Project: Late or Too Late? Old Age in the late Latin Elegies of Maximian (6th century AD).

2022-11-01 – 2026-10-31

Abstract

The project is to be situated in the field of late Latin literature and focuses on the poet Maximian (6th c.AD). His corpus consists of six elegies (686 verses) that put the motif of old age explicitly on the foreground; a stark contrast with those poems of the classical period (1st c.BC) which are written from the perspective of young men. This combination of genre and discourse is truly original: Maximian subverts the logic of the elegiac genre by adopting the perspective of the old man who is bitter about the hardships of old age. Maximian's late antique text will be the lens through which other works of literature that have old age at their core will be examined. Authors as Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, et al. discuss (dis)advantages of old age and the position of older people in society. This project will firstly look at similarities and discrepancies between these authors in regard to their views on old age, as well as make a comparative study of the chosen genres in relation to this subject. Later, we will research how Late Antiquity can help us understand the content of these selected classical works. This study productively combines antique literary studies with 'ageing studies', which focus on the self-representation of older people and their experience of old age. This proposal is based on the felicitious encounter of this approach and the field of late Latin literature which results in a completely original project.