Maximianus' "Elegies": Love Elegy Grew Old by Vasileios Pappas (review)

Reviewed by: Maximianus' "Elegies": Love Elegy Grew Old by Vasileios Pappas Grace Funsten Maximianus' "Elegies": Love Elegy Grew Old. By Vasileios Pappas. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2023. Pp. 246. Maximianus' Elegies, composed in Latin in the sixth century c.e., offer a strange reflection of Augustan love elegy, in which an elderly lover-poet looks back on a lifetime of unsuccessful romantic encounters. In keeping with the current uptick in scholarly attention to late antique poetry, Vasileios Pappas's monograph on the Elegies builds on fresh interest in Maximianus, exemplified by the recent commentaries of A. M. Juster and Emanuele Riccardo D'Amanti.1 Notably, Pappas's monograph is the first to collect and synthesize the past fifty years of scholarship on Maximianus, making its bibliography a valuable resource for scholars. Pappas takes an almost entirely literary approach to the Elegies, focusing on generic interplay and metapoetic statements in the work, as well as Maximianus' intratextual tendencies. His main argument is that Maximianus is a self-conscious poet whose aim in the Elegies is to comment on the decrepit state of the genre in his time and renew it by infusing his poetry with features from other genres. This is not a new argument. James Uden and Ian Fielding2 as well as Paul White3 have discussed the poetic and political aspects of Maximianus' fixation on old age. Wolfgang Christian Schneider4 has [End Page 183] highlighted the mix of genres in the Elegies as a stylistic choice characteristic of Late Antiquity. However, Pappas does elaborate these ideas more fully than previous scholars and adds some interesting observations. The monograph is divided into eight chapters: an introduction, a conclusion, and one chapter per "poem." In the introduction, Pappas mentions the current debate surrounding the division of the Elegies, which may have been composed as one continuous poem and then split into six during the early modern period, but he chooses not to offer an opinion on it. For clarity, I will use the same divisions throughout this review. The rest of the introduction offers an overview of the little that is known of the historical Maximianus, common motifs in his poetry, the Appendix Maximiani, and Pomponius Gauricus's early modern repackaging of Maximianus' Elegies as the work of Cornelius Gallus. Pappas's research on Gauricus is careful and a welcome addition to Paul White's 2019 book on the subject.5 Each of the six chapters on individual elegies is structured in the same way, with small variations. After a summary of the poem in question, Pappas offers general comments, often by summarizing previous scholarship. These comments include a political reading of the speaker's old age in Elegy 1, an overview of Boethius' role in Elegy 3, and an interpretation of the speaker's impotence in Elegy 5 as a response to Christian asceticism. Pappas also notes lexical connections between the Elegies, which make up the bulk of his approach to intratextuality, before he turns to questions of genre, analyzing both the "host" and "guest" genres of each poem. Chapters Two to Seven all include sections on elegy as the host genre, in which Pappas enumerates words and themes that mark the poems as elegiac. These sections quickly become repetitious and would perhaps have been more effective if they had been combined and placed in the introduction. Pappas's sections on guest genres outline references to epic, comedy, tragedy, philosophy, legal texts, and medical texts in the poems. In most cases, Pappas treats generic mixture as an end in and of itself, without considering how each guest genre serves Maximianus' poetic program. However, his approach yields interesting results in his chapter on Elegy 3, in which he argues that Boethius' success in bribing Aquilina's parents turns the citizen girl into a comic meretrix, her mother into a lena, and himself into a servus callidus plotting to help the amator get the girl. The final section of each chapter offers a metapoetic reading of the poem at hand. These sections cover Pappas's most original argument, which is that all of the women in the Elegies (Lycoris in Elegy...

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