ABSTRACT
The paper analyses how the category of age is used in the literary discourses that surround Nero and his Flavian successors. Focusing on the young principes Nero and Domitian, it analyses how their youth is depicted positively in the panegyrics of their lifetime and recoded negatively in the posthumous critical texts. Regarding the depiction of the emperor’s age, we need to differentiate between earlier and later Flavian responses to the Neronian representation. While Vespasian uses his old age as a counterpoint, Domitianic poetry creates a contrast by encoding his youth differently from its Julio-Claudian anti-model. These different depictions concern not only the individual emperor, but also touch upon general questions relating to the political system of the early principate, in particular the topic of dynasty and succession.
