Maximus
Fabius. See Fabius.
A Roman emperor, A.D. 383-388, in Gaul, Britain, and Spain, was a native of Spain. He was proclaimed emperor by the legions in Britain in 383, and forthwith crossed over to Gaul to oppose Gratian, who was defeated by Maximus, and was shortly afterwards put to death. Theodosius found it expedient to recognize Maximus as emperor of Gaul, Britain, and Spain, in order to secure Valentinian in the possession of Italy. Maximus, however, aspired to the undivided empire of the West, and accordingly, in 387, he invaded Italy at the head of a formidable army. Valentinian was unable to resist him, and fled to Theodosius in the East. Theodosius forthwith prepared to avenge his colleague. In 388 he forced his way through the Noric Alps, which had been guarded by the troops of Maximus, and shortly afterwards took the city of Aquileia by storm and there put Maximus to death. Victor, the son of Maximus, was defeated and slain in Gaul by Arbogastes, the general of Theodosius.
Petronius. A Roman emperor, A.D. 455, belonged to a noble Roman family, and enjoyed some of the highest offices of State under Honorius and Valentinian III. In consequence of the violence offered to his wife by Valentinian, Maximus formed a conspiracy against this emperor, who was assassinated, and Maximus proclaimed emperor in his stead. His reign, however, lasted only two or three months. Having forced Eudoxia, the widow of Valentinian, to marry him, she resolved to avenge the death of her former husband, and accordingly Genseric was invited to invade Italy. When Genseric landed at the mouth of the Tiber, Maximus prepared to fly from Rome, but was slain by a band of Burgundian mercenaries, commanded by some old officers of Valentinian.
A learned Greek monk of the Byzantine period, and distinguished as a theologian and philologist. He lived from A.D. 1260 to 1330, and took some part in public life, being sent by Andronicus II. in 1327 as ambassador to Venice. His writings comprise treatises on grammar and syntax, scholia to Theocritus and Hermogenes, a collection of excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Strabo, Dio Cassius, etc., and translations from Latin into Greek (e. g. Caesar's De Bello Gallico, Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, the Metamorphoses and Heroides of Ovid, and Boethius, De Consolatione); but, above all, he is remembered for his famous collection known as the Anthologia Planudea, which was the only Greek anthology known to Western Europe until 1606, when Salmasius discovered the older and richer collection of Cephalas at Heidelberg. See Professor Alfred Gudeman in Calvary's Berl. Stud. viii. 3 (1888), and in the Proc. of the American Philological Assoc. xx. pp. 6 foll.; also M. Treu's commentary on the Epistulae of Planudes (Breslau, 1890); A. Palmer, Ovid's Heroides (Oxford, 1894); and the article Anthology.
Valerius, q. v.