Crimen amare, convivia, cantus : evaluations of the public and private life of the older persona in the Elegiae of Maximianus (sixth century AD)

“Literary fiction is said to serve as an imaginative resource for understanding variations in the meaning of the experience of ageing in society” (Swinnen, Port & Lipscomb 2017, 24). Fiction’s engagement with contemporary socio-cultural realities makes it indeed fruitful to analyze for the study of older age in all its facets and across temporal boundaries. Where it concerns antique perspectives on the position of older age in society on the one hand and its experience in the private sphere on the other, the narrative of an older man’s life-course as recounted in the late Latin elegies of the poet Maximianus provides us with an interesting casestudy. The self-evaluation of both his younger and older age by the persona in combination with societal prescriptions for the older man’s behavior in his public and private life form the starting point of the discussion. Through an exploration of the intersected categories of age, gender and sexuality in different passages of the collection, this paper aims to shed light on the ways in which positive and negative views on older age are constructed and if this image that is presented to the reader conforms to attitudes and beliefs that prevailed in Christian Late Antiquity.