The Last Roman Poet

The Last Roman Poet

A.M. Juster makes the bawdiness and decrepitude of the forgotten 6th-century poet Maximianus available for the first time to 21st-century readers of English.

by John Talbot

The Washington Examiner

December 14, 2018

                                                   St. Ambrose Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P. (CC BY-NC-SA)

 

 

The Elegies of Maximianus

edited and translated by A.M. Juster

Pennsylvania, 223 pp., $65

 

The very last great moment in all of ancient literature comes as a surprise twist—a single line of Latin poetry that transforms a bawdy comic scene into a strange, tragic vision of the end of the cosmos. There then follow just 54 more lines of verse, after which Roman poetry itself comes to an end. You’d think that this last remarkable flicker from the ashes of antiquity would be famous. But both the author, the 6th-century Roman poet known to us as Maximianus, and his Elegies—just 686 lines of verse traditionally divided into six interrelated poems—have dropped almost completely from memory. Who has even heard of him?

 

This needs to change, starting with the remarkable passage I mentioned. The scene: Our poet, Maximianus, on a diplomatic mission from Italy to Byzantium, finds himself alone with a bright young Greek thing. He falls for her, and she’s willing, but he is not the young stallion he once was. When she bewails his repeated failure to rise to the occasion, he naturally takes it personally. Whereupon she delivers a startling retort: Nescis / Non fleo privatum set generale chaos. That is (in my own translation): “You’ve missed the point. It’s not your particular condition I’m bewailing—it’s the progressive dissolution of the universe as a whole.” What for Maximianus is simply one humiliating instance of later-life detumescence is, for the rather more alert and intelligent girl, something else altogether: a moral and intellectual apprehension of universal entropy. From the failure of Maximianus’ virility she generalizes on a cosmic scale and goes on to envision, in a speech that reads like a bleak parody of Lucretius, the eventual extinction of “the human race, the herds, the birds, the beasts / and everything that breathes throughout the world,” all of which depend on the procreative impulse.

 

Her sudden realization surprises her as much as it does us. It’s the moment when youth comes “for the first time,” as one critic puts it, “face to face with...the blankness of annihilation.” Yet this stark vision arises from a low comic situation, and that’s a key to its power. I doubt that Maximianus is a greater writer than Swift or even Samuel Beckett, but the satire is Swiftian and the Greek girl’s laconic observation, compacting mundane human irritation with cosmic existential despair, could have been uttered by an Estragon or Vladimir.

 

The passage is colored by the fact that it comes to us from one of the hinge-moments in human history. The world of Maximianus’ poems—6th-century Italy—is expiring. Roman civilization is about to finally give up the ghost. The last Roman emperor in the already long-declining West had lately been deposed by the Ostrogoths, who would rule Italy for a few decades only to be themselves defeated and absorbed into the Byzantine East. This is the moment late antiquity blurs into the early medieval world, and Maximianus’ poems are pervaded with this sense of the world coming to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

 

Once again: Not that Maximianus can hold a candle to T.S. Eliot, but if you want to gauge Maximianus alongside poets of the last century or so who have sought to register a sense of the end of a civilization, the contrast between Eliot and Yeats is helpful. We can’t get back to Maximianus via Yeats. Non fleo privatum set generale chaos is not too distant semantically from “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” but the rhetorical pitch of Yeats’s line is altogether too stately. Instead it’s Eliot’s picture of the desultory encounter between the typist and her ungentlemanly caller (“Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved if undesired”) that gets at the idea of an exhausted civilization in a way that casts light on Maximianus’ unsatisfactory encounter with the anonymous Greek girl. In Eliot’s poem, the issue is indifference; in Maximianus’, it’s impotence. The background of both assignations is a world sputtering to an end.

 

If Maximianus often seems from our vantage in history to catch the twilight mood of a great civilization finally spent, it’s in part because his poems obsessively focus on a single theme: the contrast between his old man’s body gone to pot and his former glory as a confident Roman youth, silver-tongued, athletic (“I swam the icy currents of the Tiber’s waves / and did not fear to trust my limbs in rapids”), and, in his own humble opinion, possessed of “heavenly good looks.” Some centuries earlier, Cicero wrote an influential essay extolling the virtues of old age. Some centuries later, Yeats would write “bodily decrepitude is wisdom.”

 

Maximianus is having none of that. Bodily decrepitude is nothing but misery. He rails against the indignities of old age. His opening elegy—by far the longest of the six—is a sprawling catalogue of every ailment that overtakes him. The effect is not elegant—the list of maladies accumulates rather than develops, and the complaints most often feel generic rather than particular. Shakespeare’s Jacques nimbly distills all of Maximianus’ theme into two lines (“second childishness and mere oblivion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”). Yet for those willing stick with it, the over-the-top prolixity of Maximianus’ roster of aches and pains, of senile impotence and incontinence and decay, in its very excessiveness and awkwardness and tedium, makes an effective impression. And every now and then—perhaps not quite as often as one could wish—we do get, instead of a well-turned rhetorical commonplace, an acute poetic turn of phrase. As when, addressing “miserable old age” directly, Maximianus writes, “We have collapsed toward you, whatever cracks is yours”—a line of disconcerting epigrammatic force.

 

This opening elegy on the wretchedness of old age is balanced by the final poem, which reprises the theme, but with this surprising and effective contrast—that it is short, only 12 lines long. These two poems on old age frame the four intervening elegies, each of which involves some stage of his amatory career. Reminiscences of two infatuations of his youth are followed by erotic misadventures in middle age, including the mortifying episode with the Greek girl. Whether this is fictional or autobiographical cannot be known. In fact it is far from sure that “Maximianus” even existed—the speaker names himself only once, in passing. We know nothing about him for certain. From a handful of inconclusive hints in the text, scholars can construct the threadbare outlines of biography: 6th-century; youth in Rome; wealthy enough to have got a thorough literary education; important enough to have served as an ambassador. The Latin text itself is unstable; any editor or translator has to choose between conflicting readings among the surviving manuscripts. But for a general reader, willing to accept the convention of a poet called Maximianus and the traditional ordering of his six elegies, the impression of the whole is of a satisfyingly artful arrangement, with the lamentations about old age bookending the vignettes of the poet’s past loves—age and eros disconcertingly juxtaposed.

 

Even as his poems were being composed, antiquity was dissolving into the Middle Ages, and yet the poems themselves did not dissolve but survive. They became a standard school text. Given their bawdiness—mostly focusing on the forlorn mechanics of male impotence—and their recursive preoccupation with old age, you’d think it odd that Maximianus thrived on the curriculum for medieval schoolboys. But early medieval Christianity could be less squeamish about such matters than might be expected: A contemporary bishop, Ennodius—later beatified—wrote even more frankly phallocentric verses. What’s more, Maximianus’ style lends itself to the classroom. His poems feature all the standard rhetorical figures a schoolboy would be expected to learn. Look at the elaborate way he recalls his youthful infatuation with a girl called Aquilina:

 

 

Seduced by love for you, I went mad, Aquilina,

morose and pale, seduced by love for you.

 

 

To begin and end a sentence with exactly the same phrase is a perfect example of a kind of rhetorical trope—epanalepsis—schoolchildren were required to imitate in formal composition exercises. Such rhetorical figures are everywhere on conspicuous display. If some of the less vivid passages of Maximianus read less like heartfelt poetry than a textbook performance of rhetorical commonplaces, that at least explains why his work was so often used as, well, a textbook.

 

But there are other, perhaps better, reasons for his long afterlife. For many medieval poets who quoted, imitated, or echoed him, Maximianus’ poetic persona was the very paradigm of senescence, the unofficial poet laureate of exasperated old age. His medieval admirers include no less than the father of English literature. In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, there’s an old man, bent double, pleading for Mother Earth to open and welcome him into the grave:

 

 

And on the ground, which is my moodres gate

I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,

And seye, “Leeve mooder, leet me in.”

 

 

Many of Chaucer’s contemporary readers would have recognized these lines as lifted straight out of Maximianus. Well into the Renaissance, Maximianus continued to shape the imagination of writers greater than himself. Montaigne, for instance, who in one of his most disarmingly frank essays, “On Experience,” urges us to accept old age’s inevitable physical disintegration: “My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you; they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by that means prolong your misery an hour or two.” Montaigne, who loves to buttress such observations with quotations from the ancients, naturally turns to Maximianus, whom he quotes as if he were the classical authority on collapsing health:

 

 

Not unlike one who wants to brace a crumbling ruin

one leans against assorted reinforcements,

until time’s passage undermines the help itself,

with the whole structure broken into pieces.

 

 

Time’s passage had not yet undermined Maximianus’ status as a classic, which by Montaigne’s time had endured 1,000 years.

 

So why is Maximianus almost unknown today? In part it’s to do with a dearth of translations. By the 17th century, English had begun to supplant Latin as the principal literary language of the Anglophone world, and by 1800, the book market was increasingly dominated by readers unacquainted with Latin. If a classical text was going to survive in the public sphere, it had to get translated into English often and by prominent writers. If not, it could drop out of sight. Just so with Maximianus. Until a few months ago, if you wanted to read Maximianus in English verse, you had somehow to lay your hands on a little volume published in 1689 under the pithy little title 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. This is the work of a young British naval officer, Hovenden Walker, later to become Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden, though his knighthood was perhaps a bit tarnished by the blunders that forced him to abort an elaborate secret attack on Quebec City. Another little blunder: Based on the misattribution of a 16th-century publisher, Walker was under the impression that the poem he was translating was by the Roman poet Gallus, who lived centuries before Maximianus. So even if you knew that there was a 17th-century translation out there, searching under “Maximianus” would turn up nothing. That misattribution has helped to keep Maximianus out of the Anglophone consciousness.

 

Walker rendered Maximianus’ elegiac verses in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, the prevailing style of the day. Here, for instance, is his version of the scene with Maximianus and the Greek girl:

 

 

 

But she inrag’d, said, Fool, thou do’st not know

The real Cause of all my real Woe;

And why such floods of Tears my Eyes o’er-flow.

Be not so fond and vain as to believe,

That thy peculiar Fate I only grieve;

No, this to my distracted Fancy, brings

The sad Estate of all Created things:

For if the gen’tive Pow’r were tane away,

How soon, alas, would this vast World decay?

 

 

“The sad Estate of all Created things.” Not a very strict translation, maybe—Walker’s contemporary Dryden would have called it “paraphrase”—but his version does a good job of drawing out the implications of Maximianus’ much more compressed verses, and the Roman poet’s ribaldry harmonizes easily with the permissive sensibility of Restoration-period poetry. (That may help to explain why translators of later periods avoided him). Moreover, though Walker is no Dryden, his heroic couplets are generally solid, and their rhymes bring out a kind of jaunty wit that’s there in the Latin, but only in complex rhetorical figures that do not survive translation.

 

Whatever the virtues of Walker’s translation, though, we’ve long needed a complete verse translation in contemporary English, without which Maximianus stands no chance of having a place on our literary map. Such a translation has now appeared. Fortunately it’s the work of A.M. Juster, whose quality as a translator (he has translated four other classical, medieval, and modern Latin poets) is closely connected to his skill as a witty, formally astute writer of his own original English verse. By rendering Maximianus into a clear, straightforward, up-to-date idiom, he has made the last poet of the Roman world available for the first time to 21st-century readers of English.

 

That alone justifies his project, but Juster achieves much else besides. He is a scrupulous translator. Unlike so many others, he is sensitive to poetic meter, both in the Latin and the English. Like Walker before him, he turns out adroit and convincing English pentameter verse. But by alternating hexameter with pentameter lines, he suggests something like the motion of Latin elegiac couplets. Juster in his translator’s note advertises his interest in replicating, where possible, the Latin’s sonic qualities, even to the extent of mimicking Maximianus’ “love of the spondee.” Well: One could only wish for a modern audience alert to such metrical subtleties, but Juster delivers on his promise. When the longsuffering poet complains “It is less pain to bear sure ruin all at once,” the translator weighs down the English line with not one but two fittingly sluggish spondees. A convenient Latin text on the facing pages will help learned readers spot, among other features, Juster’s tendency to impart a slangy tang to the English: The Latin abit, “went away,” becomes not even “sneaked off,” which would have been colloquial enough, but “snuck off.” On the whole, though, this is a conservative translation, sticking close to the Latin and—here’s a rare feat—remarkably matching the length of the original poems line for line.

 

Juster’s volume comes packed, really packed, with extras. Most readers will need nothing more than the translation, which runs to 60 or so pages, and the introduction by classicist Michael Roberts, who provides an overview of Maximianus’ work and a dispassionate summary of what little is securely known about him. There’s an intriguing anthology of appendices, including a letter from the Ostrogothic king Theoderic to a certain Maximianus who may or may not be our poet; a series of poems traditionally, but probably mistakenly, ascribed to Maximianus; and exhibits from the poet’s literary afterlife, including a fascinating anonymous imitation in Middle English called Le regret de Maximian. (Some readers will regret that Juster leaves Le regret untranslated.) And finally, there’s a line-by-line commentary—with bibliography—of more than 100 closely-printed pages, in which Juster draws attention to variant readings, justifies his own translations while considering the merits of those rejected, signals nearly every outstanding point of scholarly controversy, and cites the relevant scholarly literature. He is in communication with classicists studying Maximianus and occasionally cites work yet to be published. It’s hard to imagine anybody but a classical scholar making much use of this section, and its thoroughness makes the volume feel slightly awkwardly pitched. The commentary is likely to daunt the general reader, and classicists capable of understanding the technical detail are perhaps unlikely to need it. But curious laymen ought to brave a look at Juster’s notes. At the very least, they reveal the thoroughness of his commitment: He is not one of those slapdash translators confident that a bit of stylistic panache and trendy anachronism can compensate for ignorance of the language and context of his source text. The notes also reveal what I doubt any translator could quite bring out—that is, the range of the poet’s literary allusions: to Lucretius, Virgil, Horace’s satires, Ovid, and many other echoes that amplify our sense of Maximianus’ belated entry into the history of Latin poetry. And anybody venturing a look over the notes will be struck with how often Juster must point out that the Latin text itself is uncertain. Among so many alternative readings, a translator has got to make the hard choices which collectively create the English text—a significant achievement. A different set of choices by a different translator would have produced a rather different collection of poems.

 

So, then: Maximianus is back, at last available at to anybody who can read English. Does it really matter? Not even his proponents would put him in the front rank of poets, so it’s fair to ask why he should matter to us now. One answer is that he is of historical importance. We have blind spots in our picture of the world. Among readers with a reasonable grasp of the arc of Western civilization there tends to be a gap: A shadowy and shifty period of three centuries or so between Constantine—the last Roman emperor with a strong place in the popular imagination—and what’s distinctly medieval rather than ancient. This is understandable, but it’s a shame, too, since those neglected centuries are doubly fascinating precisely for being transitional. Maximianus’ world is simultaneously pagan and Christian, late-ancient and early-medieval, enlightened and benighted, terminal and incipient. Maximianus is arguably the last significant poet of ancient Rome and for that reason alone ought to be known and read. The situation is analogous the popular assimilation of the epic of Gilgamesh. That great Mesopotamian poem was first deciphered in the 19th century, and it has taken more than a century for it to achieve a firm place in the popular imagination. But it is now firmly on the curriculum and occupies the place that for centuries Homer’s poems held, as the first major epic poem in ancient literature. What’s needed is for the popular view of ancient literature to be similarly extended, at its other end, to include Maximianus. Juster’s translation makes that a possibility.

 

Maximianus offers surprising glimpses into the world of late antiquity. To take just one instance: He is a younger contemporary of Boethius, who remarkably appears as a character in Maximianus’ third elegy. Yes, the renowned philosopher and future Catholic saint, Boethius himself, drops—most incongruously—into the complicated love life of the young Maximianus. The illustrious thinker surprises us by playing the role of a pandar, facilitating the hookup of Maximianus and a girl—the same Aquilina I mentioned above—by bribing her parents, hitherto opposed to the liaison, to turn a blind eye. With that obstacle removed, Maximianus and Aquilina find their ardor abates. Whereupon the same Boethius who had contrived the affair now congratulates Maximianus for his celibacy. This eccentric episode complicates our view of early Christianity, of late Latin literature, and of history itself. In this and many other ways, Maximianus’ poems leads readers into a fascinating and complex period.

 

Still, you could raise an objection to the work’s inherent quality. Yes, the poems are of undeniable historical value. Yes, they inspired Chaucer and Montaigne and others. But are they really any good as literature? Can Maximianus speak to us today as a poet? Has he literary, as opposed to historical, value? The question remains unsettled. Most scholarship on Maximianus has been technical rather than critical—chiefly concerned with establishing the text and basic issues of interpretation, and uninterested in weighing the poet’s intrinsic merits. One point of departure for a critic would be to dismiss the poems as chiefly exercises in rhetoric. Fair enough, but such an objection would require a persistent Romantic prejudice that sees rhetoric as inimical to genuine feeling.

 

Another critical approach would be to follow the lead of Helen Waddell, the Irish poet best known for her 20th-century anthologies of medieval Latin verse, for whom Maximianus’ poetry is “one of the strangest documents of the human mind: Ecclesiastes without its austere reconciliation.” This is a powerful recommendation, since by mentioning “strangeness” and Ecclesiastes in the same sentence, she seems to be thinking of the kind of sublime weirdness and terribilità we find in much of the greatest of art. She overreaches when she claims for him “the lightnings of the spirit that is nearer Donne than anything in Latin literature.” This is simply untrue: Contrast the elaborate tortured complexities of Propertius, whom Donne imitated.

 

But Waddell may be on to something: There is an intriguing strangeness in Maximianus’ poems. Part of this has to do with things only classicists would notice: His curious blending of Horatian self-deprecation, Ovidian suavity and slyness, the tropes of Roman comedy, and any number of other features of Roman literature that make his elegies impossible to classify, at least according to the conventions of classical Latin poetry. But general readers will notice other kinds of intriguing quirkiness—the relentless recursiveness of his style and the strange mixture of low comedy and cosmic seriousness, as in the episode with the Greek girl, or the unexpected hijinks of Boethius. Readers will appreciate the overall effectiveness of the framing structure of the six poems. And then there’s the refusal to prettify or ennoble the indignities of old age, as Cicero had done. I can think of at least one ailing octogenarian in my own family, bravely but miserably eking out his days in a care home, who would take some cathartic satisfaction in Maximianus’ cloyingly long catalogue of infirmities—because obsessively enumerating each ailment is precisely what his condition drives him to crave.

 

My sense, though, is that something more has to happen for the last of the Roman poets to achieve currency in today’s culture. Juster in his translator’s note generously anticipates “future translations” succeeding his own. Now that he has given Maximianus, at long last, a foothold in modern English literary culture—an elegant, clear, remarkably accurate, formally adroit translation, with ample critical apparatus—the path is cleared for different kind of work. What’s now possible is for somebody to do for Maximianus what Ezra Pound did for Propertius and Christopher Logue has lately done for Homer.

 

Pound’s accomplishment, in the midst of World War I and as literary modernism was approaching its zenith, was to revive the reputation of the ancient Roman poet and make him relevant and contemporary as never before. He achieved this not by translating Propertius but by rewriting him. In his Homage to Sextus Propertius, he recast the Latin elegies into 20th-century modernist idiom, over the complaints of professional classicists who could not see that Pound’s licentious handling of the originals was not hapless mistranslation but a feat of creation and re-creation. Pound had detected in Propertius ironies and indirections that earlier translations had obscured and many classicists had missed. Now, a century later—his Homage was written in 1917—Pound’s juxtaposition of Propertius and high English modernism continues to inform critical discussion of both Roman and English literature.

 

For his part, the English poet Christopher Logue has similarly reinvented much of Homer’s Iliad. From 1959 until his death seven years ago, Logue sporadically produced installments of a new version of Homer’s poem in contemporary poetic idiom, rich in allusion to other poets, especially Milton and Pope, full of topical references (in particular to World War II and Vietnam), and overtly borrowing the techniques of cinema and the conventions of screenwriting. These efforts are now collected under the title War Music. Here again, the key is to approach the ancient text with a kind principled wantonness that paradoxically gets closer to a Homeric tone, or an irony, or a picture, or a cadence, than more scrupulous translation ordinarily permits. Neither Pound nor Logue could have done this kind of work without the help of proper, accurate translations of Propertius and Homer—in fact, Logue could not read Greek at all, and depended on the skill of those who could. But both poets took a step beyond strict translation, and that has made all the difference.

 

What if Juster’s translation fell into the hands of a young poet of Poundian or Loguian temperament? Perhaps she’s never heard of Maximianus before—who has?—but here he is, a querulous old man, falling to pieces as the Roman world itself is falling to pieces, regaling us with tales of the erotic adventures of his youth and misadventures of middle age. His tone is both funny and bleak, and his narrative is eccentric, yes, but she’s read her Eliot and her Beckett, and detects something in his style that reminds her of them. It makes Maximianus feel somehow contemporary with the cultural exhaustion of the West, and late-imperial America. It would take some tweaking to bring all this out, and it would mean taking liberties with the Latin. But it occurs to her that, building on Juster’s foundation, she just might be able to make over Maximianus into a new English poem. It would be a slender volume—no footnotes, no apparatus, just a voice she creates: cantankerous, bemused, funny and trivial and tragicomic by turns, full of ancient and modern references, a bravado ventriloquizing of the very last poetic voice of the ancient world, speaking afresh to the modern one. And what a great ending it would have in that final brief poem, just 12 lines long: Maximianus waking—as if from a trance—from the reveries of his youth, to curse his ruined body in one last bitter moment of lucidity, necessarily brief, because there is nothing left to say.