The Boy Who Crashed and Burned: Quintus Sulpicius Maximus and the Limits of Classical Criticism

This article is two things. On the one hand it is a sustained reflection on the principles that underpin contemporary classical criticism. On the other, it is an exploratory reading of a very distinctive text, a 43-line hexameter Greek poem composed by one Quintus Sulpicius Maximus in 94 CE, which was subsequently inscribed on a funerary altar for him. Sulpicius had improvised a verse ethopoeia at Domitian’s Games for Capitoline Jupiter of 94 CE, on the theme What Words Would Zeus Have Used to Castigate Helios for Giving his Chariot to Phaethon? The poem’s 43 verses appear on two columns on either side of the sculpted figure of Sulpicius (the final lines appearing on a scroll in his hand).