect of Egypt. Although only nine lines of his poetry are extant today, he was considered by Ovid as one of the major Latin poets of the 1st century BC.
Amores is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity.
Philitas of Cos, sometimes spelled Philetas, was a Greek scholar, poet and grammarian during the early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. He is regarded as the founder of the Hellenistic school of poetry, which flourished in Alexandria after about 323 BC. Philitas is also reputed to have been the tutor of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the poet Theocritus. He was thin and frail; Athenaeus later caricatured him as an academic so consumed by his studies that he wasted away and died.
The Old English Boethius is an Old English translation/adaptation of the sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, dating from between c. 880 and 950. Boethius's work is prosimetrical, alternating between prose and verse, and one of the two surviving manuscripts of the Old English translation renders the poems as Old English alliterative verse: these verse translations are known as the Metres of Boethius.
