ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how, and by whom, Gallus-Maximianus was read during his period of ascendancy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Who took these poems to be genuine works of Gallus, and what did they find worthwhile in them? How did they reconcile the style and content of the Maximianus elegiacs with their expectations of what the poetry of Gallus should be like, which derived from Quintilian and from the love elegies of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid? How did their readings transform conceptions of Gallus? The chapter surveys responses to the pseudo-Gallus elegies by Petrus Ramus, Kaspar von Barth, Enrico Palladio, Michele Foscarini, Johannes Petrus Lotichius, Sebastián Fox Morcillo, and René Rapin. It concludes with an analysis of Michel de Montaigne’s remarks on Gallus in his Essais.
