Preface
THIS SMALL VOLUME is aimed at two constituencies: the undergraduate coming to Martial for the first time, and the general reader with an interest in the epigrammatist and in Latin poetry more broadly. Its brief is above all to convey the enjoyment to be had from reading Martial, to proselytise for a writer who is beyond question the wittiest of the Roman poets. In that sense, Chapters 3 and 4, which analyse by means of selected instances a number of the devices whereby Martial attempts to surprise and amuse his audience, are at the core of the book. At the same time, as we stress, Martial is an important author and his poems far more than a mere repository of wit. His importance resides in two particular characteristics: first, he conveys a wealth of information about Roman social attitudes and practices – which does not mean of course that such information is to be read in a straightforwardly literal way – and furthermore, he conveys it in a highly amusing and accessible fashion; second, he is the founder of epigram as all subsequent eras have come to conceive of it, that is, a short, witty, pungent poem with a sting or paradox in its tail. These two dimensions of the poet have been addressed respectively in Chapters 1 and 2, and in Chapter 6. Chapter 5 charts the reception, literary, cultural and scholarly, of the poet over the centuries. The second half of this chapter attempts to orientate readers new to the poet by providing an overview of critical approaches to him over the last 50 years, and by flagging those aspects of his oeuvre which have engaged the attention of specialists during that time. Since a good deal of the most significant scholarship on Martial is written in the major European languages, the contents of some works which seem to us particularly important or innovative have been synthesised for the convenience of readers to whom they might not otherwise be accessible.
From the time of his re-emergence in the Renaissance almost up to the present day, Martial has been attacked on the grounds of obscenity, mendicancy and flattery of a tyrant. In defending him against these charges (Chapter 2), we attempt to show that these criticisms are fundamentally misconceived. They are conditioned by religious and ethical preconceptions operative at the time when they were penned, but hardly applicable to Martial. Or, to put it another way, they are essentially ahistorical, since they take no account of the cultural situatedness of the poet: Martial wrote at a time when attitudes to matters such as sexuality, bodily deformity, old age, ethnicity, women and a host of other issues were radically different from those prevailing nowadays and certainly from those of the Victorian era, which took particular umbrage at Martial, one writer of the time famously describing his epigrams as ‘nauseous’.
The present volume is by way of being a ‘taster’, and is in no sense intended as a comprehensive introduction to Martial. Readers looking for the latter are directed to John Sullivan’s valuable Martial: The Unexpected Classic of 1991, which attempts complete coverage of all aspects of the epigrammatist’s work and his literary and cultural afterlife. Also calling for mention here is Sven Lorenz’s immensely useful bibliographical survey of work on Martial during the years 1970–2003 – a period when approaches to the poet gained immeasurably in sophistication. Details of this two-volume survey are found in the bibliography.
All translations of Latin are our own unless otherwise specified. In almost every case the relevant Latin text has been quoted either in our text or in a footnote. We have tried to keep the translations as literal as possible, hopefully without sacrificing Martial’s wit and panache in the process. For, in the end, this book seeks primarily, in a modest way, to help others share the enjoyment which its authors continue to derive from Martial even after multiple rereadings: an enjoyment which, if we are to believe the author, his Roman audience gained in large measure. For, as he said himself, in reply to a critic who exalted mythic themes over the slighter genre of epigram, ‘people praise such writings, but I’m the one they read’.1
Why Read Martial?
MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS was born between 38 and 41 CE, and like many of the important Roman literary figures of the first century, such as Seneca the Younger, Quintilian and Lucan, he was a native Spaniard. His parents, well-to-do residents of the town of Bilbilis who had taken Roman citizenship, gave him the cognomen Martialis (literally ‘belonging to Mars’), because he was born in the god’s month of March, but the name was also a happy omen, since Mars was the father of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and it was in the city of Rome, to which the poet headed in his mid-twenties, that Martial discovered the source of poetic inspiration which was eventually to lead to fame and material success.
Although it was more than 20 years after his arrival in the City before Martial published the first of the 12 books of epigrams for which he is best known, he was an established poet for some years before that. Settling in Rome in 64, the budding poet honed his skills as an epigrammatist, and as was usual in an age when royalties were unknown, he sought material support by circulating examples of his work among potential patrons, which would later be included in his first two books of Epigrams. During this time he also published his first book of poetry, On the Spectacles, usually thought to have been composed for Titus’ inauguration of the Flavian amphitheatre in 80.1 In December 85 or thereabouts he issued the Xenia and Apophoreta (Books 13 and 14 in modern editions): books of (mostly) elegiac couplets designed to accompany Saturnalian gifts of food and various other commodities. The 12 books of Epigrams were published at the rate of roughly one a year from 85 onwards. In 98 he retired to his native town,2 dying (probably) in 104.
Epigram occupied the lowest place in the ancient generic hierarchy, both in terms of its subject matter (everyday life as opposed to elevated mythological or military themes) and in its correspondingly less elevated language and style, which included the widespread use of basic obscenities. Moreover, these were the sort of poems that educated men might toss off casually in a sympotic setting.3 Consequently, Martial has often been regarded as a minor talent, an assessment which began directly after his death in a famous obituary by one of his patrons, Pliny the Younger, himself an epigrammatic poetaster; in this, praise for Martial’s satirical wit and charm is tempered with allusions to the modesty of his chosen genre: ‘he gave me the very best he was able to give, and he would have given more had he been able […] You may object that his verses will not be immortal; perhaps not, but he wrote them as if they will’ (Ep. 3.21).4
Martial himself, though paying lip service to the humbleness of his genre, was accustomed to elevate its importance, claiming for his everyday subject matter a relevance and attractiveness surpassing that of the hackneyed themes of mythological poetry (cf. 10.4). He also pointed to the popularity of his work: a claim no doubt with some validity, even if his assertion at the beginning of Book 1 that he was ‘known all over the world for his witty little books of epigrams’ (1.1.2–3) might have been something of an exaggeration.
Two thousand years on, Pliny would be gratified at the survival of his Epistles, but he would also be astonished that the epigrams he regarded as ephemeral are still read and studied. It seems that Martial’s self-assessment may have been more accurate: in fact, it can be argued that, from our perspective, he is one of the most rewarding of Roman poets.
One reason for this is the presence in his work of elements which are perfectly accommodated to the modern experience, in particular his aggressively urbanised poetics of the metropolis. Martial fills his epigrams with all the sights, sounds, smells, trades, merchandise,5 nuisances and inconveniences of city life. No other Roman poet can match him for the richness and density of his cityscape, for – as a recent writer puts it – the ‘degree of topographical explicitness […] [his] sheer accumulation of urban scenes, objects, monuments, persons’.6 For all that Martial likes to vaunt his Celtiberian origins, his epigrams are firmly rooted in the city. This is the source of his inspiration and subject matter: a point made explicitly in the epistolary preface to Book 12, written following his retirement to Spain, where he laments that his new-found provincial solitude has deprived him of the intellectual stimulus and themes which Rome used routinely to provide. Particularly indicative of Martial’s citified focus is the presence in the supposedly Spanish Book 12, composed in the poet’s homeland and sent onwards from there to Rome, of a large number of vividly realised scenes of metropolitan life.7 Cases in point are the ruthlessly detailed account of the eviction from his lodgings of Vacerra, a failed Celtic immigrant to Rome, for defaulting on his rent (12.32),8 or the densely peopled, panoptic urbanism of 12.57:
Cur saepe sicci parva rura Nomenti
laremque villae sordidum petam, quaeris?
nec cogitandi, Sparse, nec quiescendi
in urbe locus est pauperi. negant vitam
ludi magistri mane, nocte pistores,
aerariorum marculi die toto;
hinc otiosus sordidam quatit mensam
Neroniana nummularius massa,
illinc balucis malleator Hispanae
tritum nitenti fuste verberat saxum;
nec turba cessat entheata Bellonae,
nec fasciato naufragus loquax trunco,
a matre doctus nec rogare Iudaeus,
nec sulphuratae lippus institor mercis.
numerare pigri damna quis potest somni?
dicet quot aera verberent manus urbis,
cum secta Colcho luna vapulat rhombo.
tu, Sparse, nescis ista nec potes scire,
Petilianis delicatus in regnis,
cui plana summos despicit domus montis,
et rus in urbe est […]
et in profundo somnus et quies nullis
offensa linguis, nec dies nisi admissus.
nos transeuntis nisus excitat turbae,
et ad cubile est Roma. taedio fessis
dormire quotiens libuit, imus ad villam. (ll. 1–21, 24–8)
Do you ask why I often make for my little rural place at dry Nomentum and the dingy house of my villa [country estate]? In the city, Sparsus, a poor man has no room either to think or to rest. Schoolmasters deny you life in the morning, bakers at night, the mallets of the coppersmiths all day long. On one side the lazy banker makes his grubby table vibrate with Nero’s metal, on the other the hammerer of Spanish gold dust beats the worn stone with gleaming mallet; neither does the frenzied throng of Bellona give it a rest, nor the talkative survivor of shipwreck with his bandaged trunk, nor the Jew taught to beg by his mother, nor the bleary-eyed pedlar of sulphurated wares. Who can tot up the losses of sleep that makes the limbs sluggish? Such a one will tell how many bronze vessels the hands of the city pound when the moon, cut in two, is beaten by the magic wheel of Colchis. You, Sparsus, know nothing of those things, nor can you know of them, coddled as you are in your Petilian realm, you whose house, built on a levelled terrace, looks down upon the tops of the hills [of Rome], who have country in the town […] and there is deepest slumber and quiet troubled by no tongues, and no day unless deliberately admitted. But I am aroused by the thrusting of the passing throng and Rome is at my bedside. Whenever I’m worn out and weary of this and want to get some sleep, I go to my villa.
Writing the Urbs Roma into text,9 Martial offers his reader in 12.57 a long, characteristically circumstantial account of the various noisy individuals who disturb his sleep, much as 12.59 (only two poems later) is populated with a galaxy of smelly, banausic, unwholesome types – hirsute farmers, weavers, fullers, cobblers, the facially diseased, the lame, the blear-eyed, the practitioners of oral sex – who press so-called social kisses on one recently returned to Rome, or 7.61 is thronged with an army of tradesmen of different kinds who have encroached on Rome’s already crowded thoroughfares.10 The negative tenor of these crowded snapshots is palpable, and yet so is the fascination which this rich urban tapestry holds for the poet, so that it is possible to discern in him – in terms eminently familiar to modern urban dwellers – a kind of love–hate relationship towards the city, at once the wellspring of his inspiration and a source of appalled fascination. Perhaps nowhere in Martial’s corpus is the sense of isolation and alienation which urban living can provoke better captured than in 1.86:
Vicinus meus est manuque tangi
de nostris Novius potest fenestris.
quis non invideat mihi putetque
horis omnibus esse me beatum,
iuncto cui liceat frui sodale?
tam longe est mihi quam Terentianus,
qui nunc Niliacam regit Syenen.
non convivere, non videre saltem,
non audire licet, nec urbe tota
quisquam est tam prope tam proculque nobis.
migrandum est mihi longius vel illi.
vicinus Novio vel inquilinus
sit, si quis Novium videre non vult.
Novius is my neighbour and can be touched by hand from my windows. Who would not envy me and think me happy all the hours of the day, when I can enjoy having my friend so close to me? But he is as far away from me as Terentianus, who is currently governing Syene on the Nile. I cannot dine with him, even see him or hear him, nor in the whole city is there anyone so near to and so distant from me. I must change my lodgings, or he must. If anyone doesn’t want to see Novius, let him be Novius’ neighbour or lodger.
Martial’s focus on the City, then, will resonate with modern readers who either live in, or have experience of, urban life. What other factors make the poet especially worthy of our attention? We would like to isolate three. First, a large number of the epigrams can be shown to be exemplary poetic compositions in their own right – provided they are approached without the prejudice arising from the ancient concept of a hierarchy of genres. Second, Martial is of prime importance as a source for our knowledge of Roman social history in the late first century CE. Of course, a good deal of the information which he relays can be found in other sources too, but Martial presents this in a particularly lively and accessible way. Third, the poet was not only founder of an epigrammatic tradition which has continued to our own time, but he also exercised a profound influence on subsequent poets, both in epigram and other genres as well. To cite John Sullivan:
I judge a classic, not just by his survival but by his literary reverberations. An author of short, generally witty poems who could inspire vernacular writers such as Boileau, Quevedo, Ben Jonson, Herrick and many others in their own work, provide a foundation for the critical theories of Scaliger and Gracian, and prompt a biting defence of his uncensored text by John Donne, surely deserves a place in T. S. Eliot’s Musée imaginaire.11
Martial’s epigrams as poetry
The first of these points – that Martial’s epigrams are worthy of attention for their own sake – will be discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 4, but we give one example here by way of illustration.
10.63 is a mock epitaph for an exemplary Roman matron, using the conventional fiction of a speech from the tomb by the deceased:
Marmora parva quidem sed non cessura, viator,
Mausoli saxis pyramidumque legis.
bis mea Romano spectata est vita Tarento
et nihil extremos perdidit ante rogos:
quinque dedit pueros, totidem mihi Iuno puellas,
cluserunt omnes lumina nostra manus.
contigit et thalami mihi gloria rara fuitque
una pudicitiae mentula nota meae.
The marble you are reading, traveller, is indeed small, but it will not yield to the stones of Mausolus and the Pyramids. My life was approved twice at Roman Tarentos and lost nothing right up to my last hour. Juno gave me five boys and the same number of girls; all their hands closed my eyes. Rare glory of marriage was my lot, and my chastity knew only one prick.
The poem contains many traditional epitaphic features: the initial address to the traveller passing by (tombs were erected along the side of main roads), the contrast between the size of the tomb and the greatness of its occupant,12 the emphasis on the outstanding qualities of the dead person – in this case, the key matronal virtues of fertility and being univira, that is, having had only one husband to whom she was sexually faithful.
Until the last line, the epigram could in theory be read as a straightforward epitaph, though a careful reader would be alerted to the possibility of parody by the consistently hyperbolic and unrealistic details: comparison with the greatest tombs of antiquity; the selection of the woman to represent matronal virtue at the Ludi Saeculares on two occasions (the games, celebrated by Domitian in 88, had last been held 41 years earlier); a large and suspiciously equal number of offspring of each sex; the children all surviving their mother in an age when babies stood at best a one in two chance of reaching adulthood. Although all this lays the ground for the surprise finale, it does not, however, detract from the shocked amusement elicited by the appearance of the obscene mentula (‘prick’) – all the more shocking because the word is incongruously put in the mouth of the matrona herself.
But the epigram is not just a parody of an epitaph for a matrona univira. Martial is also holding up to ridicule the Roman paradigm of the virtuous woman – for whom intercourse should ideally be something she submits to in order to please her husband and produce heirs for his family line – by suggesting that even a paragon of matronal virtues might have an interest in things sexual.
Many of the characteristic features of Martialian epigram are represented in the poem we have just discussed: his trademark surprise ending, the use of hyperbole and of obscenity for comic/satiric effect, his satiric take on conventional Roman moralities, and his manipulation of the conventions of sepulchral epigram in the interests of his own literary priorities.
Martial as a source for Roman social history
In modern studies of everyday reality in ancient Rome, Martial’s works feature prominently among the source materials. The poet himself points to real life as the subject of his epigrams, for instance when he contrasts poetry on mythological themes – ‘the empty frivolities of a wretched sheet’ – with his own work, ‘of which life can say: “it’s mine”’. No mythical monstrosities like Centaurs, Gorgons or Harpies populate Martial’s pages; rather, ‘my page smacks of humankind’ (10.4).
With subject matter taken from all aspects of Roman life and with its wealth of detail, Martial’s poetry might give the impression of being an accurate representation of Rome at the end of the first century CE. Controversy has raged, however, over the extent, if any, to which a poet such as Martial can be taken at face value.13 In employing his epigrams as source material caution is of course necessary, especially in satirical pieces where hyperbole is a tool used for comic effect. For instance, there is a palpable element of exaggeration in the many pieces where doctors are represented as invariably lethal, such as 1.47: ‘Not long ago Diaulus was a doctor; now he’s an undertaker. What he does as an undertaker, he also did as a doctor’; yet at the same time they can still offer evidence for the bad reputation of the profession in antiquity: not surprising in a milieu where practitioners of medicine did not need to have formal qualifications and where sudden, unexplained deaths were not so uncommon.14 Likewise the fantastical description of Cinna’s seven offspring, each of whom bears a striking and embarrassing resemblance to one of his slaves (6.39), may be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of a scenario which must have occasionally occurred in a wealthy household where slaves and owners lived in close quarters.15
One key aspect of Roman society for which Martial is an important source is the patronage system. As was noted earlier, Martial, like most poets, was obliged to seek patrons so that he could devote himself full-time to his poetic pursuits. If we are to believe what he himself tells us, he was relatively successful in this aim, gaining equestrian status and receiving from both Titus and Domitian the ius trium liberorum (the Right of Three Children), whereby he was exempted from the penalties, especially as regards accepting legacies, imposed on the childless by the Augustan marriage laws. He also mentions his house in Rome and a country estate in Nomentum, presumably financed in part by appreciative benefactors. When he eventually retired to Spain it was to a villa provided by a Spanish patroness, Marcella (12.21, 31). Despite this apparent prosperity, however, Martial is accustomed to represent himself as an impoverished client, dependent on the largesse of his many patrons. His Nomentan farm and town house are described as ‘a tiny country estate and a small house in the city’ (9.18.2) – though ownership of any house in Rome, as opposed to apartment-living, was a sign of comparative affluence.
It is debatable whether the equestrian property qualification of 400,000 sesterces in itself ensured a comfortable lifestyle in a very expensive city; but regardless of the poet’s true circumstances, it is clear that his self-image is to some extent, or even entirely, as some argue, a persona based on the traditional poverty of poets, which provides him with a rich supply of material for a variety of epigrams on the patronage system, covering topics such as the reciprocal duties of patrons and clients and the exchange of gifts. Such poems offer valuable insights into the patronage system as an institution.16 They are, for instance, an important source of information about the types of gifts given by patrons to their clients. These might range from items such as silver plate (e.g. 8.71, 10.57, 8.33), a new toga or cloak (e.g. 8.28, 7.36.6), roof tiles (7.36) or a carriage (12.24), to real estate (e.g. 11.18, 12.31) or substantial monetary gifts: in 4.67, for example, a client’s unsuccessful request for 100,000 sesterces to enable him to meet the equestrian property qualification is made the subject of a clever verbal joke (the epigram coincidentally illustrates the considerable rewards which could be gained by the most successful charioteers):
Praetorem pauper centum sestertia Gaurus
orabat cana notus amicitia,
dicebatque suis haec tantum deesse trecentis,
ut posset domino plaudere iustus eques.
praetor ait ‘scis me Scorpo Thalloque daturum,
atque utinam centum milia sola darem.’
ah pudet ingratae, pudet ah male divitis arcae!
quod non vis equiti, vis dare, praetor, equo?
Impoverished Gaurus asked a praetor, to whom he was known as a client of ancient standing, for 100,000 sesterces, and he said that only this amount was lacking to his 300,000 to enable him to applaud our Lord as a legitimate knight. The praetor replied: ‘You know that I am intending to give gifts to Scorpus [a famous charioteer] and Thallus: if only I were giving them just 100,000!’ Shame on the ungrateful coffer, shame on it, wealthy to no good purpose! What you are unwilling to give to a horseman (equiti), are you willing to give to a horse (equo), praetor?
Gaurus’ request is not granted, but we know from Pliny (Ep. 1.19) that wealthy patrons such as himself did in fact make gifts of this kind on occasion, and though Martial elsewhere suggests that such generosity was unusual (5.19.9–10, 14.122), the epigram offers evidence that faithful clients did not think it unreasonable to harbour expectations of a sizeable handout.
Certain rituals and reciprocal duties were integral to the patronage system, for instance the formal greeting of the patron at his house in the early morning (the salutatio), in exchange for which the clients received a sportula (dole) of 100 quadrantes. Martial is one of the primary witnesses to the continuation of the custom into his period, putting on vivid display for us its irksomeness, especially from the viewpoint of the client, who was forced to ‘greet [his patron] shivering with cold at daybreak’ (3.36.3). In one epigram he complains that the client ‘must surmount the steep path up from the Subura and its dirty stones with its constantly wet steps, only with great difficulty managing to break through the long trains of mules and the blocks of marble you see hauled by many a rope’ (5.22.5–8).
Even men of senatorial status, themselves patrons, might in turn court patrons wealthier than themselves. This is illustrated in the following epigram, the theme of which is the complaint that senators, by attending salutationes as clients, impose unfair competition on the comparatively poor equestrians:
Sexagena teras cum limina mane senator,
esse tibi videor desidiosus eques,
quod non a prima discurram luce per urbem
et referam lassus basia mille domum.
sed tu, purpureis ut des nova nomina fastis
aut Nomadum gentes Cappadocumve regas:
at mihi, quem cogis medios abrumpere somnos
et matutinum ferre patique lutum,
quid petitur? rupta cum pes vagus exit aluta
et subitus crassae decidit imber aquae
nec venit ablatis clamatus verna lacernis,
accedit gelidam servus ad auriculam,
et ‘rogat ut secum cenes Laetorius’ inquit.
viginti nummis? non ego: malo famem
quam sit cena mihi, tibi sit provincia merces,
et faciamus idem nec mereamur idem.
Since you, a senator, tread 60 thresholds in the morning, do I, a knight, seem lazy to you because I don’t run here and there from first light all over the city and tired out, bring home a thousand kisses? But you do this in order to give a new name to the purple consul lists or to govern the nations of Numidia or Cappadocia, whereas I, whom you compel to interrupt my sleep halfway through and put up with and suffer the morning mud, what is it that I seek? When my wandering foot comes out of its broken leather shoe and a sudden shower of heavy rain falls down and the slave who went off with my cloak doesn’t come when I shout for him, a servant approaches my poor frozen ear and says: ‘Laetorius invites you to dine with him.’ For 20 sesterces? Not I. I prefer to starve rather than get a dinner for my reward while you get a province, both of us doing the same work but not earning the same pay. (12.29)17
Early rising was a burden for patrons as well as clients, and an epigram, written after Martial had retired to Spain, offers us a rare insight into the patron’s experience of the salutatio:
Matutine cliens, Urbis mihi causa relictae,
atria, si sapias, ambitiosa colas.
non sum ego causidicus nec amaris litibus aptus,
sed piger et senior Pieridumque comes;
otia me somnusque iuvant, quae magna negavit
Roma mihi: redeo, si vigilatur et hic.
Morning client, reason why I left Rome, if you were sensible, you would dance attendance on pretentious halls. I am no advocate nor apt for bitter lawsuits, but lazy and elderly and a companion of the Pierian maids [the Muses]. I am fond of leisure and sleep, which great Rome denied me. If I’m kept awake here too, I go back. (12.68)
Many other areas of everyday reality are illuminated by Martial. He has for instance much to say about the book trade, and we have him to thank for our knowledge of the earliest appearance of books in codex form as opposed to papyrus rolls (1.2, 14.190), or the areas in Rome where bookshops were to be found: for example, he gives directions to booksellers who stock his works: ‘look for Secundus, freedman of learned Lucensis, behind the entrance to the temple of Peace and the Forum of Pallas’ (1.2.7–8) and:
Argi nempe soles subire Letum:
contra Caesaris est forum taberna
scriptis postibus hinc et inde totis,
omnis ut cito perlegas poetas.
illinc me pete. si roges Atrectum –
hoc nomen dominus gerit tabernae –
de primo dabit alterove nido
rasum pumice purpuraque cultum
denaris tibi quinque Martialem.
I’m sure you frequently go down to the Argiletum. Well, opposite the Forum of Caesar there’s a shop with its doorposts covered all over with advertisements, so that you can quickly read through the names of all the poets. Look for me there. If you ask for Atrectus (that’s the name of the shop’s owner), he will give you from the first or second pigeonhole a copy of Martial, shaved with pumice and decorated with purple, for five denarii. (1.117.9–17)
The first of these examples also provides evidence for a former slave (perhaps an amanuensis?) of a lettered owner running his own bookstore after manumission, while the second gives us valuable and rare information about the price charged for a deluxe edition of Martial’s first book of epigrams.
In an age when the concept of copyright was unknown,18 plagiarists were active, and again Martial is one of our major sources, making frequent complaints, such as in the following epigram where the book of poems is represented as a slave whom Martial has set free, only to be re-enslaved by a plagiarist:
Commendo tibi, Quintiane, nostros –
nostros dicere si tamen libellos
possum, quos recitat tuus poeta:
si de servitio gravi queruntur,
assertor venias satisque praestes,
et, cum se dominum vocabit ille,
dicas esse meos manuque missos.
hoc si terque quaterque clamitaris,
impones plagiario pudorem.
Quintianus, I commend to you my little books – if at any rate I can call them mine when your poet friend recites them. If they complain of harsh enslavement, you must come and plead their claim to freedom and give bail as required. And when he calls himself their master, you must say they are mine, manumitted by me. If you keep on shouting this three or four times, you will make the kidnapper feel ashamed. (1.52)
Interestingly, the Latin term translated here as ‘kidnapper’ is plagiarius, i.e. someone who steals another’s slave: a metaphorical usage from which the English ‘plagiarist’ is apparently derived.
Martial’s poems on shows in the amphitheatre, many of them published in a separate book On the Spectacles, are an important witness to some of their more bizarre aspects, such as the re-enactment of myths as a spectacular way of executing criminals.19 Take, for instance, Spect. 6:
Iunctam Pasiphaen Dictaeo credite tauro:
vidimus, accepit fabula prisca fidem.
nec se miretur, Caesar, longaeva vetustas:
quidquid Fama canit, praestat harena tibi.
Believe that Pasiphae was mated with the Cretan bull:20 we have seen it, the old story has won credence. And let not hoary antiquity preen itself, Caesar: whatever Fame sings of, the arena provides for you.
So fantastic is the scenario of a woman mated with a bull that many have taken the poem as a literary conceit rather than a reflection of reality, but given that ‘fatal charades’ are elsewhere described by Martial, it is likely that the poem provides evidence for a staged execution carried out in the arena.21 The case is convincingly argued by Kathleen Coleman, who hypothesises how it might have been done: a female was tied to some sort of trestle with oestrous cows’ urine smeared on her genitals to attract the bull: she either died from the effects of the penetration or was finished off by an executioner with a sword.22
Martial’s books were often published to coincide with the festival of the Saturnalia, held over several days in December.23 It was a time for general enjoyment and licence when gifts (a precursor of modern Christmas presents) were given and many traditional taboos were lifted – such as the ban on gambling and excessive drinking. Social barriers were broken down, even those between masters and slaves, a phenomenon symbolised by the general donning of a type of headwear normally worn by newly manumitted slaves as a mark of liberty. Martial is one of the most important sources for the festival, in several cases our main or sole source, for instance for the custom of discarding the heavy and cumbersome toga – the usual dress for formal occasions – in favour of the synthesis, an outfit consisting of a matching tunic and cloak, normally worn indoors at dinner parties (cf. Mart. 6.24, 11.16.2 with Kay, 14.1.1 with Leary, 14.142). Martial also provides a wealth of information about the type of gifts given at this time of year, e.g. in 7.53 (gifts between patron and client) and throughout Book 14, a series of distichs describing various gifts suitable for presentation at the Saturnalia, for some of which we have no independent evidence, such as a peacock feather used as an expensive fly-swat (67), or slippers with a woollen lining (65).
Often Martial brings alive for us commonplace experiences. For example, the end of the Saturnalia, when the brief freedom from everyday constraints must be (reluctantly) abandoned, is vividly described:
Iam tristis nucibus puer relictis
clamoso revocatur a magistro,
et blando male proditus fritillo,
arcana modo raptus e popina,
aedilem rogat udus aleator.
Now the boy sadly leaves his nuts [used in gambling] and is called back by the clamorous schoolmaster, and the drunken gambler, betrayed by the only too seductive dice box and just now dragged out from a secret tavern, is pleading with the aedile. (5.84.1–5)
Although the physical remains of baths from all over the Roman world have provided us with a great deal of knowledge about these establishments, Martial, in the following piece eulogising the private bathing house of a patron, offers us an insight into the actual experience of the bathers,24 as they enjoyed the beauty of the variously coloured marble, the brightness of the light and the clarity of the water:
Etrusci nisi thermulis lavaris,
illotus morieris, Oppiane.
nullae sic tibi blandientur undae,
non fontes Aponi rudes puellis,
non mollis Sinuessa fervidique
fluctus Passeris aut superbus Anxur,
non Phoebi vada principesque Baiae.
nusquam tam nitidum vacat serenum:
lux ipsa est ibi longior, diesque
nullo tardius a loco recedit.
illic Taygeti virent metalla
et certant vario decore saxa
quae Phryx et Libys altius cecidit,
siccos pinguis onyx anhelat aestus
et flamma tenui calent ophitae.
ritus si placeant tibi Laconum,
contentus potes arido vapore
cruda Virgine Marciave mergi;
quae tam candida, tam serena lucet
ut nullas ibi suspiceris undas
et credas vacuam nitere lygdon.
non attendis et aure me supina
iam dudum quasi neglegenter audis.
illotus morieris, Oppiane.
If you don’t bathe in the warm Baths of Etruscus, you will die unbathed, Oppianus. No waters will charm you so, not the springs of Aponus unexperienced by women nor Sinuessa with its mild climate and the hot waves of Passer or lofty Anxur, nor the waters of Apollo and top-ranking Baiae. Nowhere does the clear sky lie open so brightly. The light itself stays longer there, from no place does the day depart more slowly. There is seen green marble from the quarries of Taygetus and stones which Phrygians and Numidians have cut out from deep in the earth contend in variegated beauty. Rich alabaster breathes dry heat and snakestones are warm with slender flame. Should you like the Laconian style, you can take a hot-air bath to your satisfaction and then plunge into water from the native Virgin or Marcian aqueducts; water which gleams so bright and so clear that you would not suspect there was any water there, and you would think the shining white marble pool was empty.
You’re not paying attention and have been listening all this time with ears unalert, as if you’re not interested. You will die unbathed, Oppianus. (6.42)
Given that Martial set such great store by his popularity and by the acquisition of patrons favourable to his work, it is a reasonable assumption that the attitudes and prejudices betrayed in his poems, either openly or implicitly, would be ones with which the reader could sympathise. The epigrams, therefore, can provide useful insights into the views of the average Roman upper-class male25 on a variety of topics.
The poet’s attitude to slavery, for instance, was conventional, and he thinks nothing of making the beating of a servile cook a subject for humour (8.23). On the other hand, affectionate relationships between owners and young slaves – attested by numerous tomb inscriptions preserved from Rome and elsewhere in the Empire – are amply illustrated in Martial’s funerary epigrams for favourite slaves who have died young, among them one of Martial’s best-known poems, on the five-year-old Erotion.26
Affection for slaves might also have an erotic aspect,27 ranging from an amatory relationship with a favourite boy (e.g. 3.65 to Diadumenus) to more casual encounters with either sex.28 Like most29 Roman slave-owners, Martial did not regard this as sexual exploitation or as morally opprobrious in any way – an attitude arising both from the fact that slaves were the owner’s property and from a conception of slaves as not quite human and thus not subject to normal human standards of morality.
In contrast to the warm feelings which Martial often entertains towards slaves, upwardly mobile ex-slaves are met with uncompromising hostility. It would not be surprising if freedmen who managed to rise in the world were regarded with contempt by members of the upper classes, motivated not merely by snobbery but often by jealousy that the wealth attained by such freedmen surpassed their own. A good illustration of this is the following epigram on a slave who started as a cobbler and ended up heir to his former master’s estate:
Dentibus antiquas solitus producere pelles
et mordere luto putre vetusque solum,
Praenestina tenes decepti regna patroni,
in quibus indignor si tibi cella fuit;
rumpis et ardenti madidus crystalla Falerno
et pruris domini cum Ganymede tui.
at me litterulas stulti docuere parentes;
quid cum grammaticis rhetoribusque mihi?
frange leves calamos et scinde, Thalia, libellos,
si dare sutori calceus ista potest.
You who used to stretch ancient hides with your teeth and bite on a shoe sole, rotten with mud and old, now possess the Praenestine realms of your one-time master who was deceived in you: it seems to me an outrage if you had even a tiny room in the place. In a drunken state you break crystal cups with hot Falernian wine and satisfy your lust with your master’s Ganymede. But my parents stupidly taught me my ABC. What use to me are teachers of grammar and rhetoric? Break your fragile pens and tear up your little books, Thalia, if a shoe can give all those things to a cobbler. (9.73)
Although such a scenario should represent a success story (a slave who started out as a cobbler, progressed to become manager of his master’s shoe-making business and eventually inherited the estate), for Martial the man remains a humble cobbler – the most banausic of trades – and as such is unworthy of his current affluence and status. To bring out his disdain, the poet depicts the man in unflattering terms: his previous occupation is described in the most degrading fashion, while his present enviable lifestyle, symbolised by the attractive boy-slave and the expensive wine and dinnerware, is presented in wholly negative terms – he is too drunk, or ignorant, to avoid putting warm wine in fragile crystal vessels, he ‘satisfies his lust with his master’s Ganymede’.30
The series of epigrams attacking the freedman Zoilus – Martial’s most developed character – is grounded in common prejudices about parvenus: Zoilus likes to show off his wealth (e.g. 2.16, 5.79); as dinner-party host he is both bad-mannered (e.g. 3.82) and stingy towards his guests (e.g. 2.19); his propensity for oral sex brands him to a Roman as effeminate (e.g. 2.42, 3.82, 6.91, 11.85).31
Sexual mores in general are a common theme in the epigrams, offering a vivid illustration of what behaviours were regarded as acceptable and what were thought depraved or shameful. Although the apparent preference of the poet for youths over women has led scholars to speculate about Martial’s sexual habits,32 it is clear that such relationships, if not perhaps the preferred practice of the majority, were not in themselves considered abnormal or reprehensible – provided that the youth in question was of slave status.33 That good-looking young male slaves were found attractive by mature males is shown by their employment as wine waiters (cf. 11.56.11–12: ‘[let] a boy sleep with you who just now tormented the guests with his rosy countenance while mixing the Caecuban wine’). This is also demonstrated in the following epigram, in which the scenario is used as the basis of a clever joke, coming, typically, in the last line. The poem also illustrates the way Martial employs mythology, using well-known characters to represent types (e.g. Hercules and Hylas encapsulate the paederastic relationship, while ‘Phineuses and Oedipuses’ stand for blind men).
Dantem vina tuum quotiens aspeximus Hyllum,
lumine nos, Afer, turbidiore notas.
quod, rogo, quod scelus est mollem spectare ministrum?
aspicimus solem, sidera, templa, deos.
avertam vultus, tamquam mihi pocula Gorgon
porrigat, atque oculos oraque nostra tegam?
trux erat Alcides, et Hylan spectare licebat;
ludere Mercurio cum Ganymede licet.
si non vis teneros spectet conviva ministros,
Phineas invites, Afer, et Oedipodas.
Whenever I watch your Hyllus as he serves the wine, you mark me out, Afer, with a rather troubled glance. What crime is it, what crime, I ask you, to look at a girlish page? We look upon the sun, the stars, temples, gods. Should I turn away my gaze as though the Gorgon were offering me a cup, and cover my eyes and face? Hercules was fierce, yet people were allowed to look at Hylas. Mercury is allowed to play with Ganymede. If you don’t want guests to look at tender pages, Afer, I suggest you invite Phineuses and Oedipuses. (9.25)
In attacking old women, especially those who are sexually active, Martial is following a well-established literary tradition, but also reflecting a widespread attitude that sex should be a dead letter for women of a certain age.34 The most striking instance is a lengthy epigram (3.93) on Vetustilla (‘Cronelette’) who, despite her years, intends to remarry after ‘burying 200 husbands’. The ridicule in this case is effected by an over-the-top description of the woman’s physical characteristics, among them three hairs, a forehead ‘more wrinkled than a draped robe’, breasts like spiders’ webs, a mouth which makes a crocodile’s look narrow, the ‘rump of a skinny duck’ and a ‘bony cunt’.
In general, the (to our mind) callous tendency of the Romans to laugh at physical deficiencies35 is illustrated in Martial’s many pieces where such failings become the basis for a joke, as in the following:
Si memini, fuerant tibi quattuor, Aelia, dentes:
expulit una duos tussis et una duos.
iam secura potes totis tussire diebus:
nil istic quod agat tertia tussis habet.
If I remember rightly, you had four teeth, Aelia. One cough expelled two, and one cough another two. Now you can cough all day long without worry: a third cough has nothing more that it can do there. (1.19)36
Baldness is a common butt, for example in this fantastical epigram on Labienus, whose combination of a bald pate and a rich growth of tufts on either side makes him appear to have three heads, like one of Hercules’ victims, the monster Geryon:
Vidissem modo forte cum sedentem
solum te, Labiene, tres putavi.
calvae me numerus tuae fefellit:
sunt illinc tibi, sunt et hinc capilli
quales vel puerum decere possint;
nudum est in medio caput nec ullus
in longa pilus area notatur.
hic error tibi profuit Decembri,
tunc cum prandia misit Imperator:
cum panariolis tribus redisti.
talem Geryonen fuisse credo.
vites censeo porticum Philippi:
si te viderit Hercules, peristi.
When recently I happened to see you sitting alone, Labienus, I thought there were three of you. The plurality of your bald head tricked me. On one side and on the other you have locks such as might suit even a boy, but in the middle your head is bare and not a single hair can be observed in the long space between. This illusion was profitable for you in December, at the time when the emperor sent lunches; you came back with three bread baskets. I expect Geryon was like you. I advise you to avoid the colonnade of Philippus; if Hercules sees you, you’re done for. (5.49)
In Rome most people went out to take a bath, either in the large public Thermae or smaller private establishments; bathing in the nude was the norm. Consequently it was difficult to hide even the most intimate bodily defects, and Martial’s poems reflect the mockery to which bathers might be subjected:
Derisor Fabianus hirnearum,
omnes quem modo colei timebant
dicentem tumidas in hydrocelas
quantum nec duo dicerent Catulli,
in thermis subito Neronianis
vidit se miser et tacere coepit.
Fabianus, mocker of hernias, whom lately all balls feared as he spoke out against swollen ruptures more fluently than two Catulluses could have done, suddenly saw himself in Nero’s baths, poor man, and fell silent. (12.83)
In this epigram the humour depends not just on a physical deformity per se, but on the poetic justice involved in Fabianus being afflicted with the very defect he is accustomed to ridicule. In many epigrams of this type, in fact, a bodily fault is not the sole focus of the attack. It is frequently allied to a moral flaw, reflecting the common ancient perception of physical failings as the outward manifestation of moral ones.37 The following epigram, on Martial’s bête noire Zoilus, encapsulates the idea:
Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine laesus,
rem magnam praestas, Zoile, si bonus es.
Red-haired, dark in complexion, short of foot and deformed of eye, it’s quite an achievement, Zoilus, if you are a good person. (12.54)38
Martial’s place in the epigrammatic tradition
When Martial described his poems as epigrammata in the preface to the first book, he was applying to them a term which had previously been used by Roman writers to refer mainly to verse epitaphs, or was one of several names given to short, light compositions.39 By publishing collections of these epigrammata in the form of books, the poet established the place of the epigram in the canon of Roman poetic genres.
Epigram had a long pedigree, going back to the earliest period of Greek literature. In order to isolate the features which characterise Martial’s poetry and set it apart from its predecessors, we must look briefly at the tradition which he inherited and adapted, both Greek and Roman.
The term epigram literally refers to an inscription on some physical object or monument. The first examples of such inscriptions date to the eighth century BCE. From an early stage these tended to be in verse: by the fifth century (perhaps earlier)40 the elegiac couplet had become established as the metre of choice for Greek epigram, which at this stage is largely epitaphic in content. By the fourth century epigram had attained a de facto existence as an independent literary form. In the Hellenistic period (roughly 323–30 BCE) and that immediately following, epigram undergoes a major transformation: above all, its thematic repertoire is enormously expanded and it becomes primarily literary in the sense that it loses much of its connection with real people or events, instead dealing for the most part with invented occurrences or personages. Both developments are visible in our huge body of epigrams from this period, represented mainly by two collections by diverse hands entitled, after their respective compilers, the Garland of Meleager (published probably in the 90s BCE) and the Garland of Philip (issued around 40 CE). The two Garlands form the core of our major surviving corpus of Greek literary epigram, which comprises the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies, assembled by Byzantine scholars, whose division of these into 16 books according to subject matter – sepulchral, dedicatory, epideictic, sympotic, heterosexual, paederastic, and so on – reflects the new-found diversity and enormous range of epigram from the time of the two Garlands and later periods as well.
Epigram as conceived by Martial has only a limited connection with Greek epigram of the era covered by the Garlands, with two exceptions: (1) the appearance of a courtly or epideictic41 strain involving, among other things, panegyric of members of the imperial household (as in the case of Crinagoras: floruit under Augustus), and (2) the beginnings of a debate about the proper length of an epigram.
In the second half of the first century CE, however, two writers of Greek epigram, Loukillios and Nicarchus,42 introduced a new development – the satiric epigram – which was to have a profound influence on Martial, even though he was loath to admit it in his anxiety to represent his epigram as thoroughly Roman in genesis.43
Although it is generally agreed that Loukillios is by no means Martial’s equal, he does anticipate the Roman poet in a number of respects. These include: the targeting of stock types – the incompetent physician, the miser, the laughably unsuccessful athlete, and so on; hyperbole that can tip over into absurdism;44 a taste for the ‘humour of wretchedness’,45 especially destitution; above all, the employment, on occasion, of the surprise or paradoxical ending,46 a constant in Martial’s oeuvre. Importantly, there are significant thematic overlaps between Loukillios and Martial and a number of instances where Martial has imitated and creatively adapted a Loukillian original, such as the following pair of epigrams, attacking an incompetent physician, which offer a good example both of Martial’s creative use of sources and of his superior technique.47 In the first, Loukillios describes a doctor, Hermogenes, who is so deadly that merely dreaming of him produces fatal results: ‘Hermogenes the doctor was seen by Diophantus while dreaming. He never woke up, even though he was wearing an amulet’ (AP 11.257).
Martial’s adaptation reads:
Lotus nobiscum est, hilaris cenavit, et idem
inventus mane est mortuus Andragoras.
tam subitae mortis causam, Faustine, requiris?
in somnis medicum viderat Hermocraten.
Andragoras took a bath with us, dined in good spirits and yet was found dead next morning. Do you ask the cause of such a sudden death, Faustinus? In his dreams he had seen Hermocrates the doctor. (6.53)
Martial has taken over from Loukillios’ physician a similar, Greek, name. But a number of details have been added which greatly enrich the poem and place the incident in a specifically Roman setting: Andragoras is a fellow bather and banqueter of the speaker; a third friend, Faustinus, is introduced as an interested interlocutor; a vivid contrast is drawn between the victim’s healthy conviviality of the previous night and his condition the next morning. The piece also illustrates the perfecting of a satiric technique which has come to encapsulate not just Martial’s own poetry, but epigram as a genre. The poem begins with a statement of a situation, involving a paradoxical, sudden change of fortune: Andragoras was fit and happy in the evening, and yet dead only a few hours later. The poet then introduces an addressee, who is imagined as asking the reason for this paradox. The question is answered in the final line, which involves a surprise ending, the witty point of which is left to the reader to decipher and appreciate.
Nicarchus ploughs the same thematic–satiric furrow as Loukillios, but with one significant addition, the incorporation of a good deal of explicit sexual comedy – a clear overlap with Martial. At the same time there is an important difference in the way in which the two exploit this subject matter. The difference is conveniently exemplified by AP 11.328, on a ménage à quatre involving the triple penetration of an elderly woman by three men. Each of the woman’s orifices is described in terms drawn parodically from a variety of Homeric passages, as in the following lines on the woman’s anus (ll. 5–8): ‘but Hermogenes got a loathsome dank dwelling, the furthest spot, passing down into an unseen place, where are the shores of the dead, and breeze-stirred wild figs are tossed by the blast of ill-sounding winds.’ This pattern of circumlocution is typical of Nicarchus’ sexual pieces. In stark contrast, Martial is free with primary obscenities such as futuo (‘fuck’) and cunnus (‘cunt’) and this, as we shall see, is a decidedly Roman trait.
As mentioned earlier, Martial represents his poetry as the product of a purely Roman tradition, repeatedly invoking Roman poets, above all Catullus, as his models in the epigrammatic genre.48 Particularly revealing here is the programmatic preface to Epigrams 1, in which two key arguments are advanced: (1) Martial’s poems, while scoptic, do not involve attacks on real personages, (2) his incorporation of obscenity is defended by Roman literary precedent and Roman popular taste. In developing the first point he notes by contrast the practice of ‘writers of old’, who assailed ‘not only real names, but even great ones’. As commentators note, by ‘writers of old’ Martial has in mind Roman, not Greek, poets, such as Lucilius, the inventor of satire,49 and writers of epigram like Marsus and Catullus, all of whom engaged in invective against living, sometimes great personages.50 Hence Martial is placing his work firmly in a native tradition of satirico-epigrammatic attacks on individual targets, though in fact, by attacking fictitious/stock types, instead of real persons, he is closer to the practice of Loukillios and Nicarchus. Second, in defending the lasciva verborum veritas, ‘the naughty/playful frankness of his vocabulary’, Martial makes explicit allusion to the characteristic use of obscenity in the Roman tradition, invoking a cluster of Roman precedents: ‘that is how Catullus writes, and Marsus, and Pedo, and Gaetulicus and anyone who is read right through’.
The scanty remains of Marsus, Pedo and Gaetulicus do not allow us to evaluate the extent of Martial’s debt to these epigrammatic predecessors.51 The situation is quite different with Catullus, whose literary inheritor Martial several times declares himself (notably at 10.78.16, where he says to Macer ‘rank me below Catullus only’), and his indebtedness to whom52 he proclaims by multiple unmistakable adaptations of Catullan originals,53 not to mention his creative use of Catullan names.54 But the Catullan imprint extends well beyond this: it is from Catullus that Martial derives his claim that the obscenity of his verse in no way reflects his own morals (1.4.8: ‘my page is wanton, but my life is virtuous’),55 likewise the ironically self-depreciatory categorisation of his epigrams as nugae, ‘trifles’ and the like. Martial borrows certain features of the Catullan idiolect such as bellus, ‘pretty/fashionable’, or requiris?, ‘do you ask?’, introducing a conundrum. His three main metres (elegiacs, hendecasyllabics and scazons or limping iambics) are the same as those used by Catullus in his short poems. Equally Catullan in flavour are Martial’s liveliness of treatment and sardonic tones, his occasionality, his keying of the poems to the rhythm of city life, his aggressive foregrounding of his likes and dislikes, his overturning of traditional generic hierarchies and, as noted, his obscenity.56
We have focused on the similarities between Martial and Catullus, but the differences are of greater importance in evaluating Martial’s position as founder of the genre of epigram as we know it. First, unlike Catullus, whose published work comprises both short poems in various metres and longer pieces, including an epyllion (a miniature epic in hexameters), Martial issued collections of short or relatively short poems,57 which he called books of epigrams. He included a much greater diversity of topics than had Catullus, many taking their inspiration from the subjects of Greek epigram (though with a specifically Roman focus), in particular epideictic pieces and panegyric for the emperor and other patrons. He directed satiric attacks at fictitious individuals, often representing character types, in the manner of Lukillios and Nicarchus. More than anything else, however, he established a form of epigram characterised by a witty pointed ending, and though by no means all of his poems fit the pattern, it was this typically Martialian epigram which became the paradigm for the later tradition. The above features, particularly the last, will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 3.
Obstacles to the Understanding and Appreciation of Martial
FOR NON-ROMAN READERS, a number of obstacles have stood in the way of appreciating Martial’s work. Since knowledge is assumed of contemporary Roman social practice, a full understanding of many epigrams has only been possible in recent years when the study of social history has taken off. In addition, over the centuries and up to the present day Martial has been taken to task, often severely, for aspects of his epigrammatic oeuvre deemed offensive to good taste and morality. Chief among the criticisms1 levelled are: gross adulation of the ‘bad’ emperor Domitian; a stridently voiced attitude of materialism and mendicancy; obscenity of language and subject matter. Each of these criticisms is in its own way misconceived. All, however, are vitiated alike by a failure to take into account the dynamics of the society which gave these features birth. We will deal with these in turn.
Lack of knowledge of social history
Although, as we saw in Chapter 1, Martial’s poetry is an important source for our knowledge of Roman society, this has, paradoxically, created barriers for the reader. In this respect, in the twenty-first century we are in a much happier position than our counterparts of 40 or so years ago, thanks both to the recent flood of sophisticated publications on every conceivable topic related to the everyday life of Rome (the amphitheatre, the baths, sexuality, women, slavery, patronage, and so on) and to the appearance of commentaries on Martial’s work which have utilised these publications in order to come to a better understanding of the epigrams.
A few examples will illustrate how appreciation of Martial has benefited from research into social history. The following typically Martialian satiric couplet (3.89) looks relatively straightforward:
Try lettuces and try softening mallows,
for you have the face, Phoebus, of a man shitting hard matter.
In the late nineteenth century, Friedländer (1886) explained why Phoebus is advised to eat lettuce by referring to Martial 11.52.5–6 (‘lettuce useful for moving the bowels’); he also compared Suetonius’ description of the emperor Vespasian as one who had ‘the countenance of someone straining at stool’. But greater light is cast on the circumstances from which this epigram arose by more recent research, which has shown how the majority of Romans, having no private facilities, resorted to public latrines for purposes of defecation (there were jars at the side of the road for use as urinals). In these places, which might contain as many as 60 adjacent stone seats, there was no privacy whatsoever.2 For those unfortunates suffering from constipation, their facial expressions would be on full view and, we might surmise, subject to ridicule. Martial, then, is exploiting for humorous purposes a sight which would have been all too familiar to his readers.
A pair of epigrams (3.56 and 3.57) focus on Ravenna, a seaside town known for its lack of fresh drinking water, which consequently was expensive to obtain. The first of these poems comments wittily on this situation: ‘I’d prefer to have a cistern at Ravenna than a vineyard, since I could sell water at a far higher price.’ Here is the second piece: ‘The other day a crafty innkeeper at Ravenna put one over on me. When I asked for a mixture of wine and water, he sold me neat wine.’ Of the earlier commentators, Friedländer is silent, while Paley and Stone (1875) regard the epigram as simply repeating the subject matter of the former. Thanks to more recent publications on drinking customs and inns,3 we are now well placed to understand the poem, the main point of which is somewhat different from its companion piece. Romans customarily drank their wine mixed with water, but unscrupulous innkeepers added too great a proportion of water; in this case, due to the unusual topography of Ravenna whereby it is water that is costly rather than wine, the innkeeper does the opposite. Thus Martial, by reversing a well-known scenario, offers in the second epigram an elegantly humorous variation on the theme of the first.
7.67 is an attack on a female homosexual, Philaenis:
Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis
et tentigine saevior mariti
undenas dolat in die puellas.
harpasto quoque subligata ludit
et flavescit haphe, gravesque draucis
halteras facili rotat lacerto,
et putri lutulenta de palaestra
uncti verbere vapulat magistri:
nec cenat prius aut recumbit ante
quam septem vomuit meros deunces;
ad quos fas sibi tunc putat redire,
cum coloephia sedecim comedit.
post haec omnia cum libidinatur,
non fellat – putat hoc parum virile –
sed plane medias vorat puellas.
di mentem tibi dent tuam, Philaeni,
cunnum lingere quae putas virile.
Lesbian Philaenis buggers boys and, even more fierce than a husband’s lust, bangs 11 girls a day. She also plays with the hand-ball wearing only her knickers and gets yellow with sand, and with effortless arm rotates weights that would be heavy even for strongmen, and muddy from the crumbly wrestling floor she is pounded by the blows of the oiled trainer, nor does she dine or recline for dinner until she has vomited six pints of neat wine, to which she thinks she can decently return when she has eaten 16 collops.4 When after all this she gets down to sex, she does not suck men (she thinks that not manly enough), but simply devours girls’ middles. May the gods give you your present mind, Philaenis, who think it manly to lick a cunt.
The epigram testifies to negative attitudes to female homoeroticism and the portrayal of such women as ‘butch’: thus Philaenis is shown aping behaviour normally (in Rome) associated with males, both in the sexual sphere and in respect to her athletic pursuits and dining habits.5 At the same time, however, a full understanding of what Martial is about is only gained through modern studies of Roman sexuality. These, for instance, have demonstrated that the Romans attached less importance to the biological sex of partners than to whether one took the active role (thought of as ‘masculine’ as well as appropriate to those of higher social status) or the passive/submissive one (‘feminine’/servile).6 This explains why Philaenis is depicted as masculine (she adopts a dominant role) and also why she has relationships with young male slaves (pueros), over whom she is both sexually and socially dominant. Similarly, according to the Roman way of thinking, both types of oral sex, which involved serving the needs of the partner, were ‘passive’ activities – hence the slur against Philaenis for regarding cunnilingus as ‘manly’ and thus suitable for herself.7
Martial’s flattery of Domitian
While there is no denying that hyperbolic praise such as Martial directs towards Domitian is alien to modern sensibilities,8 there are mitigating factors at work, and it is important to view the issue in its broad historical context. It has often been thought peculiarly repugnant that Martial should have showered praises upon Domitian of all emperors. But, as a number of important revisionary studies have suggested, it is far from clear that Domitian was anything like as bad as the historical record asserts.9 Here it is vital to note that our two most hostile sources, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, in view of the fact that their careers had prospered mightily under Domitian, had a vested interest in blackening the memory of the emperor following his assassination, in order both to occlude their complicity in his regime and to recommend themselves to the new Trajanic one. Also important are the pragmatics of Martial’s situation. As he constantly reminds us, literary men (unless independently wealthy like his friend Arruntius Stella) were dependent upon patronage for material support (more on this below); and the best source of such largesse was the emperor, whose interests were certainly served by Martial’s encomia. For the traffic was by no means one-way. Martial regularly boasts of his capacity to bestow everlasting fame on individuals and on two occasions, once implicitly,10 twice explicitly,11 states that he contributes in no small measure to Domitian’s repute. But, leaving aside the pecuniary dimensions and the (to the Romans) satisfying reciprocity of such an arrangement, there appears to have been something of an imperative for writers of both poetry and prose to heap praises on whatever emperor happened to be in power. At all events, it is striking that in Books 10 and 12, issued after Domitian’s death, Martial felt it incumbent upon him to praise Trajan,12 although he enjoyed no personal connection with that ruler, as he had with his predecessors Domitian and Nerva. Significant here will have been ‘indirect direction’,13 that is, a tacit understanding that certain encomiastic themes, such as the assimilation of an emperor to Jupiter, would prove congenial to the ruling dynasty, creating a powerful if oblique encouragement to write in such terms.
It has caused particular umbrage that, after showering Domitian with the most extravagant praises, Martial recanted after the latter’s death, notably in 10.72, the implied addressee of which is the new princeps Trajan: it begins ‘Flatteries, you come to me to no avail, wretched creatures with your shameless lips. I am not about to speak of “Lord and God” [allegedly the mode of address required by Domitian].14 There is no place for you any more in this city.’ It then continues ‘there is no lord here, but a commander-in-chief and the most just of all senators […] under this prince, Rome, beware, if you are wise, of using the language you formerly employed.’15 The inversion of Martial’s previous attitude towards Domitian has led to accusations of opportunism, hypocrisy and insincerity. But quite apart from the fact that ‘the best way to praise a living emperor was through criticism of his predecessors’ (Plin. Pan. 53.6), it is altogether misleading to invoke issues of sincerity and insincerity in connection with imperial praise and dispraise. Rather, one should talk of ‘non-sincerity’, in a context where both audience and honorand were well aware that what was being said was less than the truth,16 but colluded in the process, in order to enjoy the virtuosity of well-turned compliments.17 That Roman audiences relished encomium (and its opposite, dispraise) is verified for us by Quintilian.18 Nor would Martial, who sets very great store by the entertainment of his readers, have included such a wealth of imperial panegyric in his work, had he not sensed that it would find a receptive ear. Here it is vital to note in addition a particular stratagem adopted by Martial in eulogising Domitian, one that commends itself to modern readers as it will have done to ancient ones: that is, the blending or leavening of imperial panegyric with substantial dashes of wit, a technique which Martial used from the outset in addressing Domitian, and the subject of an important book-length study by Sven Lorenz.19 We will return to this subject in Chapter 4.
It is surely because Domitian is one of the canonically ‘bad’ Roman emperors that Martial’s praise of him has seemed so objectionable. An epigram such as 9.3, hypothesising that if Domitian claimed back from the Olympians all that he has expended on building and restoring their temples, the gods would be reduced to bankruptcy, while humorous in picturing the celestial coffers emptied of money, can easily seem to modern readers both oleaginous and fantastical. Yet hyperbole, no matter how extreme, was the order of the day in Roman imperial panegyric,20 and there is little in Martial’s eulogising of Domitian that cannot readily be paralleled elsewhere. Nonetheless, the sheer extravagance of the praise heaped upon Domitian has caused such disquiet in some quarters that a school of criticism has grown up whereby what can easily appear to moderns as intolerable in its panegyrical excess is construed as too good to be true and hence an implicit invitation to incredulous dissent on the part of Domitian’s subjects, or as encoding a subversive message directed against the notional honorand.21 In our opinion there is not much to be said for this approach,22 and it has been subject to fierce attack in numerous quarters.23 It is in fact salutary to compare what Pliny says in the Panegyricus of the ‘excellent’ Trajan with what Martial has to say of his despised predecessor. To select a few instances among many, Trajan is compared to Hercules by Pliny (Pan. 14.5, 82.7), as is Domitian by Martial (9.64–5, 101);24 Trajan is assured of the love of his people for him (Pan. 55.11, 68.5): similar assurances are proffered to Domitian by Martial (8.11.7–8, 8.56, 9.7.9–10). Both Pliny and Martial wish for a long life for their respective emperors (Pan. 28.6, Mart. 4.1, 8.2, 8.39), and both claim to have reined in their praises lest the emperor’s modesty be affronted (Pan. 3.2, Mart. 8 praef.).25
But the supposed excesses of Martial’s adulation of Domitian are best put in context if we set his clever and sophisticated treatment of Domitian’s arrival home from his Sarmatian campaign (8.8, 8.11, 8.15, 8.2126) side by side with Pliny’s account of Trajan’s entry to Rome, having succeeded his adoptive father Nerva as emperor while serving in Pannonia and Moesia. As an egregious example of unabashed and undiluted sycophancy, devoid of the wit and rhetorical panache with which Martial enlivens his panegyric poems, the latter deserves to be quoted in full:
And first of all, what a day was it on which, long expected and so desired, you entered your city! Further, the very mode of your entry – how miraculous and how delightful! Your predecessors made it their practice to be borne or carried in, I do not say on a chariot drawn by four white horses [i.e. a triumphal chariot], but on the shoulders of men, something more arrogant still. But you, raised above and towering over everyone else merely by virtue of your tallness, conducted a triumph, so to speak, not over our humiliation, but over the arrogance of other emperors. Consequently, no one was held back by age, ill health or their sex from glutting their vision with the unaccustomed spectacle. You little children got to know, young men pointed you out, old men looked on you in admiration, even sick persons, ignoring the orders of their doctors, crept forth to catch sight of you, as if this would restore them to life and health. Then others said that that they had lived long enough now that they had seen you safely home; others again declared that this was a reason to live longer. As for the women, these felt the greatest possible pleasure in their fecundity upon seeing for what a prince they had borne citizens, and for what a general soldiers. One could see rooftops packed and tottering [under the weight of spectators], not even those locations empty of viewers, which provided at best an unstable platform for one standing on tiptoe, streets packed on all sides, leaving only a narrow thoroughfare for you, an excited populace on this side and that, everywhere equal rejoicing and identical shouts of acclamation. The universal joy which was felt by all at your coming was matched only by the fact that you were coming for all. Still, this joy itself grew as you moved forward, and increased almost with every step you made.
(Plin. Pan. 22)
In terms of its totalising hyperbole, self-abasing unctuousness and rhetorical excesses this is quite as capable of setting the teeth on edge as anything that Martial penned in his most extreme panegyrical vein. More than anything, a passage such as this affirms the accuracy of Kathleen Coleman’s verdict that under Trajan, self-styled optimus princeps (who in fact reaffirmed and extended the autocratic tendencies of Domitian27) ‘the atmosphere of sycophantic adulation of the emperor is, if anything, intensified’.28
Martial’s materialism
‘No other poet in Graeco-Roman Antiquity talks so often and so openly about the exchange of money, goods, and services as does Martial,’29 provoking charges that the poet was nothing but a shameless mendicant.30 There is no denying the veracity of the words just quoted, but they need to be contextualised and nuanced. Roman society operated on the principle of patronage, or, to put it another way, a social contract, whereby those who wielded power, wealth and influence dispensed pecuniary and material benefits to their inferiors (clients) in exchange for a range of services which involved dancing attendance on their betters: most notably in the shape of the morning salutatio or levee, the disagreeable, frequently humiliating nature of which gave rise to numerous complaints by Martial. The patronage system was predicated on the notion of reciprocity, the mutual interchange of benefits. Now the poet as client was in a special position, in that he could bestow on his patrons what no other kind of client could: fame and distinction. That Martial not unreasonably expected tangible rewards in return for this is an idea which underpins his many epigrams on the ungratefulness or stinginess of patrons; it is articulated with particular clarity in 5.36: ‘a certain person who was praised in my little book, Faustinus, plays the innocent, as though he owes me nothing. He has cheated me.’ As noted above, it was best of all if such emolument came from the emperor himself: Martial duly petitions Domitian, more or less subtly, on a number of occasions for financial or related assistance,31 and several times remarks on Domitian’s gift of the ius trium liberorum, ‘Right of Three Children’, with its honorific and pecuniary advantages. And in what is surely intended as a risible effect of crass materialism, he in 8.55 reductively and simplistically equates the bestowal of imperial largesse with the creation of great works of poetry, a sentiment encapsulated in words supposedly spoken to Virgil by Augustus’ minister Maecenas: ‘take riches and be greatest of poets’ (l. 11).
Critics have taken umbrage at what was still being described recently as ‘blatant mendicancy’ and mercenary attitudes.32 But a defence can be mounted. It assumes several forms. In the first place, while Martial is highly vocal on the subject of his meagre resources and the ever-pressing need to prop up his finances, he had as poet to operate within the parameters of the only system available to him, and this was, as implied, a system which set enormous store by the reciprocation of benefits.33 In that sense he had a perfect right to complain if the recipients of his services as client, in whatever shape and form, failed in their duty of dispensing matching benefits. But there is far more to the matter than this. One way of unpacking Martial’s harping on the subject of money and gifts is, with Spisak, to see him as offering a serious critique of the failings of the patronage system as it currently operated. Certainly epigrams such as 5.19 (the only shortcoming of Domitian’s regime is that poor men cultivate patrons whose gifts to them are miserly) and 12.36 (as patron ‘Labullus’ is merely the best of a bad lot) lend themselves to such an analysis, in that they do seem to articulate a genuine sense of grievance at the shortcomings of contemporary patrons, particularly when it comes to the support of literary figures such as himself. A more promising tack in our opinion, however, is to regard Martial as using the real or imagined deficiencies of the patronage system as a vehicle for satirical humour, a case of ridentem dicere verum, ‘telling the truth while laughing about it’. Take for example 7.16: ‘there’s no money at home. The only solution left to me is this, Regulus – to sell your presents. Do you feel like buying?’ This combines a roundabout plea for financial assistance from Martial’s (exceedingly wealthy) patron Regulus with the implied complaint that the stinginess of other patrons has reduced Martial to a state of destitution, leading to the ridiculous suggestion that Regulus – who scarcely needed them – can rescue the situation by buying back the presents which he has previously given the poet: a deliberately gross distortion of the philosophy of interchange which governed patron–client relationships.
One further instance of a witty complaint against the selfishness and stinginess of patrons, 10.29, which ends with Martial’s trademark obscenity, may be allowed to speak for itself:
Quam mihi mittebas Saturni tempore lancem,
misisti dominae, Sextiliane, tuae;
et quam donabas dictis a Marte Kalendis,
de nostra prasina est synthesis empta toga.
iam constare tibi gratis coepere puellae:
muneribus futuis, Sextiliane, meis.
The dish you used to send me at the Saturnalia, you sent to your mistress, Sextilianus, and the green dinner outfit you gave her on the Kalends named after Mars was bought out of my toga. Girls have now started to cost you nothing. You fuck, Sextilianus, at the expense of my presents.
To take Martial too seriously when he complains of paupertas or even, as in 7.16, of utter penury, or rails against the patronal Scrooges of his day, is not only to ignore his status as a Roman knight, with its property qualification of 400,000 sesterces34 and his ownership (at least in later years) of a town house and an estate at Nomentum, but, worse, to violate the textuality of the Epigrams or, to put it another way, to fall into the trap of biographical literalism. For the speaking ‘I’ of the poems is by no means to be identified tout court with the historical figure of the poet, but is a shifting, kaleidoscopic creation which avails itself opportunistically of a whole treasury of conventional literary poses: not least of which is the typical impoverishment of poets. Thus the Homer of the Greek biographies led a wandering and mendicant existence, already in the seventh century BCE Hipponax portrayed himself as a starveling, while Theognis (sixth century BCE) in turn complains of the loss of standing attendant on lack of money. And the pattern continues through Callimachus all the way to the Roman poets Horace, Propertius and Ovid and of course Catullus, whose famous complaint that his ‘little money bag is full – of cobwebs’35 comes from a poem, c.13, which of all Catullan pieces is the one most frequently imitated by Martial. While there may be a kernel of truth in Martial’s repeated complaint that his age lacks any equivalent of the great literary patrons of old, Maecenases, the Pisos and the like, the patronage theme above all provides a canvas on which to inscribe amusing and sophisticated expositions of the conventional theme of poets’ impoverishment.
A good example of the continuity of the theme of the literary man’s lack of means and its attendant comic possibilities involves the subject of the freezing poet, his need for a warm cloak and the request from an authority figure for the same. Hipponax in particular is vocal on the subject:
Hermes, dear Hermes, son of Maia, Cyllenian, I pray to you, for I am shivering exceedingly and terribly and my teeth are chattering […] give a cloak to Hipponax and a tunic and sandals and felt shoes and 60 staters of gold on the other side36 (fr. 32 W.)
returning to the subject in fr. 34:
For you have not yet given me a thick cloak to protect against the cold in winter time, nor have you covered my feet with thick felt shoes, so that they do not break out in chilblains
before adding for good measure:
Wealth – for he is exceedingly blind – has never come to my house and said ‘Hipponax, I give you 30 minas of silver and much else besides’. (fr. 36)
While worn or inadequate clothing is admittedly a well-established symbol of impoverishment in classical literature,37 it is hard not to see resemblances of theme and ethos between Hipponax here and Martial’s various pieces on his ‘chilly cloak’ or ‘snowy’ toga (viz. snow-white, and no defence against the cold) and the sufferings which the winter cold in consequence causes him (literary winters are always freezing).38 What particularly connects the two is the poets’ self-ironising accounts of their physical discomforts, the amusingly overdrawn feeling of entitlement in the face of the indifference of others,39 and above all the barefaced soliciting of gifts additional to those already bestowed or requested. Just as Hipponax, after asking Hermes (mythically the inventor or giver of such a garment) for a cloak in order to keep out the cold and to stop his teeth from chattering, but then sneaks in a plea for an enormous sum of money (!), so too Martial, in two poems thanking patrons for valuable gifts (7.36, 8.28), tacks on a request which shamelessly duns them for more. It should be obvious that we are dealing in Martial not with a parasitical, money-obsessed individual or even, as Sullivan puts it, ‘an eleemosynary client’,40 but with the constructed fiction of a beggar-poet whose shameless importunity and exaggerated physical sufferings were designed by their sheer hyperbole to elicit mockery and amusement: in short we have here a precursor of the mediaeval Bettelgedicht.
Obscenity
Appreciation of Martial has been bedevilled by the prominence of obscenity, both verbal and thematic, in his work, especially in periods when such material was greeted with moral disapproval and/or disgust.41 Consequently, access to this part of the Martialian corpus became limited through the omission of many epigrams, as in the commentary of Paley and Stone; in translations such as Ker’s early Loeb edition (Ker 1919–20) the meaning of obscene terms was fudged; for instance, in 7.10.1, pedicatur Eros, fellat Linus (‘Eros is buggered, Linus sucks’) is given as: ‘Eros has one filthy vice, Linus has another,’ while in extreme cases the epigrams are translated into Italian! In addition, euphemistic dictionary renderings such as ‘futuo: to have a connection with a female (rare)’ or ‘irrumo: to give to suck’ (Lewis and Short) failed conspicuously to explain the tone and usage of such terms, a deficiency only remedied after the publication in 1982 of J. Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary.42
Even in the second half of the twentieth century, dealing with obscenity in ancient texts continued to be problematic. Kenneth Dover, the first commentator to explain in detail the sexual allusions in Aristophanes’ Clouds (1968), and author of the first comprehensive treatment of Greek homosexuality (1978), attracted much opprobrium from some quarters.43 In 1990 Joseph Salemi, whose translations of Martial, including many epigrams of a highly sexual nature, were eventually published in 2007, reported adverse criticisms along the way – criticisms which only inspired him to continue with the task.44 Finally (to include a personal anecdote), some time ago, one of the authors of this book was teaching a course on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. After one or two sessions, a student of religious bent requested permission to transfer to another class because ‘there was too much sex and violence’ in Apuleius, but was dismayed to find the alternative, on Juvenal Satire 6, even more disconcerting (the student in question was conveniently ‘smitten’ with a virus on the day when the highly obscene ‘Oxford fragment’ was discussed).
In Martial’s own time, as well, the use of obscenity, and obscene language in particular, required apology and justification; furthermore, in Martial’s case the traditional claim of a demarcation between a poet’s output and his own morals (cf. 1.4, 11.15) was especially relevant in the light of the emperor Domitian’s recent revival of the Augustan marriage legislation, which imposed penalties for various sexual offences. In the prose preface to Book 1, Martial defended his use of obscenity by appealing to the Roman epigrammatic tradition where explicit sexual language was not only accepted, but expected.45 He also pointed to other areas of Roman life where obscenity had a legitimate place, such as the festival of the Floralia, when prostitutes appeared naked on stage (1 praef., 1.35.8). He additionally excused the risqué nature of his poetry by claiming that the Saturnalia, in conjunction with which a number of his books were published,46 tolerated, indeed encouraged, sexually explicit material.47
In general, the Romans were not offended by obscenity provided that it was used in the appropriate milieu.48 Just as obscene language was perfectly acceptable in the ‘low’ genre of epigram but avoided in the higher genres,49 so in everyday life obscenity played a role in a variety of scenarios: a striking example is the sexually explicit paintings which adorned the walls of dining rooms in Roman houses. Obscenity also had an apotropaic function. The phallus was thought to be a potent charm against the evil eye: it was worn inside an amulet (bulla) by young children; images of phallic dwarfs or black Africans were on display at the public baths. Similarly apotropaic were the obscenities directed at triumphing generals and the Fescennine verses sung at weddings.50 Martial’s original readers, then, would not have been particularly worried by his use of obscenity. But exactly how would they have reacted to it?
In his self-apology, Martial claims that, according to the rules of the genre, epigrams cannot give pleasure unless they titillate (1.35.10–15), and in an early poem of Book 11 the intended effect on the reader of sexually explicit poems is spelled out in graphic detail:
O quotiens rigida pulsabis pallia vena,
sis gravior Curio Fabricioque licet!
tu quoque nequitias nostri lususque libelli
uda, puella, leges, sis Patavina licet.
erubuit posuitque meum Lucretia librum,
sed coram Bruto; Brute, recede: leget. (11.16.5–10)
how often will you strike your garment with rigid member,51 though you be more austere than Curius or Fabricius! You also, my girl, will be moist52 as you read the naughty jesting of my little book, though you come from Patavium.53 Lucretia blushed and laid aside my book; but in Brutus’ presence. Brutus, withdraw, and she will read.
Curius and Fabricius, characters from early Roman history, represent a moral rigidity associated with the remote past, as does the legendary Lucretia, who committed suicide to protect her reputation after being raped, and who here stands for the ideal married woman (matrona) whose primary virtue is her sexual fidelity to her husband (pudicitia).54 Martial’s epigrams are so arousing, he claims, that even such paragons will enjoy reading them.
Mere titillation for its own sake is not, however, the sole or even the primary function of obscenity in the majority of the epigrams in which it appears. Sometimes it is allied to invective, a traditional use of obscenity which extended – albeit in the form of euphemism – even to the law courts.55 A most striking example of obscene vituperation – striking because the epigram in question is by the emperor Augustus himself – is cited by Martial at 11.20:
Quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam
Fulvia constituit, se quoque uti futuam.
Fulviam ego ut futuam? quid si me Manius oret
pedicem? faciam? non puto, si sapiam.
‘aut futue; aut pugnemus’ ait. quid quod mihi vita
carior est ipsa mentula? signa canant!
Because Antony fucks Glaphyra, Fulvia decided on this punishment for me, that I should fuck her likewise. I fuck Fulvia? Suppose Manius were to beg me to bugger him, would I do it? I think not, if I were in my right mind. ‘Either fuck me or let us fight,’ she said. What about the fact that my cock is dearer to me than life itself? Let the trumpets sound.56
Especially strong invective is directed by Martial against lesbians (e.g. 7.67, discussed earlier) and men who engage in passive sexual practices, such as his bête noire Zoilus:
Zoile, quid solium subluto podice perdis?
spurcius ut fiat, Zoile, merge caput.
Zoilus, why are you spoiling the washtub by bathing your bum? To make it even filthier, Zoilus, immerse your head. (2.42)
In this invective piece, Zoilus is attacked for being a pathic and even worse, a fellator. But even when attack is most virulent, invective is harnessed to wit. Most often, in fact, the response elicited by obscene pieces is amusement, as in the parodic epitaph for a matron discussed in the first chapter, and especially in the large number of satiric poems where the poet holds up to ridicule a variety of vices and failings.57 The following couplet, for instance (11.62), mocks a woman who instead of receiving a fee for her sexual services, has to pay herself:
Lesbia se iurat gratis numquam esse fututam.
verum est. cum futui vult, numerare solet.
Lesbia swears that she has never been fucked for free. That’s true. When she wants to be fucked, she is accustomed to pay.58
Another epigram makes use of a typically Martialian surprise ending:
Formosam Glyceran amat Lupercus
et solus tenet imperatque solus.
quam toto sibi mense non fututam
cum tristis quereretur et roganti
causam reddere vellet Aeliano,
respondit Glycerae dolere dentes.
Lupercus loves beautiful Glycera, and he is her sole possessor and sole master. When he ruefully complained that she had not been fucked by him in a whole month and was trying to explain why to Aelianus, who had asked him the reason, he replied that Glycera had toothache. (11.40)
The concluding witticism – Glycera’s sore mouth prevents her from performing fellatio – is reinforced by a primary obscenity (‘fucked’). The point is that Lupercus has advertised himself as a macho lover, a fututor, but makes himself an object of fun as his sexual inadequacy (he can only achieve a climax if Glycera fellates him59) is inadvertently revealed by his careless reply.
Finally on this topic, Martial exploits the idea that obscenity is appropriate or inappropriate in certain contexts. In two books dedicated to Domitian, for instance (5 and 8), he ostentatiously points to the absence of obscene language as a means of paying deference to the emperor’s official role as censor, whereas in Book 11, the abolition by Domitian’s successor Nerva of harsh censorship is celebrated by an unparallelled licence in the use of sexual language and content (cf. 11.2.).60
As we saw, Martial’s readers included married women. But – especially in the context of Domitian’s revival of the Augustan laws against adultery – a link could be made between an interest in obscenity on the part of a matrona and adulterous behaviour.61 Thus in Book 5, Martial points out that the book, being free from obscenity, is suitable not only for the emperor, but also for married women.62 There was an inconsistency, however, between the officially sanctioned ideal of the virtuous wife, uninterested in sex, and the realities of life in a city where erotic art adorned the walls of dining rooms, where mixed bathing in the nude was common, and where women attended events like the pantomime, a form of theatre in which the lewd movements of the male dancers were erotically charged, or gladiatorial shows, gladiators holding a notorious sexual attraction for women.63 This inconsistency offered the poet rich opportunities for wit. We have already seen how in 11.16 he has a joke at the expense of his female readers, depicting them as secretly fascinated by the obscene poems, which they lap up in the privacy of their boudoirs.
The same point had been made earlier, in Book 3, anomalous in Martial’s oeuvre in that the first two-thirds of the book contains no obscenity whatsoever, whereas the final section, by contrast, is replete with it. In making the transition to the second part, Martial addresses the female reader:
Huc est usque tibi scriptus, matrona, libellus.
cui sint scripta rogas interiora? mihi.
gymnasium, thermae, stadium est hac parte: recede.
exuimur: nudos parce videre viros.
Up to this point, matron, my little book has been written for you. For whom are the latter parts written, you ask? For me. The gymnasium, the warm baths, the running track [i.e. the male sphere] are in this section. Retire; we are undressing. Refrain from looking upon naked males. (3.68.1–4)
He then warns off the matrona by making it clear that the following section will contain obscene language – but in such parodically euphemistic terms and at such great length as to produce the opposite effect to that ostensibly intended:
schemate nec dubio, sed aperte nominat illam
quam recipit sexto mense superba Venus,
custodem medio statuit quam vilicus horto,
opposita spectat quam proba virgo manu.
si bene te novi, longum iam lassa libellum
ponebas, totum nunc studiosa leges.
naming openly and with no ambiguous turn of phrase that thing which Venus proudly welcomes in the sixth month, which the bailiff sets up as guard in the middle of the orchard [an ithyphallic statue of Priapus], which an upright maiden eyes from behind her hand.64 If I know you well, you were already tired and putting aside the lengthy volume; but now you will eagerly read it right through. (3.68.7–12)
The joke is continued later, in epigram 86 – a poem wedged between two highly obscene ones:
Ne legeres partem lascivi, casta, libelli,
praedixi et monui: tu tamen, ecce, legis.
sed si Panniculum spectas et, casta, Latinum –
non sunt haec mimis improbiora – lege.
I told you beforehand and warned you, virtuous lady, not to read part of my wanton little book; nonetheless, look, you are reading it. But if you watch Panniculus, virtuous lady, and Latinus – these things are no naughtier than the mimes – read away.
To conclude, the tolerant reader who understands the role of obscenity in Martial’s poetry is free to appreciate the various ways in which the epigrammatist employs this tool in his repertoire of wit. Admittedly, not all these epigrams are equally successful, and modern readers might find especially repugnant Martial’s sexually based misogynistic humour directed against older women or against those who engage in homoerotic practices; such poems can nevertheless shed useful light on Roman attitudes to sexuality and for that reason should not be dismissed out of hand from our consideration.
III
Martial’s Humour
‘MARTIAL IS THE CREATOR of the classical type of the humorous epigram,’ states Holzberg.1 He is valued more than anything for his sardonic wit and point, characteristics that are in turn tied to brevity,2 a defining feature of ancient epigrams, Martial’s included.3 It is above all these aspects of Martial’s poems which have helped shape the later epigrammatic tradition. Wit can of course come in a number of guises: these will be the subject of this chapter; in the latter part we will discuss some of Martial’s favourite means of creating humour. But one type of wit is utilised by the poet before all others: the surprise or paradoxical conclusion, a brand of humour much appreciated by ancient authorities,4 prominently flagged by G. E. Lessing, the famous theoretician of epigram,5 and capable in Martial of assuming a multiplicity of forms which encompass numerous aspects of his satiric armoury. Notwithstanding such variation, the surprise conclusion always involves some form of textual ambush, the wilful deceit of the reader, who is led to believe that the thought or trajectory of an epigram is heading in one direction, only to have this perception drastically overturned in the concluding sequence, as the poet strikes out in a completely unexpected direction.
A nice example of this is 11.93:
Pierios vatis Theodori flamma penates
abstulit. hoc Musis et tibi, Phoebe, placet?
o scelus, o magnum facinus crimenque deorum,
non arsit pariter quod domus et dominus!
Fire has consumed the Pierian home of the bard Theodorus. Does this please the Muses and you, Phoebus? What a crime, what great villainy (o scelus, o magnum facinus) and reproach to the gods! – that house and householder did not go up in flames together!
In the first three lines of the poem Martial to all appearances expresses sympathy towards Theodorus for the loss of his house and reproves the gods of poetry, the Muses and Apollo, for allowing this (since Latin poetry was regularly recited, the tone of (seeming) pity could have been underlined by appropriate modulations of the voice). The impression that Martial genuinely sympathises with Theodorus is bolstered by the echo in o scelus, o magnum facinus of the virtually identical words in the same line of 11.916 – only two poems earlier – where they convey a heartfelt reproach to the Fates for cutting short the life of a seven-year-old girl. But now Martial springs his trap: the ‘crime’ is actually that Theodorus was not consumed in the flames along with his house. That is, he is a bad poet, burning being one of the two canonical methods for disposing of worthless verse; Martial however goes one better by wishing that their author himself be burned alive, putting a definitive end to his awful productions. And in a further touch of wit, Theodorus’ name (‘God-given’) is now revealed as singularly inappropriate,7 like that of Petronius’ Eumolpus (‘Melodious’), a poet so bad that his recitations elicit showers of stones, rather than applause.
A particularly effective form of the unexpected ending occurs when the surprise is reserved for the final word of an epigram. One instance is 2.56:
Gentibus in Libycis uxor tua, Galle, male audit
immodicae foedo crimine avaritiae.
sed mera narrantur mendacia: non solet illa
accipere omnino. quid solet ergo? dare.
Among the peoples of Libya, Gallus, your wife has a bad reputation for unbridled greed, an ugly charge. But what they say is nothing but lies. Taking (accipere) isn’t her way at all. So what is her way then? Giving (dare).
Here Martial in the body of the poem seems to defend Gallus’ wife against the (decidedly plausible8) charge of extorting money from the natives of Libya, of which Gallus is governor. But the defence of her peculation is abruptly shunted aside by the final dare. Semantically speaking, the verb is the antithesis of accipere, so that, on the face of it, Martial’s defence of Gallus’ wife is carried through to the conclusion of the epigram. But in fact the poet has substituted for the putative charge of extortion a far more damning one: dare is slang for a woman’s granting sexual favours. In this latter, loaded sense, she does not ‘rake in’ money, but ‘puts out’ – and to provincials at that. Here, as in a number of epigrams, the concluding barb is made the more effective precisely by being preceded by a seeming exculpation of the target.9
One of Martial’s favourite ploys is to unmask in a surprise conclusion an individual who pretends to be other than he is: very often such pretence involves concealment of erotically deviant behaviour (Martial likes to set himself the task of policing the sexually normative). A case in point is 11.88:
Multis iam, Lupe, posse se diebus
pedicare negat Charisianus.
causam cum modo quaererent sodales,
ventrem dixit habere se solutum.
Lupus, Charisianus says that for many days now he has been unable to sodomise. When his mates just now asked him the reason, he said that he was suffering from the runs.
Here Charisianus, by his revelation of the reason why he is unable to sodomise (pedicare), namely that he is suffering from loose bowels, inadvertently gives away the fact that he likes to be sodomised (pedicari) rather than, as the active verb pedicare disingenuously implies, to sodomise: that is, he naively reveals that he is the penetrated rather than the penetrator, exhibiting passive tendencies at which his name may now be seen to hint,10 an altogether shameful thing for a mature male, according to the Roman sexual grid.11 A similar embarrassing case of sexual self-disclosure is found in 11.40, discussed in Chapter 2.
The essence of the surprise ending involves the epigrammatist’s playing off against the already established expectations of the reader. Such expectations may be set up by the poet with the express object of dynamiting them, as in the instances discussed above. Alternatively, he may impart a paradoxical twist to expected patterns of behaviour. Jokes of this sort depend on the assumption that given types of individual will behave in certain predictable ways. One such stock type was the copo or innkeeper, notorious for over-watering customers’ wine. This practice informs 3.57, an epigram which was discussed earlier in another context:
Callidus imposuit nuper mihi copo Ravennae;
cum peterem mixtum, vendidit ille merum.
The other day a crafty innkeeper at Ravenna put one over on me. When I asked for a mixture of wine and water, he sold me neat wine.
The initial description of the innkeeper as ‘crafty’, callidus, and the use of the word ‘cheating’ create an expectation that he will, as usual, over-dilute Martial’s wine. But the Ravennan setting allows the poet to ring an unlooked-for change on the scoptic paradigm of the dishonest copo: for Ravenna was desperately short of potable water,12 with the result that water was far more valuable there than wine. Hence, instead of (over-) watering the poet’s drink he serves him pure vinum – amusingly inverting the normal pattern while remaining true to form by cheating his customer.
It was noted above that in fashioning his trademark surprise conclusions Martial has various techniques at his disposal. As an acknowledged master of verbal wit and wordplay, he naturally has recourse to these devices in shaping his fulmina in clausula, ‘concluding thunderbolts’. Thus an individual word or a refrain may be made to bear almost the whole weight of the surprise ending. An instance of the former will be met in the concluding tussit, ‘she coughs’, of 1.10, to be discussed in Chapter 4. An example of the latter is 3.26:
Praedia solus habes et solus, Candide, nummos,
aurea solus habes, murrina solus habes,
Massica solus habes et Opimi Caecuba solus,
et cor solus habes, solus et ingenium.
omnia solus habes – hoc me puta nolle negare –
uxorem sed habes, Candide, cum populo.
Nobody but you has (solus habes) estates, Candidus, nobody but you (solus) cash, nobody but you has gold plate, nobody but you has murrhine ware,13 nobody but you has Massic and nobody but you Caecuban of Opimius’ vintage,14 and nobody but you has intelligence, nobody but you talent. Nobody but you has everything – be assured I have no wish to deny this – but, Candidus, you have (habes) your wife in common with the public.
Candidus, it seems, is a rich man who brags incessantly not just of his wealth and possession of luxury items, but of his intellectual gifts as well: ‘nobody but you has’ is evidently a sarcastic exaggeration of his boastful language,15 the ninefold repetition of solus driving home both the insistency of the boasts and their insufferability. The climactic line 5, ‘nobody but you has everything – be assured I have no wish to deny this’, both lulls Candidus into a false sense of security by apparently conceding the veracity of his claims and sets him up for the deflationary conclusion: he may indeed have everything, but everyone else has his wife.16 This is only one of a number of cases where Martial uses a refrain as way of building up to a surprise or debunking conclusion.17
The element of surprise can however be modified or qualified when Martial telegraphs to the reader, in advance of the conclusion of a poem, that some kind of deflationary or sardonic close is in store. In such cases the surprise does not come, so to speak, as a coup de foudre, but is confined to the disclosure of what precise form this will take. One way of encoding the coming surprise is deliberately to overpaint the picture in the body of the poem. This may involve such a suspicious aggregation of circumstantial details that the reader senses that the subject of the description is riding for a fall: as in 2.29, on an individual given to public self-aggrandisement, but finally unmasked as a one-time fugitive slave, or 2.11, where Selius displays all the external signs of some terrible personal grief – on account of his failure to cadge a dinner invitation! Alternatively, Martial may resort to his favourite device of repeating formulaically a key word or phrase. Very often such poems are among Martial’s longer pieces, to allow for the ‘set-up’ to build momentum in preparation for the debunking conclusion. A briefer instance, however, is 10.97:
Dum levis arsura struitur Libitina papyro,
dum murram et casias flebilis uxor emit,
iam scrobe, iam lecto, iam pollinctore parato,
heredem scripsit me Numa: convaluit.
While the light pyre was being built up with papyrus meant to burn, while his tearful wife was buying myrrh and cassia [to be thrown on the funeral pyre], when already the grave, already the funeral bier, already the undertaker had been organised, Numa entered me in his will as heir. He recovered.18
In this poem, where Martial plays the part of a legacy-hunter (captator) who haunts the deathbed of his target, the repeated ‘while’ (dum) and ‘already’ (iam) prefacing mention of the various preparations for Numa’s death, conspire by their insistence to create – at least on the surface – the impression that the poet has got it made: only for him to be frustrated by the single concluding word, convaluit, ‘he recovered’. Thus Numa, whose name conjures up associations of moral rectitude,19 has, ironically, cheated Martial. But the density of verbal repetition and contextual detail will have aroused in the experienced reader of Martial a suspicion that all is not as it seems, especially when he or she discovers that the poet is here figured as a captator. For he or she will know that in the satiric tradition it was a common fate of captatores to be disappointed in their expectations: either the captator dies before his victim, or the target accepts all the captator’s gifts and services, but leaves him nothing, or, as here, does not die after all. In sum, the surprise turn in 10.97 is not really not a surprise per se, but a revelation of what exact form the already anticipated scoptic conclusion will assume.
Having discussed a key – perhaps the key – element in Martial’s wit, the surprise ending, we now turn to various other aspects of his humour. Martial, to use a modern idiom, is seriously funny, and often, the more outrageous and acerbic his wit, the better. Now the deconstruction of humour both ancient and modern is notoriously fraught with problems:20 a witty point or bon mot all too easily succumbs to paralysis by analysis. There is also the further problem that much of Martial’s humour is verbal, that is, it depends on clever manipulation of the connotations and resonances of Latin words, not an easy skill to convey to readers who may perhaps lack a high-level facility in the language. But buoyed by the conviction that Martial, like Aristophanes, is often laugh-out-loud hilarious, and in view of the centrality of his diamantine wit to his enduring popularity, we will attempt to discuss what seem to us some representative gems of the poet’s humour, several of them based on wordplay, without (hopefully) annihilating the joke in the process.
Martial, from a twenty-first-century perspective, is outrageously, unabashedly politically incorrect. His poems are awash with sexism, ageism, homophobia, misogyny and paternalism: not that any of these would necessarily have attracted criticism from his contemporaries, for one of his established tricks is to exploit to brilliant comic effect prejudices which were deeply ingrained in Roman society.21 A nice example of an epigram which neatly combines misogyny (perhaps more accurately misogamy) with a dash of paternalism is 8.12:
Uxorem quare locupletem ducere nolim
quaeritis? uxori nubere nolo meae.
inferior matrona suo sit, Prisce, marito:
non aliter fiunt femina virque pares.
You all ask why I don’t want to marry a rich wife?22 I’m not willing to be my wife’s wife (uxori nubere nolo meae). A married woman, Priscus, should be below her husband. In no other way can a man and a woman be equal.
Here Martial exploits the comic stereotype of the rich wife who exploits her financial position to lord it over her husband.23 But he imparts a highly original colour to this stock situation by a startling verbal paradox: ‘I don’t want to be my wife’s wife’, the implication being that in any such marriage the husband will inevitably play second fiddle to his wife, which the speaker regards as an insufferable inversion of marital norms, whereby wives were routinely expected to submit to their husbands’ authority.24 The joke here turns on the unexpected application to the man who weds a wealthy wife of the term normally used of a woman marrying a man, nubere,25 amusingly substituted for the term which describes a man taking a woman to wife, ducere.26 And the epigram is rounded off by a further witty paradox which again gives a novel spin to a second misogynistic topos, that to marry means domestic tyranny.27 This being a given, the only way to achieve equilibrium of power within a marriage is for the wife to be, at least notionally, subject (inferior) to her spouse (‘the matron […] should be below her husband. That’s the only way man and woman can be equal’)!28
Martial never descends to the sort of rough and ready scurrility that we find for example in the dispute between the buffoonish Sarmentus and Messius in Horace Satires 1.5.51–70, for all that this form of humour was greatly relished by the Romans.29 His wit is rather rapier-like, or, to put it in more vernacular terms, he is a master of the brief squib, as in the following instance, 7.3:
Cur non mitto meos tibi, Pontiliane, libellos?
ne mihi tu mittas, Pontiliane, tuos.
Why don’t I send my little books to you, Pontilianus? So that you don’t send me yours, Pontilianus.
This quip, whose pungency and concision make it far superior to the more laboured 5.73 on the same topic, relies for its effect on repetition and balance: mitto is answered by mittas, tibi by mihi, meos by tuos, while the vocative Pontiliane features in both verses. The almost complete identity of diction in the two lines ironically however conceals a radical distinction of situation and artistic talent. To receive the little books of Martial is a desideratum. To have that gift reciprocated by a poet as bad as Pontianus definitely is not!
In 9.85, a brilliantly original metaphor enlivens one of Martial’s favourite topics, the stingy host. The poem runs:
Languidior noster si quando est Paulus, Atili,
non se, convivas abstinet ille suos.
tu languore quidem subito fictoque laboras,
sed mea porrexit sportula, Paule, pedes.
Whenever our friend Paulus is a bit unwell, Atilius, he doesn’t deprive himself, he deprives his dinner guests. To be sure you are suffering from a sudden fictitious ailment, Paulus, but my dole (sportula) has given up the ghost (literally, ‘has stretched out its feet’).
In a piece of amusing grotesquerie, the living Paulus is pictured as simulating illness (with its overtones of potential death) in order to evade his obligation as patron to provide his client Martial with a meal,30 while the dinner is figured as a human corpse with its feet extended outwards towards the door, the position assumed by cadavers in Roman households in the interval between death and burial.31 Thus the potential (fictionalised) death of a living individual is capped by the ‘death’ of an inanimate entity.
One characteristic to which Martial gives free rein is his liking for comic hyperbole, often involving the heaping up (cumulatio) of a lengthy series of circumstantial details.32 Not all such poems will necessarily be to modern taste, but at their best they can generate a laughable absurdism. One instance is 11.84, on an ancient Sweeney Todd:
Qui nondum Stygias descendere quaerit ad umbras
tonsorem fugiat, si sapit, Antiochum.
alba minus saevis lacerantur bracchia cultris,
cum furit ad Phrygios enthea turba modos;
mitior implicitas Alcon secat enterocelas
fractaque fabrili dedolat ossa manu.
tondeat hic inopes Cynicos et Stoica menta
collaque pulverea nudet equina iuba.
hic miserum Scythica sub rupe Promethea radat,
carnificem nudo pectore poscet avem;
ad matrem fugiet Pentheus, ad Maenadas Orpheus,
Antiochi tantum barbara tela sonent.
haec quaecumque meo numeratis stigmata mento,
in vetuli pyctae qualia fronte sedent,
non iracundis fecit gravis unguibus uxor:
Antiochi ferrum est et scelerata manus.
unus de cunctis animalibus hircus habet cor:
barbatus vivit, ne ferat Antiochum.
Let anyone who does not seek to go down to the Stygian shades just yet avoid Antiochus the barber, if he has any sense. Less savage are the knives with which white arms are lacerated when the inspired33 throng raves to the accompaniment of Phrygian measures. Alcon is gentler when he cuts entangled hernias or hews broken bones with a workman’s hand. Let Antiochus clip destitute Cynics and Stoic chins, let him strip horses’ necks of their dusty manes. If Antiochus were to shave wretched Prometheus beneath his Scythian crag, with his naked breast he will ask for the butcher bird. Pentheus will flee to his mother, Orpheus to the Maenads, should Antiochus’ barbarous weapons so much as sound. All the scars that you count on my chin, like those that sit on the brow of a veteran boxer, were not made by a violent wife with angry nails: it’s Antiochus’ steel and accursed hand. Of all animals the billy goat alone has sense: he lives bearded so as not to endure Antiochus.
On this epigram Kay appositely comments ‘[it] shows some of [Martial’s] most noticeable humorous effects operating together: hyperbole and a taste for the bizarre; parody of epic and the debunking use of myth; structural balance and controlled attack’. Beginning with the grossly exaggerated claim that a visit to Antiochus means premature death, Martial launches into a series of grisly comparisons drawn from life to ‘illustrate’ the pain which Antiochus causes: worse than the lacerations which the devotees of the goddess Bellona inflict upon themselves in an ecstatic condition, worse than having a hernia cut or a splintered bone removed – with a saw – by Alcon the surgeon (the adjective fabrilis, ‘like a workman’, implies that he is something of a butcher, and in any case ancient medical procedures could be torturous in the extreme). Next (line 8) we have the risible suggestion that an art so brutal is better fitted to the animal than the human realm – a deliberate piece of counterfactual nonsense, since horses’ manes would be trimmed by the instrument designed for that purpose, forfices, hardly by a barber’s clippers! The poem rises to a crescendo of absurdity with the introduction of several mythological analogies involving characters who suffered a particularly agonising or gruesome fate: Prometheus, who, chained to a rock in the Caucasus, had his liver fed upon all day long by an eagle;34 Orpheus and Pentheus, who were torn to pieces by Maenads, in Pentheus’ case led by his mother Agaue, who in her madness carried her son’s head like a trophy. According to the (il)logic of the poem, all of the above would willingly embrace these hideous tortures rather than submit to the ministrations of Antiochus. In a deliberate effect of contrast, the epigram concludes with a descent into comic bathos which nonetheless maintains the note of hyperbole which has characterised the whole: the numerous scars (stigmata) on Martial’s chin were inflicted not by the nails of an angry wife, which would be nothing unusual,35 but by ‘Antiochus’ steel and accursed hand’. As stigmata are properly tattoos or marks branded on the skin, the risible implication is that the wounds are both deep and indelible.36 And while animals were thought to lack reasoning powers, the billy goat, it may be inferred, is a clear exception, since he makes the rational decision to keep a beard in order to avoid exposure to Antiochus!37 All in all, a fantastically overblown scenario inspired by the quotidian fact that, in antiquity, ‘in the absence of proper soap or foam, and since it was not technologically possible to produce a razor-sharp edge with iron, [shaving] must have been an unpleasant ordeal’.38
Martial’s mastery of verbal wit has been noted above. Of the various devices available to him here one of the most effective is to make the punchline turn on a pun. We will consider three of our personal favourites.39 The first is 1.84:
Uxorem habendam non putat Quirinalis,
cum velit habere filios, et invenit
quo possit istud more: futuit ancillas
domumque et agros implet equitibus vernis.
pater familiae verus est Quirinalis.
Quirinalis doesn’t think he should have a wife, though he wants to have sons, and he has found a way by which he can achieve that purpose: he fucks his slave girls and fills town house and country estate with home-born slave–knights (equitibus vernis). Quirinalis is an authentic (verus) pater familiae.
This epigram sends up one Quirinalis (the name may play ironically on the Ennian phrase Quirinus pater, ‘father Quirinus’40), who resists the legal pressures to marry and produce children,41 although he wants male offspring. His solution? To ‘fuck’ his female slaves,42 becoming literally (verus) a pater familiae, ‘father of a household of slaves’ (familia = a slave household), if not a pater familiae in the sense desiderated by the law, father of a family of legitimate43 children.44
Our next instance is the monodistich 8.62:
Scribit in aversa Picens epigrammata charta,
et dolet averso quod facit illa deo.
Picens writes epigrams on the back (aversa) of the sheet and is upset because the god’s back is turned (averso) while he is composing them.
The target here is a poet, who, although composing epigrams, which, as noted above, demanded brevity,45 wrote so many that he had to resort to inscribing them on the back of the papyrus, like the wordy author of a tragedy complained of by Juvenal in Satire 1, ‘an Orestes, which, having covered the final margin, has spilled over onto the verso and still isn’t finished’ (5–6). Martial shows a better sense of proportion in the (mock-modest) conclusion to Book 1 (1.118): ‘he for whom reading 100 epigrams is not enough, will never have enough of a bad thing, Caedicianus’.46 The subtext here is the belief, inherited from the influential Greek theorist Callimachus and adopted by Horace, among others,47 that such diffuse and undisciplined scribbling makes inevitably for bad art. But Picens is too unself-critical to see this, and so is upset that the god of poetry turns away from him (averso), i.e. that his poems lack inspiration – quite unreasonably upset in Martial’s view, since Picens must turn to the back of the page in order to give free rein to his unchecked verbosity.
Our last example involves a sexual pun, the implications of which, we suggest, have not been fully teased out.
Hystericam vetulo se dixerat esse marito
et queritur futui Leda necesse sibi;
sed flens atque gemens tanti negat esse salutem
seque refert potius proposuisse mori.
vir rogat ut vivat virides nec deserat annos,
et fieri quod iam non facit ipse sinit.
protinus accedunt medici medicaeque recedunt,
tollunturque pedes. o medicina gravis!
Leda told her elderly husband that she was hysterical and complains that being fucked is a necessity for her; but weeping and groaning she says that her survival is not worth the price and says that she has chosen rather to die. Her husband begs her to stay alive and not relinquish her life in its prime, and he allows to be done what he is himself no longer capable of. Straight away the male doctors approach and the female doctors48 retire: her feet are hoisted. Drastic therapy! (11.71)
The premise underlying this poem, exploited by Leda, is that hysteria, in antiquity regarded as a physiological disorder afflicting the womb (Greek hustera), could be brought on by cessation of sexual activity: hence the plausibility of Leda’s claim that she is suffering from this disease, her husband being elderly and impotent (‘what he is himself no longer capable of’). As the medical specialist Galen put it (8.417 Kühn): ‘it is agreed that this condition afflicts widows for the most part, especially when, although they […] have […] had regular sexual relations with men, they are deprived of such things’. Pretending that the illness put her at risk of death (‘life is not worth the price’ of a cure if it involves infidelity) but histrionically claiming that she is determined to die rather than be untrue to her husband, Leda manipulates him into letting her take a surrogate – or rather surrogates, who duly arrive in the shape of male doctors, who had a reputation for sleeping with their female patients49 and administer precisely the ‘therapy’ she wants – sexual intercourse: ‘her legs are lifted’, preparatory to penetration,50 a ‘drastic’ but presumably effective cure. It seems to have gone unnoticed that ‘her legs are lifted’ (tolluntur pedes) conceals a second, non-sexual allusion which harks back to the threats of death in lines 3–4. ‘Her legs are lifted’ could also suggest the idea of lifting a corpse and placing it with its feet facing outwards towards the door.51 So while the ‘lifting of her legs’ is salutary, in the sense of ‘saving’ Leda’s life – in fact just curing her sexual frustration – the expression also reactivates, ironically, the notion of death prominent earlier in the poem.52
The language of Martial is highly innovatory in a number of respects: these include the introduction of words of foreign provenance (Greek, but also Spanish and Gallo-Celtic), the use of established terms in novel combinations, strikingly original metaphors and the coining of entirely new words. The last two in particular can lend themselves to witty effects. At least one instance of the former (11.99.5) will be considered below when we come to discuss Martial’s sexual humour, but a particularly clever instance from 11.77 will exemplify the witty use of the latter:
In omnibus Vacerra quod conclavibus
consumit horas et die toto sedet,
cenaturit Vacerra, non cacaturit.
Vacerra spends hours in all the privies, sitting the whole day long. Vacerra wants to eat, not to excrete.
Vacerra, whose name has connotations of stupidity, represents that favourite butt of Martial’s scoptic verse, the captator cenae or dinner-hunter, in this case spending all day in the public latrines in the hope of cadging an invitation from those who come to relieve themselves. But, says the poet in a neat piece of sound-play, he does not want to empty his bowels (cacaturire), but to fill his belly (cenaturire).53 Cacaturire is a so-called desiderative verb, known elsewhere from a Pompeian inscription, and a calque on the Greek desiderative form chezētian, ‘to want to shit’; cenaturire is, however, a brilliant neologism, coined essentially for the sake of the comic alliteration.
One of Martial’s favourite gambits in his scoptic epigrams is to exploit the nomenclature of fictitious54 protagonists or addressees for witty effect. This can involve a name that is comically appropriate or alternatively humorously inappropriate, may entail a change of name for its bearer, the joke may turn on an etymological pun, or can exploit the resonances of a mythological or historical name. The name may be integral to the message of the poem in question, or conversely tangential to it. Sometimes more than one of the above effects is combined in a single piece. An instance is 6.7:
Iulia lex populis ex quo, Faustine, renata est
atque intrare domos iussa Pudicitia est,
aut minus aut certe non plus tricesima lux est,
et nubit decimo iam Telesilla viro.
quae nubit totiens, non nubit: adultera lege est.
offendor moecha simpliciore minus.
It is less, certainly not more, than 30 days since the Julian law was reborn for our peoples55 and Chastity bidden enter our homes; and Telesilla is already marrying her tenth husband. A woman who marries so many times doesn’t marry: she is a legalised adulteress. I am less offended by a more straightforward whore.
Here Telesilla’s name, literally ‘she of little fulfilment’,56 is humorously appropriate to the fantastical57 situation sketched here. A woman who marries and divorces on average every three days certainly offers little prospect of fulfilment, sexual58 or otherwise, to her spouse. At the same time her name is also spectacularly inappropriate, given its coincidence with her Argive namesake, the embodiment of virtue, something that Martial’s Telesilla decidedly is not.59 Further instances of amusingly suitable names are the Euclides, ‘Well-keyed’,60 of 5.35, who affects to be ‘a proud, illustrious, affluent knight’, but is revealed to be in reality a slave when the key to his master’s house or storeroom inadvertently slips from his pocket,61 or the hot-tempered Charopinus of 5.50, whose name is derived from Greek charops, ‘bright-eyed’, a descriptor for the eyes which was generally associated with aggression.62
More common however in Martial than the risibly appropriate name is the comically unsuitable (antiphrastic) one, such as Eutrapelus, ‘Nimble’, a barber so unskilled that a new beard comes up in the time it takes him to shave his customer (7.83), or the plagiarist Fidentinus (cf. Latin fides, ‘belief, trust, good faith’) of Book 1,63 whose claim to be the author of epigrams ‘stolen’64 by him from Martial is not to be taken on trust. A more complex instance, which involves, as often in Martial, playing on the root sense of a Greek word, and a case where a name seems value-neutral until the epigram’s close unexpectedly alters that situation, is 8.64. Here ‘Clytus’, from Greek klutos, literally ‘the Distinguished’, invents birthdays almost every month of the year in order to extract presents from his friends. If this charade continues, concludes Martial, ‘I shall not regard you as born even once, Clytus,’65 meaning, ‘I shall stop observing your fictitious birthdays,’ but also, in a malicious second sense which amusingly negates Clytus’ ‘distinction’, ‘I shall regard you as a nobody, a nonentity.’
Two more examples of name-based humour, different in type and ethos but each involving a change of nomenclature, may be briefly noted here. The first, 6.17,66 jeers at one of Martial’s favourite targets, the parvenu, in this case one Cinnamus, an ex-slave, now a freedman,67 who has shortened his name to the aristocratic sounding Cinna in an attempt to conceal his servile origins. This, says Martial, is a ‘barbarism’, grammatical parlance for, among other things, the illegitimate excision of a syllable from a word,68 but also alluding to Cinnamus’ ethnic origins. By the same token, concludes the poet, if you had previously been called Furius, you would now be ‘Fur’, ‘Thief’, a ridiculous postulate which exposes the absurdity of Cinnamus’ manipulation of his name, and simultaneously hints at how he came by his new-found status.
A second instance of a change of nomenclature, 3.78, is surely among the best of Martial’s jokes on names, and, like several other epigrams in the corpus,69 involves a contrived play on Greek words. It runs:
Minxisti currente semel, Pauline, carina.
meiere vis iterum? iam Palinurus eris.
You pissed once, Paulinus, as the vessel was coursing along. You want to piss again (iterum)? Now you’ll be a Palinurus.
Palinurus, in Virgil’s Aeneid, was the Trojans’ chief helmsman. His name, a compound of Greek palin, ‘behind’ and ouros, ‘watcher’, etymologises this function. But Paulinus’ micturition70 and the alliterative similarity of his name to the epic hero’s suggest that he ought to be renamed ‘Palinurus’, ‘he who pisses again’, Palinurus being humorously and parodically re-etymologised as coming from palin, ‘again’ (cf. iterum) and ourein, ‘to urinate’.
We turn now to the epigrams where Martial’s humour is sexually based, a substantial portion of his corpus.71 Often such humour arrives as a sting in the tail of an epigram not otherwise about sex, or at least not explicitly so. At other times the subject matter is sexual from start to finish. In discussing earlier the place and function of obscenity in the Epigrams, we noted that this has, historically speaking, proved a stumbling block to appreciation of the poet. What we are concerned to do here is establish, via some selected examples, that Martial’s poems about sex can be genuinely amusing, an effect achieved not least by a highly fertile imagination and a great deal of literary sophistication. Of course judgement about what is amusing, especially when that humour is risqué, is a highly subjective business, and some epigrams may strike the reader as simply crude or distasteful to modern sensibilities.72 But these, we contend, are the exception rather than the rule. Niklas Holzberg has noted that, while Martial is justly celebrated for his witty endings, some of his epigrams are funny throughout.73 A case in point is the crude, but extremely witty 11.99:
De cathedra quotiens surgis – iam saepe notavi –
pedicant miserae, Lesbia, te tunicae.
quas cum conata es dextra, conata sinistra
vellere, cum lacrimis eximis et gemitu:
sic constringuntur gemina Symplegade culi,
et nimias intrant Cyaneasque natis.
emendare cupis vitium deforme? docebo:
Lesbia, nec surgas censeo nec sedeas.
Whenever you get up from your chair (I have often noticed it before now), your poor tunic buggers you, Lesbia. After you’ve tried with your right hand and tried with your left hand to pluck it free, you manage to extract it with tears and groans: it’s so confined by the twin Symplegades of your bum and goes so far up your over-large and Cyanean buttocks. Do you want to rectify this ugly fault? I’ll tell you how (docebo): Lesbia, I advise you neither to get up nor sit down.
This epigram belongs in the tradition of humorous attacks on individuals afflicted with a body part that is grossly oversized,74 such as the Spatale of 2.52, so busty (mammosa) that she was charged a triple fee to enter the baths, one for herself, a further two for each breast. Here the target is the steatopygous ‘Lesbia’, who is, ridiculously, ‘buggered’ by her tunic: that is, her tunic penetrates deep into the intimate recesses of her anus, where it is painfully trapped (constringuntur) between the twin globes of her hypertrophied bottom (nimias […] natis), in the manner of ships caught by the Clashing or Cyanean Rocks, which came together to crush any ship attempting to pass through them, a quite ludicrous and bizarre analogy. Now the Greeks and Romans were particularly attuned to the charms of a well-proportioned derrière, whereas rumps which were too fleshy, as here, or too skinny, as in the case of the following epigram, were deplored as a major physical shortcoming.75 All the more ironically inapposite, then, is the name of the protagonist, Lesbia, which inevitably calls to mind the homonymous and incomparably beautiful mistress of Catullus.76 The topographical whimsy of assimilating Lesbia’s bum to the mythical Symplegades represents the comic climax (or should one say nadir?) of the epigram, but a witty coda follows which cleverly parodies the modalities of poetic erotodidaxis. Adopting the mock-serious persona of an Ovid instructing puellae on how best to disguise corporeal flaws, Martial not only uses the Ovidian and didactic term docebo,77 ‘I will show you how’, to preface a piece of wholly unrealisable advice (Lesbia should neither get up nor sit down, nec surgas […] nec sedeas); he also spoofs the language and syntax78 of Ovid when counselling too short girls on how to conceal a lack of height, si brevis es, sedeas, ne stans videare sedere […] iaceas, ‘if you are short, you should sit, in case when standing you should seem to be sitting […] you should recline’ (Ars am. 3.263–4). All in all then, a wittily sophisticated piece which relies on much more than crudity for its effects.
We turn now to an epigram, 7.18, which is a good deal more explicit than the previous one and also extremely funny. It reads:
Cum tibi sit facies de qua nec femina possit
dicere, cum corpus nulla litura notet,
cur te tam rarus cupiat repetatque fututor
miraris? vitium est non leve, Galla, tibi.
accessi quotiens ad opus mixtisque movemur
inguinibus, cunnus non tacet, ipsa taces.
di facerent ut tu loquereris et ille taceret:
offendor cunni garrulitate tui.
pedere te mallem: namque hoc nec inutile dicit
Symmachus et risum res movet ista simul.
quis ridere potest fatui poppysmata cunni?
cum sonat hic, cui non mentula mensque cadit?
dic aliquid saltem clamosoque obstrepe cunno,
et, si adeo muta es, disce vel inde loqui.
Since you have a face about which even a woman could find nothing to carp, since no blemish marks your body, do you wonder why a fucker so seldom wants you and so seldom comes back? You have a serious defect, Galla. Whenever I have got down to the job (opus) and we move with mingled loins (mixtisque movemur / inguinibus), your cunt isn’t silent, but you are. Would that the gods had made you to talk and it to be silent. I am put off by the garrulity of your cunt. I had rather you farted: Symmachus says that is healthy, and at the same time it arouses laughter. But who can laugh at the pop-pop (poppysmata) of a silly cunt? Whose cock and spirits don’t droop at the sound of it? At least say something and drown out your clamorous cunt; or, if you are so tongue-tied, learn to talk from there.
In an indubitably fictitious scenario, Martial explains to Galla why he cannot achieve consummation with her (‘whose cock […] do[esn]’t droop?’). In so doing he offers none of the rationales for masculine sexual incapacity which are conventional in scoptic contexts: the woman’s ugliness (a possibility firmly discounted in the first couplet), stinkiness, age-induced impotence, an inexplicable failure of virility. Instead the reason is an entirely original (and embarrassingly personal) one: her disconcerting vaginal flatulence or, to put it in vulgar terms, ‘fanny farts’. The epigram is replete with witty touches, some of them linguistically based. When Martial speaks of a fututor, ‘fucker’, the –tor termination may imply that the person is an inveterate fucker: given that even such a one rarely returns for a second bout (repetat), this ‘proves’ empirically the seriousness of Galla’s defect. Next, the slightly coy opus (‘job’, sexual act) and the elegantly periphrastic mixtisque movemur / inguinibus (inguen being a euphemism for the sexual organs and mixtis a calque on the Greek epicism migēnai, ‘commingle sexually’) sets the reader up for the explicit crudity of the immediately following ‘cunt’. But the crux of the joke in 7.18 lies in the witty inversion of both a misogynistic topos and sexual protocols. Women are standardly accused of being excessively loquacious,79 but here it is Galla’s cunt which is ‘garrulous’: she herself is silent. Moreover, females were expected to help things along during love-making80 by sounds of pleasure and naughty language:81 but the only sounds here are vocalised by Galla’s vagina. It would be preferable, according to Martial, if she farted: the latter is both salubrious,82 and (audibly) funny.83 Martial may be mischievously alluding by ‘salubrious’ to the edict purportedly meditated by the emperor Claudius, whereby intestinal gas might be expelled at dinner, since to hold this in was injurious to the health (Suet. Claud. 32). But there is nothing funny, he says, about the popping sounds, poppysmata, made by her vulva during intercourse (indeed poppysmata were known for their apotropaic effect,84 which may be part of the joke in ‘whose cock and spirits don’t droop at the sound of it?’). Two alternative remedies present themselves, advises the poet by way of conclusion: Galla should either say something to muffle the clamour of her cunt or learn to articulate not with her tongue but her pudenda, a solution which both sits with the logic of the poem – and is a physiological impossibility.
In his immensely learned commentary on Martial Book 7, Vioque compares with 7.18 various poems where revulsion is expressed towards the vagina and cites with approval Karen Horney’s and Carol Ember’s much-quoted pieces on male fears of sex with women, as well as Amy Richlin’s well-known article on invective against women in Roman satire, which argued that in Latin texts attacking females there is a consistent pattern of disgust expressed towards women’s genital organs.85 It seems to us that in citing these ‘parallels’, Vioque fundamentally misconceives the spirit of Martial’s poem.86 To be sure, the epigram may at some level be informed by the psychosexual considerations which Horney and Ember identify, but the Latin texts to which Vioque also refers by way of comparison exhibit a real viciousness which is quite lacking here, while the poems and prose writings which formed the backbone of Richlin’s study were, as her title suggests, satiric and iambic in intent and hence entailed a great deal more aggression than is encountered here. Of course, 7.18 seems to us moderns intolerably un-PC, but it would not have done so to the Romans – why else would Martial write such a piece? – with their (mostly) unbuttoned attitude to frank discussion of matters erotic87 and, the most important point, an omnipresent readiness to find amusing any unusual physical quirk or personal idiosyncrasy. In sum, it is crucial to read Martial’s sexual pieces through an ancient lens if we are correctly to appreciate the ethos which informs each.
Some Characteristics of Martial’s Poetry
IN HIS Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm und einige der vornehmsten Epigrammatisten of 1771,1 G. E. Lessing offered a definition of the epigram which, while not exactly original to him,2 has ever since been associated with his name. An epigram, Lessing proposed, consists of two parts, an Erwartung, or ‘set-up’, wherein a reader’s curiosity is aroused regarding some unusual or noteworthy phenomenon, and an Aufschluss, a ‘conclusion’ or ‘resolution’, whereby that curiosity is satisfied by a comment or explanation on the author’s part, often witty in character. Although ultimately deriving its inspiration from the lapidary setting in which epigrams were originally inscribed,3 Lessing’s schema was manifestly predicated on the work of Martial, whom he regarded as the supreme practitioner of the genre: for Martial’s epigrams, or his scoptic ones at any rate, characteristically exhibit a bipartite structure, and regularly end in the pointed or unexpected way which Lessing mandated for the Aufschluss.4 In further confirmation of the Martialian genesis of his theory, Lessing also insisted that ‘terseness must be the first and foremost characteristic of the Aufschluss of an epigram’;5 as we shall see immediately below, this again reflects Martial’s satirical practice.
Lessing’s theories have come in for criticism on a number of grounds: that they privilege structure over content;6 that they understate the contextual unity of Martial’s epigrams, that is to say the dynamic movement which sustains and carries them forward;7 that they overlook the numerous structural devices, such as repetition of key words or phrases as well as ring composition,8 which link together the different components of an epigram;9 that they illegitimately sideline the numerous lengthy, often epideictic pieces which are an important part of Martial’s oeuvre;10 that the structure of the epigrams can be tripartite rather than bipartite.11 Also, in an important brief monograph on Martial and rhetoric, Barwick argued that it is more productive, analytically speaking, to speak of an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ section of an epigram, rather than Lessing’s ‘set-up’ and ‘conclusion’.12 Notwithstanding all this, Lessing’s definition of the epigram continues to be treated with respect by scholars of Martial,13 because it does capture the essence of most of the poet’s scoptic pieces, a type which preponderates in his corpus.
Two brief instances will demonstrate the practical applicability to some of Martial’s poems, at any rate, of Lessing’s pronouncement that an epigram is structured around the provoking of curiosity and the subsequent satisfaction of this. The first is 10.102:
Qua factus ratione sit requiris,
qui numquam futuit, pater Philinus?
Gaditanus, Avite, dicat istud,
qui scribit nihil et tamen poeta est.
You ask how Philinus, who never fucks, has become a father? Avitus, let Gaditanus answer that, who writes nothing and is nonetheless a poet.
Here Martial plays with the fiction of ‘Avitus’ expressing curiosity about an apparent conundrum:14 how can Philinus, although he never has sex with his wife, have become the father of a child? The answer takes the shape of a gibe conjuring up a situation roughly parallel to Philinus’: in the same way as Gaditanus is a poet, though himself writing nothing. In other words, both employ surrogates.15
A second example comes from near the beginning of Book 1 (1.10), in the view of Fitzgerald, perhaps rightly, Martial’s best.16 It runs:
Petit Gemellus nuptias Maronillae
et cupit et instat et precatur et donat.
adeone pulcra est? immo foedius nil est.
quid ergo in illa petitur et placet? tussit.
Gemellus seeks to marry Maronilla; he expresses his desire, presses her, begs her, gives her presents. Is she so very beautiful? On the contrary, nothing is uglier than she. So what is it about her that is so enticing and attractive? Her cough.
Here again a paradoxical situation is set up which both provokes puzzlement and demands an answer: why is Gemellus so desperate to wed Maronilla when she is so repulsive to behold? The explanation comes in a single word, conforming to Lessing’s principle, extrapolated from Martial, that the Aufschluss should be as brief as possible: tussit, ‘she coughs’. Maronilla is suffering from consumption, offering hope that she will shortly die: Gemellus is not after Maronilla, but after her money, which he hopes soon to inherit.17
It is a key premise of Lessing that Martial throws out an interpretative challenge to the reader. Indeed, it is a known fact that it can sometimes be difficult fully to understand an epigram of Martial or to grasp its point. This is especially true of the obscene epigrams, but the problem is by no means confined to these. On occasion, commentators will simply throw up their hands in despair.18 At other times, certain pieces will elicit a multiplicity of different interpretations without any consensus being reached, so that objections to the views of predecessors continue to proliferate in tandem with fresh attempts at explication. Cases in point are 9.6719 and, an especially notorious instance, 9.95a:
Alfius ante fuit, coepit nunc Olfius esse,
uxorem postquam duxit Athenagoras.
Athenagoras was Alfius formerly, but has now begun to be Olfius since he married a wife. [thus SB]
– an epigram so vexed that it has elicited at least six different explanations: indeed to translate as above is ipso facto to embrace one interpretative position over other alternatives, and also to take a stance on the contentious issues of orthography and punctuation.20 Again, when reading over an epigram, one can sometimes get a sense that not all the implications with which Martial has invested it have been fully teased out in the existing scholarship; an example is 6.6:
Comoedi tres sunt, sed amat tua Paula, Luperce,
quattuor: et κωφὸν Paula πρόσωπον amat.
There are three actors in a comedy, but your Paula, Lupercus, loves four. Paula loves a muta persona too. [SB]21
Here the Greek expression κωφὸν πρόσωπον, a technical term for a non-speaking part in a drama (whence SB’s translation muta persona) is, we submit, considerably more sardonic and polyvalent than has hitherto been appreciated.22
Not all of the above factors should necessarily be regarded negatively, however. The difficulties in question stem from what is surely one of the most rewarding aspects of reading Martial, that he goes out of his way to involve and to challenge the reader. Sometimes this effect is quite overt, as in 2.28:
Rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum
dixerit et digitum porrigito medium.
sed nec pedico es nec tu, Sextille, fututor,
calda Vetustinae nec tibi bucca placet.
ex istis nihil es, fateor, Sextille: quid ergo es?
nescio, sed tu scis res superesse duas.
Roar with laughter, Sextillus, at anyone who calls you a poofter and stick out your middle finger. But you are neither a bugger nor a fucker, Sextillus, nor is Vetustina’s hot mouth your fancy. You are none of those things, I admit, Sextillus. So what are you then? I don’t know. But you know that two possibilities are left.
This epigram, an attack on Sextilius initially packaged as a defence against malicious accusation, is really an invitation to the reader to work out what the ‘two remaining possibilities’ are, the answer in this case being palpable: Sextilius is either a cunnilingus or a fellator, or both, activities alike regarded as feminising. At other times, the reader has to work a little harder, as in 2.78:
Aestivo serves ubi piscem tempore, quaeris?
in thermis serva, Caeciliane, tuis.
Do you want to know where you are to keep fish in summer time? Keep them in your warm baths (thermis), Caecilianus.
Here the question disingenuously placed in Caecilianus’ mouth in line 1 is a set-up for the paradox of line 2, which a little reflection will unpick: thermis is a misnomer and Caecilianus’ hot baths are actually so cold that one could store fish there in the broiling Mediterranean summer.23
Craig Williams, in his commentary on Book 2, uses the term ‘riddle’ to characterise certain of Martial’s epigrams, and it does seem that the poet at times sets out pleasurably to tease his readers by composing epigrams that admit of no definitive solution24 but instead throw up several alternative explanations. Take for example 10.95:
Infantem tibi vir, tibi, Galla, remisit adulter.
hi, puto, non dubie se futuisse negant.
Your husband, Galla, sent your baby back to you and so did your lover. Beyond question (non dubie), I think, they deny having fucked you (non […] futuisse negant).
This epigram is evidently an attack on Galla,25 but beyond that several interpretations, not necessarily exclusive of each other, beckon. One explanation is that Galla’s baby bears no resemblance to either her husband or her lover, but exhibits clear similarities to a third party, so that the first two reject her attempts to foist upon them an infant that is palpably not theirs and thereby disclaim having ‘fucked’ her.26 In that case Martial is spoofing, as he does elsewhere,27 the matrimonial dictum that the likeness of a child to its father was proof of a woman’s chastity, in order to mock Galla for serial adultery. A second alternative, which lays rather more weight on the punchline non […] futuisse negant than on the baby, would hypothesise that Galla has become so ugly that both husband and lover wish decisively (non dubie) to disclaim any sexual association with her, much as Horace in Epodes 8 and 12 attempts to disassociate himself from continued involvement with an allegedly superannuated and repulsive female. The situation would then be broadly similar to 12.26, ‘you say that you were fucked by bandits, Saenia: but the bandits deny it’, which seems to mean that the bandits confess their thievish activities, but reject any suggestion that they had intercourse with someone as ill-favoured as Saenia, whatever she may claim to the contrary. A third possibility, embraced by Shackleton Bailey and more recently by Hessen,28 but already hinted at by Farnaby, is that both her husband and her lover did not have vaginal – hence potentially procreative – intercourse with Galla, but instead engaged in some kind of sexually deviant behaviour,29 presumably oral: cf. 3.96 ‘you lick, you don’t fuck my girl, and yet you talk like a lover and fucker’.
It is not easy to choose between these three alternatives. A similar problem confronts us in 11.19, a brief lampoon against (presumably) the same Galla as before:
Quaeris cur nolim te ducere, Galla? diserta es.
saepe soloecismum mentula nostra facit.
You ask why I am unwilling to marry you, Galla? You are too literate. My cock (mentula) often commits a solecism.
This epigram was imitated by Juvenal in his sixth Satire, against women and marriage, where he concludes a diatribe against the insufferability of an over-educated wife with the put-down ‘let a husband be allowed to commit a solecism’.30 In Juvenal’s adaptation, mention of a solecism makes perfect sense: the satirist protests that a husband should be able to make an error in syntax (soloecismum) without being subjected to a humiliating correction by his pedantic wife. But what are we to make of the remark ‘my cock often commits a solecism’? Kay, in his commentary on Book 11, finds the key to unlocking the epigram in diserta, ‘too literate’: Martial’s cock cannot match up to Galla’s sexual eloquence, being sometimes ‘inept in intercourse’.31 But this explanation seems to drift dangerously far from the root meaning of soloecismus and might look to our eyes a bit feeble. A possible alternative that better respects the sense of soloecismus might take as its premise the fact that a solecism frequently means the grammatically illegitimate combination of a singular with a plural.32 Martial in fact plays with precisely this sense of the word in 5.38: this involves a joke about two brothers, the first of whom possesses the equestrian census, permitting him to occupy one of the seats reserved for knights in the theatre, while the other does not. In attempting, although two, to claim a seat which properly belongs to only one, the brothers perpetrate a ‘solecism’, an idea expressed in a masterpiece of faulty grammar which cannot be captured in English: unus cum sitis, duo, Calliodore, sedebis? / surge: σολοικισμόν, Calliodore, facis.33 Pursuant to this logic, the sense of 11.19 might be that Martial’s mentula, albeit singular,34 often conjoins itself with more than one person, or, perhaps better, with two lovers in a single bed,35 an offence against the protocols of both syntax and marriage. Or, if this solution does not persuade, we might seek assistance from a passage of Horace (Epod. 8.15–18), the general sense of which is perspicuous, although the textual and interpretative details are highly contentious: that book learning (in the case of the Epode represented by ‘Stoic pamphlets’) has no relevance to the male sexual organ, which is illiteratus, i.e. has no interest in matters of higher culture. These two things being irreconcilable, Galla’s excessive literacy acts as a positive deterrent to marriage for one who constructs his poetic self, particularly in Book 11, as a dyed-in-the-wool sensualist.
When it comes to the not insubstantial body of epigrams that have proved problematical, it can be difficult to determine whether readers are missing the point of a piece, or whether the poem in question is simply more jejune than one would wish: to put it another way, whether interpreters have read into it subtleties or hidden meanings that may not be there. A further complication here is that jokes which might appear unfunny to us need not have done so to the Romans, because of their quite different cultural preconceptions.36 A good test case is 2.17, the highly circumstantial details of which seem to push the explanation in two different directions, one of them to our mind a little flat. It reads:
Tonstrix Suburae faucibus sedet primis,
cruenta pendent qua flagella tortorum
Argique Letum multus obsidet sutor.
sed ista tonstrix, Ammiane, non tondet,
non tondet, inquam. quid igitur facit? radit.
A female barber (tonstrix) sits right at the entrance of the Subura, where the bloody lashes of the torturers hang and many a cobbler throngs Argiletum. But that female barber, Ammianus, does not clip (non tondet), she doesn’t clip (non tondet), I say. So what does she do? She skins you (radit).
Now radere is the regular verb for ‘shaving’ someone. But the term here must have a loaded sense, first as a single-word sentence embodying the point to which the epigram leads up37 and second because Martial emphatically distinguishes38 what barbers normally do, that is tondere, ‘clip’ or ‘trim’ the hair and beard, from what this particular tonstrix does, namely, radit. But what exactly is that loaded sense? There are two possibilities, both of which gain legitimacy from details in the epigram. The first depends on the suggestion that the tonstrix moonlights as a prostitute. In favour of this solution is the place where she plies her trade, the Subura, which was not only very crowded and hence good for attracting customers, but also notorious as Rome’s red-light district. Moreover, she ‘sits’ at the entrance to the Subura, one of the postures assumed by prostitutes on the lookout for punters.39 Furthermore, her sex is surely significant: Roman barbers were usually male. If then the tonstrix is also a whore, radit, it is suggested, has the secondary meaning that she ‘skins’40 or ‘strips’ her customers of all they’ve got (a rare financial metaphor for which a passage of Persius, 3.49–50, is cited as a – not entirely cogent – parallel):41 such rapacity was typical of ancient demi-mondaines.42
An alternative path along which interpretation might proceed is to explain radit as ‘scrapes’43 or even ‘lacerates’.44 In other words, to be shaved by the tonstrix was a brutal, painful business (the closest modern analogy might be ‘she doesn’t exfoliate you, she excoriates you’). We have just seen that the epigram contains details which sit neatly with the first interpretation. But there are other details which equally lend authority to the alternative. The ‘bloody scourges of the torturers’ which hang where the tonstrix conducts her business seem to set the scene for a similarly gory trade: while the tmesis in line 3 of Argiletum (contiguous with the Subura) into Argique Letum45 foregrounds the idea of letum, ‘death’, calling to mind the absurdly exaggerated claim of 11.84, discussed in Chapter 3, that a visit to Antiochus the barber means a premature end to one’s life. There are, moreover, satiric accounts aplenty of the brutality of ancient barbers,46 and when Martial praises the light touch of the dead boy barber Pantagathus (6.52), there is a clear implication that others were not so deft.
If we plump for the second, more straightforward47 explanation two conclusions suggest themselves: first, that commentators may have been over-ingenious in explicating 2.17, detecting subtleties that are not necessarily present, a pattern repeated elsewhere;48 second, that this is not one of Martial’s more felicitous productions – 11.84, on the brutal Antiochus, is surely more ingenious and amusing. There is nothing particularly surprising about the fact that Martial can treat the same theme with unequal success, or compose epigrams that are less than inspired or fall short of his best efforts. Throughout his corpus Martial is engagingly self-depreciatory about his poetic talents.49 Of particular note are 1.16: ‘among the things which you read here, there are good pieces, there are some that are indifferent and there are more that are bad. In no other way, Avitus, is a book made’,50 and 7.81, a reply to a hostile critic: ‘“there are 30 bad epigrams in the whole book”. If there are as many good ones as that, Lausus, it’s a good book.’51 Of course there is a great deal of posturing here, with various factors at work – the conventional mock-modesty of poets and literary artists more generally, an awareness of epigram’s place at the bottom of the generic ladder and, finally, the influence of Catullus, who affects to regard his shorter poems as trifles or of questionable value, a stance that Martial imitates both attitudinally and dictionally. But for all that, there is some truth in the self-criticisms of 1.16 and 7.81; accordingly, attempts by interpreters to uncover more point than can legitimately be found in some of the arguably less successful pieces rest in the end on an unwillingness to accept that Martial occasionally nods; or, to put it another way, such critics are so dazzled by the consistency of Martial’s wit and brilliance that they find it hard to accept that he is capable of penning poems that are flat or lame. For there can be no doubt that, quantitatively and qualitatively speaking, the good immensely outweighs the bad.
We have been arguing that one of the especial pleasures in reading Martial lies in supplying answers to the interpretative questions which he likes to pose to his audience at the conclusion of a poem; and, more generally, in decoding the puzzles which he sets them, in extracting all the nuances that can lie beneath the surface of a piece, in having to weigh two or more competing explanations of a text, and lastly in testing how far we should push the explicatory possibilities of a given epigram. Of course, the reader who feels that he or she has cracked the code, so to speak, will feel a heightened sense of appreciation for the poet that is grounded partly in self-satisfaction, rather like the consumer of a detective novel who works out the identity of the murderer in advance of the denouement. This said, it must be conceded, as noted at the outset of this chapter, that Martial will occasionally stump the interpreter. That does not however necessarily mean that the enjoyment entailed in unpacking an epigram is nullified or drastically curtailed. There remains the intellectual reward of seeing just how far one can get in understanding the relevant piece, even if its meaning cannot entirely be fathomed. An intriguing instance is 4.31:
Quod cupis in nostris dicique legique libellis
et nonnullus honos creditur iste tibi,
ne valeam si non res est gratissima nobis
et volo te chartis inseruisse meis.
sed tu nomen habes averso fonte sororum
impositum, mater quod tibi dura dedit;
quod nec Melpomene, quod nec Polyhymnia possit
nec pia cum Phoebo dicere Calliope.
ergo aliquod gratum Musis tibi nomen adopta:
non belle semper dicitur ‘Hippodame’.
That you desire to be mentioned and read in my little books and believe this to be a considerable distinction, I’ll be damned if that isn’t most gratifying to me, and I want to include you in (inseruisse) my pages. But you have a name laid on you when the Sisters’ fountain (fonte sororum) was averse, one which a cruel mother gave to you; one which neither Melpomene nor Polyhymnia, nor dutiful Calliope in company with Phoebus could utter. So adopt some name that is agreeable to the Muses. It is not pretty (non belle) to be always saying ‘Hippodame’.
What makes this epigram peculiarly challenging is its indeterminacy of tone, and even more the multiple ironies with which it is layered. Martial claims that he would like to accommodate the wish of a certain lady whom he dubs ‘Hippodame’ to be mentioned in his pages, but is prevented by the metrical intractability of her actual (presumably Roman) name. Yet he goes out of his way to advertise his metrical virtuosity by including in lines 7–8 the polysyllabic names of three of the Muses of poetry and by employing a periphrasis for the inspirational spring of the Muses, Hippocrene (disconcertingly similar to Hippodame!), in the expression fonte sororum. Moreover, in the first three poems of the Earinus-cycle of Book 9 (11–13) he displays remarkable skill in inventing clever but transparent periphrases for the likewise metrically recalcitrant name of Domitian’s eunuch-favourite. So even if the words ‘Melpomene could not utter it, nor Polyhymnia, nor dutiful Calliope’ mean, as some early commentators argue,52 that the offending name could not be fitted into the metres of tragedy, lyric and epic, with which genres the three Muses in question came to be associated, it is hard to believe that some way could not have been found to circumvent the problem of nomenclature53 and hence that it was not necessary for Martial to be always using the name Hippodame. This brings to the fore the issue of what the poet means by ‘there is something not pretty about forever saying Hippodame’. A clue here is surely the fact that when he uses the adverbial expressions belle, non belle and the corresponding adjective bellus, it is almost invariably with sardonic or censorious force.54 This in turn would indicate that there is some barb concealed in the name Hippodame, and that pedestrian suggestions such as that the lady’s real name was Domitia Caballina55 quite miss the point. But what is that point? Hippodame literally means ‘horse-subduer’, being compounded of Greek hippos, ‘horse’ and damaō, ‘subdue, break in’. Is Martial then punning on Greek kelētizein, sexual slang for a woman ‘riding’ a man (i.e. being atop him in intercourse, a position associated with libertine women56) and, in a deliberately shocking effect, attributed by him elsewhere to the epic heroine Andromache, who supposedly ‘sat on the Hectorean horse’ (11.104.14)? Or does he mean us to think of the mythological Hippodameia, whose name had an alternative form ‘Hippodame’ (Verg. G. 3.7, Nic. fr. 104.5–6), and who, according to some versions of the myth, committed incest with her father?57 And if either of these possibilities applies, is Martial then accusing his unnamed woman of being a prostitute,58 or of engaging in incest, a theme on which he jests elsewhere (2.4, 4.16)? In that case, is the apparent attitude of goodwill in lines 1–4 a blind (it may seem suspiciously overhyped)? Or is Martial merely saying that the name Hippodame has distinctly unfortunate connotations? But, if so, why not choose a less compromising periphrasis – something which, as noted, 9.11–13 shows he was perfectly capable of doing? In the end, all the clues that Martial scatters throughout 4.31 do not yield a clear solution to the poem’s meaning.59 But it is a distinct pleasure and a tease to unravel them as far as one can: and that must have been part of Martial’s purpose in penning the poem.60
One of Martial’s most attractive traits is his clever blending of wit with literary allusiveness.61 In the process the source-text or -myth is often spoofed or banalised.62 For example, in 3.85 an adulterer who has been grotesquely mutilated by a vengeful husband63 – an idea rooted at base in the impromptu sanctions meted out to their wives’ paramours by Roman spouses64 – becomes parodically a latter-day ‘Deiphobus’, the name borne by the Trojan hero who took over Helen of Troy following Paris’ death, and had his ears and nose retributively cut off by Helen’s husband Menelaus when, after a ten-year-long war, the Greeks finally captured the city (Verg. Aen. 6.494–7). In 5.72, ‘he who could call the Thunderer the mother of Bacchus can call Semele, Rufus, his father’,65 Martial uses a biological reductio ad absurdum to mock the preciosity of poets who called Bacchus by the Greek compound adjective dimatōr or its Latin calque bimater (cf. Ov. Met. 4.12), literally ‘having two mothers’:66 the reference is to the stitching up of Bacchus in Jupiter’s thigh following the incineration of his mother Semele by Jupiter’s lightning, leading to the baby’s eventual birth at full term from the god’s thigh.
A further example of Martial’s combination of humour with intertextual allusiveness calls for discussion at slightly greater length: 12.77, which is incidentally a good instance of that occasionality which characterises his epigrams. This piece is also noteworthy for its highly effective combination of two registers, linguistic and literary, in a mere 12 lines.
Multis dum precibus Iovem salutat
stans summos resupinus usque in ungues
Aethon in Capitolio, pepedit.
riserunt homines, sed ipse divom
offensus genitor trinoctiali
affecit domicenio clientem.
post hoc flagitium misellus Aethon,
cum vult in Capitolium venire,
sellas ante petit Paterclianas
et pedit deciesque viciesque.
sed quamvis sibi caverit crepando,
compressis natibus Iovem salutat.
As Aethon on the Capitol greeted Jupiter with many prayers, bending backwards and standing on the very tips of his toes, he farted. People laughed, but the father of the deities himself was offended and punished his client with dining at home for a triad of nights. After this scandal, when poor little Aethon wants to go the Capitol, he first makes for Paterclus’ latrines and farts ten or 20 times. But though he has buttressed himself by breaking wind, he greets Jupiter with clenched buttocks.
Here the protagonist is identified as a captator cenae, a chaser after dinner invitations, by the peculiarly specialised nature of the punishment, a trinoctiale domicenium, ‘three nights of home dining’, inflicted upon him by Jupiter for farting in his Capitoline temple: having to dine at home was the worst fate conceivable for such a person. A further clue to his identity is the quite extraordinary measures he takes (ll. 7–12) to avoid repeating his faux-pet. Aethon, then, is a parasite, a comic type who is always going around hungry.67 But his name – significantly, nowhere else in surviving Latin literature attached to a person68 – conjures up another starveling, but in a jarringly different context, the mythic Erysichthon, upon whom Demeter laid an insatiable hunger for ignoring a divine command not to cut down a tree in her sacred grove, the upshot of which, in at least one version of the legend,69 was autophagy. Aethon, we know, was the nickname of Erysichthon,70 and Callimachus, in his account of the tale in Hymn 6, plays on this when he says that Erysichthon’s punishment took the form of an aithōn limos, ‘a blazing hunger’ (ll. 66–7).
Both Martial’s Aethon and his mythological congener, then, are punished with the same fate, starvation, for an offence against a deity: but their respective offences are comically disparate, an inadvertent fart in one case, a hubristic disregard71 for a divine warning in the other.72 The clash of contextual registers is cleverly matched within the epigram by a witty oscillation between vulgar language (ll. 1–3, 7–12,73) and mock-solemnity (ll. 4–6): of especial note in the latter lines74 are the dignified periphrasis for Jupiter, divom […] genitor, the tone of elevation being enhanced by the archaic genitive plural form in –om, by attaching to Jupiter the qualifier ipse, with its epic and oracular resonances,75 and finally by two impressive-sounding polysyllabic coinages, trinoctiale and domicenium. The effect of all this is to make Aethon an Erysichthon in miniature, someone for whom being unable to dine out for three nights represents an unmitigated disaster, much like the Selius of 2.11, who exhibits all the signs of deep mourning if he fails to cadge a dinner invitation (in Martial’s words, if he domi cenat, ‘dines at home’). But now (ll. 7–12), in an effect of contextual and linguistic bathos, the poem bottoms out, so to speak, with a reference to a public latrine, multiple precautionary farts, duly captured by the alliterative onomatopoeia of ‘p’ and ‘c’, and the risible concluding detail that Aethon now addresses Jupiter ‘with compressed buttocks’, a wicked spoof on the idea, implicit in the over-the-top devotionalism of line 2 – no doubt responsible for the offending fart in the first place – that ancient prayer was highly gestural.76 Martial’s Aethon is thus no more than a whimsical and reductive alter ego of his mythological namesake, a parasite defined solely by his fixation with food.
It was noted earlier that, in discussing his models for writing Latin epigram, Martial gives top billing to Catullus. A key way in which that indebtedness expresses itself is by creative adaptations of Catullan poems, sometimes overt, sometimes more subtle. A good instance of the first type is 3.12:
Unguentum, fateor, bonum dedisti
convivis here, sed nihil scidisti.
res salsa est bene olere et esurire.
qui non cenat et unguitur, Fabulle,
hic vere mihi mortuus videtur.
You gave a good perfume to your guests yesterday, I admit, but you carved nothing. It’s an amusing thing to smell nice and to go hungry. A man who doesn’t dine but is perfumed, Fabullus, is truly dead to my way of thinking.
This epigram explicitly evokes one of Catullus’ most famous pieces, c.13, much imitated by Martial,77 a mock-invitation in which the poet asks Fabullus to dinner, with the proviso that he bring the food, a beautiful girl, wine, wit and laughter: all the poet can contribute is a miraculous unguent given to Lesbia by the Venuses and Cupids. But the Catullan original is cleverly stood on its head. Previously the invitee, Fabullus is now the host. Like Catullus, he provides a high-quality unguent, and nothing else (‘you carved nothing’). But whereas Catullus could claim the excuse of poverty on this score (‘for your friend Catullus’ little money bag is full – of cobwebs’, ll. 7–8), Fabullus belongs to the genus stingy host, one of Martial’s favourite targets: an extreme instance at that, since the concluding verse seems to hint that Fabullus’ guests are at risk of death from inanition. And whereas the Catullan Fabullus was requested to bring sal (in the transferred sense of ‘wit’, but also punning on the literal meaning of ‘salt’), Fabullus’ feast is conversely revealed as a sour joke (‘to be nicely scented and to go hungry, that’s amusing, res salsa’) – after the event, for the Catullan invitation to ‘a good meal’ (l. 1) has been transformed into a retrospective on a bad one.78
One of the more notorious of Catullus’ poems is the scandalous79 c.57:
they suit one another other beautifully, the shameless queens (pulchre convenit improbis cinaedis, l. 1), those poofters Mamurra and Caesar. And no wonder (nec mirum, l. 3). Equivalent black marks, one urban, the other Formian, are stamped indelibly on each. Equally diseased (morbosi pariter, l. 6),80 twins in vice, both with their little store of learning gained on one mini-couch,81 both with an equally boundless appetite for adultery, mates and rivals of the nymphets. They suit one another beautifully, the shameless queens (pulchre convenit improbis cinaedis).
Martial’s reworking (8.35) of c.57, composed in the same metre as the original,82 runs:
Cum sitis similes paresque vita,
uxor pessima, pessimus maritus,
miror non bene convenire vobis.
Since you two are alike and matched in your way of life, a rotten wife and a rotten husband, I am surprised that you don’t get along well with one another.
Martial compresses the ten lines of c.57 into a mere three, almost every word of which echoes Catullus. Pariter reappears as pares, mirum becomes miror, the impersonal verb convenire with the dative occupies the final line of both poems; pulchre resurfaces as its near-synonym bene. In addition, the pessima, pessimus of line 2 clearly evokes the anaphoric pessimus of another Catullan poem, 49.5–6.83 Furthermore, although the point is not made with anything like the same expansiveness or level of detail as in Catullus, the habits of Martial’s couple, ‘alike and matched in your way of life’, both ‘rotten’, mesh as neatly as do those of Caesar and Mamurra, presumably embracing, as with these, every kind of vicious behaviour, particularly in the sexual arena. All the more surprising then (miror), says Martial, unexpectedly inverting the situation in Catullus (as well as the traditional idea underpinning it, that kindred spirits get along with one another84), that the pair don’t suit one another. It is not entirely clear what the epigrammatist means by the concluding paradox, but the fact that he changes the same-sex pair of the original into husband and wife may offer a clue.85 The keystone of a successful marriage, Romans believed, was concordia, ‘harmony’, or, in Greek terms, ὁμοϕροσύνη, literally ‘being of like mind’.86 Conversely, according to theorists of the institution, the most ruinous thing for a marriage was for one of the parties (usually the wife) to be of bad character.87 Here however husband and wife have, in the juristic phrase, a bene concordans matrimonium, a marriage in which both parties are attuned to each other, in the anomalous sense that both are equally vicious. But somehow that viciousness contrives to break the mould, and they cannot get along – perhaps because of mutual infidelity?
Now for one final example of a Martialian reworking of a Catullan text, the famous 85:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and love. Perhaps you ask why I do this. I don’t know, but I feel it happen and am tortured.
Martial’s version (1.32) is:
Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare:
hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.
I don’t love you, Sabidius, but I can’t tell why. All I can tell is this: I don’t love you.
Here the confused sensations of love and hate which Catullus entertained for his mistress Lesbia are replaced by a single feeling of dislike (non amo), Catullus’ amo being retained but made to correspond to his odi by the addition of non. Keeping interrogative quare, ‘why’, but sacrificing in favour of verbal balance (‘I can’t tell why. All I can tell is this’) the question which Catullus puts in his addressee’s mouth,88 ‘perhaps you ask why I do this’, Martial replicates, but in a non-amatory context, Catullus’ incapacity to explain his feelings. These appear to rest in Sabidius’ case on an instinctive dislike,89 unless, with some,90 we explain ‘I can’t tell why’ as meaning that Sabidius practises some vice too unspeakable to name: in which case we are dealing with a much more radical and trenchant alteration of the Catullan template.
A most attractive, perhaps underappreciated dimension of Martial’s art91 is his capacity to incorporate the most diverse subject matter within a single epigram. Possibly the best-known instance of such hybridity is 5.37,92 where a famously charming lament for the pet slave Erotion mutates at the close into an attack on the hypocrisy of Paetus, who informs Martial that his distress at the death of a little slave girl is out of all proportion: the poet is told to take a leaf out of Paetus’ book, since he is bearing up despite the loss of an exemplary wife – who has left him an immense fortune. What remarkable fortitude on Paetus’ part, sneers the poet.93
The example just discussed is a relatively straightforward one, combining as it does a mere two modes, epikedeion and skoptikon.94 Often however Martial will run together multiple topics or ideas within the confines of a short epigram. A good example of a poem which ranges over a large amount of thematic territory within a brief compass is 6.27:
Bis vicine Nepos – nam tu quoque proxima Florae
incolis et veteres tu quoque Ficelias –
est tibi, quae patria signatur imagine vultus,
testis maternae nata pudicitiae.
tu tamen annoso nimium ne parce Falerno,
et potius plenos aere relinque cados.
sit pia, sit locuples, sed potet filia mustum:
amphora cum domina nunc nova fiet anus.
Caecuba non solos vindemia nutriat orbos:
possunt et patres vivere, crede mihi.
Nepos, my neighbour twice over (for you too live in the proximity of Flora’s temple and you too at old Ficeliae), you have a daughter whose face is stamped with her father’s likeness, witness to her mother’s virtue. All the same, don’t be excessively sparing of your aged Falernian, but rather leave behind you casks filled with cash. Let your girl be dutiful, let her be rich, but let her drink new wine; the flagon that is new now will grow old along with its mistress. Let not Caecuban vintage nourish only the childless. Fathers too can enjoy life, believe me.
There are at least four distinct strands to this poem: first, topographical and autobiographical data establishing a connection between Martial and his addressee (they are neighbours in both town and country); next, the subject of Nepos’ daughter (whose clear resemblance to Nepos is proof of his wife’s chastity),95 the fulcrum about which the epigram pivots. Third, the advice that – notwithstanding (tamen) the gratifying existence of offspring – Nepos should drink freely of his aged Falernian, restricting his daughter to the most recent vintage: this is an original and slightly edgy take96 on the Horatian maxim carpe diem, that is, the principle that one should enjoy life to the full, not deferring one’s pleasures, an ethos often assuming the form, as here, of consuming one’s first-rate wine,97 rather than leaving it to one’s heirs.98 Last, after a lexical bow to Catullus with an echo of the latter’s innovative use of anus, ‘old’, as an adjective,99 a further piece of admonition, that fathers too are permitted to enjoy grands crus, which should not be the sole preserve of orbi, that is to say the rich and childless, to whom legacy hunters would typically offer expensive gifts such as fine wines in the hope of inducing their victims to leave them a bequest. In sum, 6.27 combines in a highly original confection personal details about both Martial and Nepos, protreptic in a popular Epicurean vein and a tangential attack upon a familiar satiric type.
A particularly dense instance of the phenomenon presently under consideration is 9.66:
Uxor cum tibi sit formosa, pudica, puella,
quo tibi natorum iura, Fabulle, trium?
quod petis a nostro supplex dominoque deoque
tu dabis ipse tibi, si potes arrigere.
Seeing that you have a wife (uxor) who is beautiful (formosa), virtuous and young, Fabullus, what do you want with the Right of Three Children? What you seek as a petitioner from our Lord and God, you will give to yourself, if you can erect.
The opening verse of 9.66 ascribes to the wife of ‘Fabullus’ (a markedly Catullan name100) three stock attributes of the ideal Roman matron, youth, beauty and fidelity,101 thereby setting up the paradox of lines 2–3, that Fabullus, despite being wedded to an exemplary, physically desirable spouse, is soliciting the emperor for the Right of Three Children: a paradox which coincidentally allows Martial to indulge in one of his favourite ploys, making his protagonist inadvertently reveal some secret vice or defect.102 The reference in line 2 to the ius trium natorum,103 the Right of Three Children, is, in stark contrast to the initial verse with its straightforward catalogue form,104 multi-layered. At the most basic level, the unexpectedness of Fabullus’ request prepares the ground for the final disclosure that his petition is, risibly, a matter of necessity, since he is unable to have sex with his wife. Further, there is a strong, distinctly sardonic implication that Fabullus’ request will fail: the Right of Three Children was, broadly speaking, a legal fiction whereby those who, through no fault of their own, had failed to produce the number of children desiderated by the law, were counted as parents – thereby gaining the rewards (rights of inheritance, etc.) for parenthood and avoiding the penalties for childlessness, which were key provisos of the Augustan marriage legislation. But since Fabullus has not got past first base, so to speak, the chances of his petition succeeding must be slim. Third, mention of the right in question is surely a piece of smug self-advertisement on Martial’s part, conjuring up the grant of this privilege to himself by both Titus and Domitian, something of which he likes to boast,105 and simultaneously drawing a schadenfroh contrast with the wretched Fabullus. After this (l. 3) comes an honorific mention of Domitian, the target of Fabullus’ petition, as ‘Lord and God’, supposedly that emperor’s preferred style of address.106 The poem is then rounded off by the revelation of Fabullus’ impotence (‘what you seek […] you will give yourself, if you can erect’), a favourite satiric theme:107 whether because of Fabullus’ physical incapacity or because his tastes do not run to the sexually normative, we are not told.
In his stimulating, if occasionally wayward Erotik und Panegyrik: Martials epigrammatische Kaiser, Sven Lorenz makes two important, interrelated observations: that Martial does not portray the historical Domitian (that is to say, his Domitian is as much a poetic construct as the persona fashioned for himself by the epigrammatist),108 and that Domitian is viewed from the perspective of the epigrammatic ‘I’, who, in praising the emperor, holds fast to the rules of the genre – whence that admixture of humour or ribaldry with encomium of Caesar which is characteristic of Martial, his panegyric pieces not least.109 It is the second of these points, the mix of comedy and panegyric, which concerns us here. This feature is of some importance, not merely as in itself a significant aspect of Martial’s style, but also because the leavening of praise with wit can make more agreeable to modern readers that aspect of Martial’s epigrams which, perhaps more than any other, may seem alien and uncongenial, namely, egregious flattery of the several emperors under whom the poet wrote.110 For Martial’s imperial panegyric (like Roman imperial panegyric in general) was not of the ‘integrationist’ type, as theorists of propaganda like to term it, that is, ideologically freighted material whereby its consumer is nudged gently towards a particular viewpoint which the authorities wish to see embraced by society at large; rather, it is of the unsubtle, ‘in your face’ variety.111 But the potential stumbling block which this poses can, as just suggested, be alleviated by the humour with which at least some of the imperial encomia are infused.
A brief instance is 9.83:
Inter tanta tuae miracula, Caesar, harenae,
quae vincit veterum munera clara ducum,
multum oculi, sed plus aures debere fatentur
se tibi, quod spectant qui recitare solent.
Among the great marvels of your arena, Caesar, which surpasses the famous shows of the old leaders, our eyes confess that they owe you much, but our ears even more, in that habitual reciters become spectators.
Here one of Martial’s favourite panegyric themes, that the shows mounted by Domitian (and before him by his brother Titus) surpass in magnificence and originality all those staged by their predecessors,112 is unexpectedly twinned with a concluding jest against a familiar satiric target,113 also prominent in Martial,114 the inveterate reciter. But even such nuisances, who elsewhere in Martial’s corpus inflict their poems on their dinner guests and do not even baulk at following their victims into the public toilets,115 are mercifully reduced to silence by the splendour of Domitian’s spectacles, an idea which takes the form of a clever paradox: the ears, even more than the eyes, are the beneficiaries of Domitian’s visual spectacles.
A somewhat longer example from the same book, 9.70, is marked by a similar heterogeneity of content, rolling into one a complex of literary allusions, imperial panegyric and humorous dispraise of a hypocrite:
Dixerat ‘o mores! o tempora!’ Tullius olim,
sacrilegum strueret cum Catilina nefas,
cum gener atque socer diris concurreret armis
maestaque civili caede maderet humus.
cur nunc ‘o mores!’ cur nunc ‘o tempora!’ dicis?
quod tibi non placeat, Caeciliane, quid est?
nulla ducum feritas, nulla est insania ferri;
pace frui certa laetitiaque licet.
non nostri faciunt tibi quod tua tempora sordent,
sed faciunt mores, Caeciliane, tui.
‘What morals! What times!’ (o mores! o tempora!) said Tullius [Cicero] long ago, when Catiline was contriving impious villainy, when father-in-law and son-in-law (gener atque socer) were clashing in dread combat and the sad soil was awash with civil slaughter. But why do you say now ‘What morals!’, why now ‘What times!’? What is there to displease you, Caecilianus? There is no savagery of leaders, no madness of steel. One can enjoy assured peace and happiness. It’s not our morals that blacken our times in your eyes, Caecilianus, it’s your own.
The primary aim of this piece is the drawing of a flattering contrast between the bloody civil strife which marked the final decades of the Republic (ll. 1–4) and the universal peace and harmony which prevail under Domitian (ll. 7–8): the internecine dissensions of the earlier time are encapsulated in two (slightly altered) quotations from the literature of the period, the famous protest o tempora, o mores! from the opening of Cicero’s Catilinarians and the complaint of Catullus 29 against Caesar and his son-in-law Pompey, socer generque, perdidistis omnia, ‘father-in-law and son-in-law, you have ruined everything’. But the panegyric is supplemented by a comic–scoptic figure in the shape of Caecilianus, who hijacks the Ciceronian tag o tempora, o mores! (ll. 1, 5), applying it without justification to the present day (‘what is there to displease you [nowadays], Caecilianus?’, l. 6). But since there can be no warrant for this, says Martial (ll. 7–8), in a typical manoeuvre turning the tables on his antagonist, the conclusion must be that, if Caecilianus finds something rotten in the state of Denmark, the sepsis comes from him.116 Thus an essentially panegyric piece ends with a satiric take-down of one of Martial’s favourite butts, the bogus moralist who rails against the decadence of the times in order to cloak his own corruption.
As a coda to the argument above on the marriage of imperial praise and humorous dispraise, it may be noted that Martial composed a whole series of comic scenes on the farcical stratagems resorted to by fictive personages seeking to evade the provisions of the Roscian Law,117 enacted in 67 BCE but revived by Domitian, whereby the first 14 rows in the theatre were reserved for the knights.118 Evidently Martial felt no discomfort in integrating the rather absurdist humour of these poems with his support for the imperial reaffirmation of the seating provisions,119 any more than he thought the juicy sexual comedy of certain of his poems on Domitian’s revival of the Julian laws on adultery out of kilter with the determination of the emperor, as censor in perpetuity, to rein in marital immorality. It is sometimes claimed120 that epigrams such as 6.7 (Telesilla is marrying for the tenth time in the mere 30 days since the Julian laws were renewed)121 or 6.22 (Proculina weds her lover in order to avoid punishment under the Julian law: this is not a marriage, but a confession) satirise the ineffectuality of Domitian’s attempt to change Roman sexual morality. But it may equally be argued that poems such as these are simply an alternative, more winning way of bringing to public notice the revival of the Lex Iulia than a straightforward piece of puff like 6.4, ‘greatest of censors, and prince of princes, though Rome already owes you so many triumphs, so many temples coming to birth, so many reborn, so many spectacles, so many gods, so many cities, she owes you more because she is chaste’:122 the first procedure besides is more in keeping with the generic tonalities of epigram, which is by nature witty, irreverent and scabrous.123 To put it another way, the emphasis in 6.7, 6.22, 6.45, 5.75 and the like falls not on the supposed failure of Domitian’s marital reforms, but on making comic hay with the absurd extremes to which a series of (undoubtedly fictional)124 female libertines are driven in order to comply with the letter, but certainly not the spirit, of the law.
To conclude the above section: variation, the ability to treat similar material in quite different styles or from entirely different perspectives, is a hallmark of Martial’s art, as of epigram in general. Perhaps nowhere is this facility better on display than in his poetics of panegyric, which range, as we have seen, from extremes of hyperbole to low comedy.
Finally, a word on the structure of the poetic book. In a theory that has attained some notoriety, Peter White claimed that Martial’s poems were originally issued to friends and acquaintances in informal pamphlets, which he styled libelli, that these were the primary mode of dissemination, and that only later were the epigrams gathered together in individual books.125 This so-called libellus theory has now been effectively discredited:126 but it had important ramifications for the understanding of a significant aspect of Martial’s style. One of White’s main arguments was that certain epigrams betray their origins by not fitting properly in the published books. Such a postulate has proved an impediment to appreciation of the great artistry with which Martial organised and structured his books of epigrams, a dimension of his work which has come increasingly under the microscope in recent years. It has long been recognised that the poet incorporates thematic cycles in his books, for example the hare and lion sequence of Book 1, the Earinus-cluster in Book 9, or a series of pieces in Book 4 on the topic of saying ‘no’ sexually.127 But, as critics have lately seen, there is far more to the matter than this: we also find ring composition within books (e.g. 1.2 and 117, 4.4 and 87), juxtaposing of poems on interconnected themes,128 the erecting of associative bridges between two or more poems by means of addressee or by verbal or contextual links,129 the insertion of a poem or poems which cast a fresh light on an epigram placed earlier in its book, as well what Lorenz calls ‘dissonant pairings’ (e.g. 4.12 and 13, the first on on a prostitute who is open to all sexual possibilities, the second on a perfectly matched bride and groom). These structural devices and other intratextual ‘webs’ (to borrow a term once more from Lorenz130) are all at the command of Martial, with his keen eye for the hermeneutic possibilities of poetic architecture.
Reception and Scholarship
REACTIONS TO OUR POET have varied greatly over the centuries, conditioned as they have been by both the literary tastes and the social milieu of his readers.1
The comparatively lukewarm nature of the first critical evaluation of Martial’s poetry, by his patron and near-contemporary Pliny the Younger, was, as we saw in Chapter 1, informed by the ancient notion of a hierarchy of genres, on which epigram occupied the bottom rung. In the eighteenth century, a preference on artistic grounds for Catullus over Martial on the part of leading intellectuals and writers in France, especially Voltaire, led to the epigrams suffering a decline in popularity there, while in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Martial’s wit and technical virtuosity held no appeal for most writers of the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on individualism and the expression of inner personal feelings. Underappreciation of the poet lasted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even as late as 1990, J. P. Sullivan could complain of ‘the low esteem in which Latin “epigrams” […] are held’, citing the judgements of Martial on this score by E. J. Kenney and John Bramble in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature, published in 1982.2
By contrast, the epigrams were widely studied, admired and emulated during periods when the genre was especially valued as a vehicle for wit and/or invective, beginning with the Italian Renaissance and continuing throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Great Britain, France, Spain and Germany.
Having been almost entirely neglected during the Middle Ages, Martial was rediscovered by some important Italian pre-Humanists such as Boccaccio; in the Quattrocento, however, he was widely read by the Humanists, almost all of whom owned a copy of his works: an interest attested to by the 100 or more extant manuscripts written in Italy and dating from this period. After the invention of the printing press, Martial was one of the first authors to appear in a printed edition (1471): further editions soon proliferated, as did a number of commentaries by notable Humanists such as Niccolò Perotti, Giorgio Merula and Domizio Calderini. The last of these in particular demonstrated an appreciation of Martial’s essential qualities: his mordant Roman wit, his use of everyday language and pointed style, his frankness and tempering of social criticism with humour. From much the same era, Jovianus Pontanus correctly identified Martial’s adoption of various masks and noted the variable quality of the epigrams.
The process of editing and commentating on Martial, while attesting the importance which the Humanists placed on him, also however became a battleground for bitter disputes, in which accusations of editorial incompetence, plagiarism and intellectual persecution were traded. A particularly fierce feud was carried on between Calderini and Perotti: ironically, the most popular and widely read Martial commentary of the period united in one volume the commentaries of these old antagonists. So fevered did the atmosphere of odium philologum become that Perotti was forced to publish his 1473 edition anonymously and was intimidated by Calderini into withdrawing from the press his full commentary on Martial. We do, however, have Perotti’s Cornucopiae, the most important Martial commentary of the Quattrocento, which deals with 28 poems of the Liber Spectaculorum and all of Book 1.3
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Great Britain saw a flourishing of the epigram as a genre, which was partly the result of the fact that its exponents were frequently amateurs, who had a preference for the short poem; in addition, the richness of life in London, with its variety of characters, offered a source of inspiration similar to that of Martial’s Rome. Epigrams were produced for a variety of occasions such as the deaths of prominent public figures, and at a time when satire was, after drama, the genre most frequently pursued by poets, epigrams of the satiric type were especially popular as a vehicle for attacks on vices of all sorts and against the Church.
In this climate, Martial was a constant source of inspiration to writers in the genres of both satire and epigram; as well, he had a profound technical influence on the English verse form which, prior to the Romantic movement, consisted largely of the heroic couplet with its concentration on antithesis and point.
Martial was also admired in sixteenth-century France, where numerous epigrams in both Latin and the vernacular were produced by poets such as Clément Marot (1497–1544) and other members of the Pléiade. He also inspired satirists such as François de Maynard (1582–1646) and later, writers in the baroque and mannerist styles.
In Spain too during this period Martial was treasured above all as an exponent of witty ‘point’, especially by the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601–58), who also stressed the poet’s use of conceits and the surprise ending. Interest in the poet extended to writers in other genres: for example, Jerónimo Alonso de Salas Barbadillo (1581–1635) inserted epigrams inspired by Martial into his novels, while the satirist Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) found in Martial’s invective pieces a source of inspiration which is evidenced in many of Quevedo’s works in both prose and poetry. An additional factor is also at work here: Martial’s stress on his Spanish provenance, his allusions to Spanish place names and his occasional incorporation into his poetry of native Spanish words (e.g. balux, ‘gold dust’) led to the poet being regarded as an embodiment of Españolismo, a concept of long standing in nationalist ideology.
Satiric epigram also held special appeal for the Lutherans in seventeenth-century Germany as a vehicle for attacks on corrupt clergy, as well as typically Martialian targets such as professionals, ageing nymphomaniacs, parvenus and adulteresses, while the eighteenth century saw the influential work of the most significant theorist of the epigram, Lessing, which we discussed in Chapter 4.
Fluctuations in Martial’s popularity and perceived value have, as we have seen, gone hand in hand with shifting evaluations of the epigrammatic genre. The other factor affecting his reception has been the moral values of the societies in which he has been read. The poet’s flattery of his patrons, especially the emperor Domitian, along with his apparent obsession with gifts and favours, has long attracted moral disapprobation, but has not been seen as a problem in periods when poets were dependent upon the favour and support of patrons, and when poetic flattery of these was accepted as both necessary and in no way an occasion for disgust or condemnation. The Italian Humanists, for instance, dedicated their editions to aristocratic patrons in outrageously flattering terms. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prominent British epigrammatists relied on the patronage of the nobility, to whom they directed celebratory pieces that rivalled Martial in their adulation, such as John Owen’s poem on the occasion of Sir Francis Drake’s knighthood or the following piece by Ben Jonson addressed ‘To the ghost of Martial (XXXV)’:
Martial, thou gav’st far nobler Epigrams
To thy Domitian, than I can my JAMES:
But in my royal subject I pass thee,
Thou flattered’st thine, mine cannot flatter’d be.4
As Boissier aptly observed in 1899:
the only resource on which [Martial] counted was that which all poets had used before him, the liberality of wealthy men, and we have seen that he solicited it without shame. Today we have grown more squeamish […] but do not let us forget that such scruples are fairly recent; our seventeenth century knew them not.5
Martial’s flattery of patrons continues to spark disapproving comments,6 but, as we saw in Chapter 2, our improved understanding of the workings of the patronage system in Roman society allows the contemporary reader at least to tolerate it and, in the case of epigrams where flattery is combined with humour, to gain a renewed appreciation of this aspect of Martial’s work.
Although the explicitly obscene epigrams constitute much less than a quarter of Martial’s oeuvre, they have – unsurprisingly – always exercised a disproportionate influence on critical judgements of the poet’s work. Even in periods of great enthusiasm for Martial and the epigrammatic genre, voices were raised against this element in his poetry. Sometimes this took the form of total excoriation: for instance, the Jesuit Matthaeus Raderus (1561/4–1634) condemned the epigrams both as an offence to Christian doctrine and for the immoral example which they offered to the young, while Andrea Navagero (1483–1529) conducted a ritual book-burning of Martial’s works every year. When the papal list of banned books was initiated in 1559, Martial was (unsurprisingly) included. A few years later, the poet was said by Timothe Kendall to be ‘much mislik’d and loath’d of modest-minded men, for lewd, lascivious, wanton works and words which he doth pen’.7 At the height of the poet’s popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of his epigrammatic followers included sexual material in their satiric poems, but Martialian themes such as homoeroticism and oral sex were played down and little use was made of explicitly obscene language.
A different response was to justify Martial’s use of obscenity, either on the grounds that the Romans had a more liberal attitude to sexuality than the Christian one (Ben Jonson), or that Martial was essentially a moral writer who employed obscenity to satirise depravity. The second approach was adopted by Lessing and most notoriously by the Lutheran pastor Johannes Burmeister (c.1570–1612),8 who went so far as to produce on facing pages a parallel text of Martial’s epigrams and epigrams of his own in which he adapted the original to a Christian context, as in the following:
Martial 5.43
Thais habet nigros, niveos Laecania dentes,
quae ratio est? emptos haec habet, illa suos.
Thais’ teeth are black, Laecania’s snow-white. What’s the reason for this? One has those she bought, the other her own.
Burmeister:
Martha domum curat, sermonem Maria Christi.
Quae ratio est? Poli opes haec cupit, illa soli.
Martha cultivates the house, Mary the conversation of Christ. The reason? The one desires heavenly riches, the other earthly.
Burmeister also attacked the Catholic Church, accusing those who were offended by Martial’s obscene poems of secretly entertaining a lubricious interest in them, and suggesting that certain Jesuits might better look to their order’s attitude to sexuality and the numerous dead foetuses in their swimming pools.
The most common method of dealing with obscenity in Martial has been to expurgate offensive material, and this, in combination often with the sheer length of Martial’s corpus, led to the practice of producing selections of his epigrams.9 In the mid-seventeenth century, a heavily bowdlerised edition of the text ‘for use in Westminster School’ was first issued, many poems of an obscene nature being excluded altogether, while others were suitably adapted (a nice example is line 11 of 3.44, on a poetaster who pesters people by reading to them in all sorts of situations, where Martial’s legis cacanti, ‘you read to me as I’m having a shit’, is changed to legis studenti, ‘you read to me as I’m studying’).10 During the same period, Farnaby’s complete edition with Latin commentary was reproduced in a new format suitable for use in schools.11 In the Victorian era, a number of commentaries on selections were produced, the most useful being that of Paley and Stone (1875). By contrast, the stern Victorian atmosphere of moral censorship caused Martial’s obscene epigrams to go underground, resulting in the fascinating Index Expurgatorius of Martial, a selection containing only obscene poems, accompanied by a translation and extensive explanatory notes, which was published in 1868 by a group of scholars: to this day, the work retains its ‘Phi’ classification in the Bodleian library,12 along with copies of Playboy, the Kama Sutra, and the anti-pornographic works of feminist Andrea Dworkin, and scholars wishing to consult it (experti dicimus) must do so in the Special Collections reading room, braving the disapproving glances of certain librarians. Interestingly, although the work was printed anonymously and ‘for private circulation’, the authors felt it necessary to pre-empt criticism by protesting in an apologetic introduction that the project had been undertaken for its deterrent value and to ‘shed light on the immorality of the Romans’, rather than to titillate, for ‘the loathsome and degraded pictures that Martial presents to us cannot excite the passions in a healthy mind […] the abnormal and deformed condition of a confirmed debauchee like Charidemus or Philaenis as portrayed by Martial, can only disgust’ (p. viii).
A translation of the complete works of Martial appeared – anomalously – during the Victorian period (1860),13 though the author (Henry Bohn) was obliged to handle the obscene poems in a discreet manner, either keeping them in the original Latin or else making use of a decorous Italian translation. (The authors of the Index Expurgatorius, by contrast, use ‘poke’ or ‘fuck’ and for oral sex the contemporary low-register slang term ‘gamahuche’.) In general, English translators have found Martial’s explicitly sexual language challenging.14 Even when full English translations began to be published more frequently from the 1920s onwards, recourse was commonly had to euphemism, a tactic previously adopted by Bohn: for instance, in 1.77 cunnum lingit is translated by Bohn as ‘indulges in infamous debauchery’; cf. Ker (1919–20) mentula demens = ‘amorous madness’. Alternately, archaisms like ‘coynte’ or ‘swive’ (= futuo) might be employed,15 which are ‘a means of somehow maintaining the elite standing of the classical author while still giving the appearance of openness and completeness’,16 but get the linguistic register wrong. More recently, translators have not been afraid to render primary Latin obscenities by a contemporary English equivalent, though as Roberts points out, obscene language has nowadays become so accepted that a twenty-first-century reader might miss the shock at forbidden discourse experienced by Martial’s original readers.17
Between the end of the nineteenth century, which saw the appearance of Friedländer’s commentary on the complete works of the poet, and the second half of the twentieth, little work of importance was done on Martial. Our investigation of the critical reception of the epigrammatist accordingly leapfrogs forward to the 1960s and beyond. In an article dating to 1986, Niklas Holzberg complained that, since the publication of Otto Seel’s ‘Ansatz zu einer Martial-Interpretation’18 exactly 25 years earlier, there had been no overarching attempt to analyse the ethos of Martial’s poems or to assess his poetological aims. Holzberg further noted that almost none of the 15 books of Epigrams had a commentary dedicated specifically to it.19 In the nearly 40 years since then the situation has changed beyond measure. Almost every book of Martial now boasts a published commentary20 (virtually all of them substantial and for the most part written in English). Further, the appearance in 1991 of John Sullivan’s landmark Martial: The Unexpected Classic prompted a radical revaluation of the epigrammatist, succeeded in its professed aim of restoring him to popularity with the scholarly community, and provided the stimulus for a whole range of critical studies, in both monograph and article form, on the epigrammatist.
In the remainder of this chapter we will attempt, with suitably Martialian brevity, to synthesise the results and emphases of recent work on the poet, focusing largely on the post-1986 period, but with some excursions into earlier scholarship. And in fact we must begin with Seel’s much cited 1961 piece, which is important from a historical perspective because it represents, as it were, the last dying fall of a long-standing strain of Martial criticism, what we might call the moralising approach, also encapsulated in Highet’s sneer of a few years earlier, ‘Martial was a nasty little man.’21 Adopting an unapologetically biographical approach,22 Seel, while conceding the epigrammatist’s great artistic merits and allowing that he would never have written what might seem to us offensive had he not been catering to his readers’ tastes,23 condemns him, in all too familiar terms, for shameless flattery, impudent mendicancy, the explicitness of his sexual material24 and pitilessness; this last criticism is prompted by Martial’s graphic but unemotive accounts of staged executions in the Liber Spectaculorum. But Seel goes much further. The overall tenor of his approach is captured in the following:
Martial alternates between flimsy and repulsive subject-matter, between the shabby and the worthless: moral seriousness is never found in him […] a work where tact and nobleness of feeling appear completely discounted, where empty praise and gross insult serve no other purpose, either in a direct or roundabout way, than by means of intellectual corruption or artful blackmail to turn a profit for the author.25
Martial, suggested Seel, viewed his world without illusions as one of dog-eat-dog, in a spirit of cynical realism subscribed to that ethic and, in a word, was ‘scarcely anti-moral, but completely amoral’.26 Martial’s poetry, in short, was characterised by moral nihilism.27 Essentially the same view was taken by John Bramble in 1982,28 who picked up Seel’s description of Martial as a ‘court jester’,29 similarly accused him of frivolity, of lacking any moral earnestness (‘Martial never makes us think’) and drew unflattering comparisons with the seriousness of tone to be found in the satirist Juvenal.30
Written in direct response to Seel,31 Holzberg’s 1986 article begins with the premise that the time-honoured objections to Martial, namely that he is a pornographer and a barefaced flatterer, pose a literary–aesthetic dilemma, in that the epigrammatist’s artistry and originality are, in marked contrast to such disapprobation, universally conceded: he goes on to condemn as disingenuously evasive and blinkered the decision of some critics to treat Martial merely as a repository of cultural history. The main purpose of Holzberg’s paper, however, was to assert, in explicit contradiction of Seel, that Martial is morally engaged, that his work is imbued with positive concerns. To that end a number of points – repeated, as we shall see, in Holzberg’s 1988 monograph on the poet – are marshalled: that Martial’s epigrams, in contrast to those of his immediate predecessor and model Loukillios, betray a sense of surprise or affront at his protagonists’ doings and a feeling of ethical involvement which he seeks to transfer to his readers; that the charge of writing pornography can be rebutted on statistical grounds alone, since the vast majority of the risqué pieces condemn deviations from the erotic norms of the day, particularly cases where females, in defiance of received ideals of womanly modesty, take the amatory initiative (accordingly, the undisguised explicitness of such poems ultimately subserves a moral purpose, that of reinforcing traditional ethico-sexual standards); that the various epigrams where Martial represents himself as a beggar-poet have more to do with role play and literary tradition than the illusory ‘reality’ conjured up by moralising critics, whereby Martial shamelessly solicits material support from his rich friends – at the same time, the criticisms of the tribulations entailed by the client–patron system satirise on moral grounds a typical phenomenon of Martial’s time; that the traditional view of Martial as an unabashed flatterer of a tyrant, at first blush accurate, is in fact much too unequivocal, since the poet incorporates in his panegyric an element of concealed criticism of the type adverted to by Pliny the Younger in Panegyricus 3.4, a kind of authorial doublespeak that saps or undercuts the effusiveness of the seeming praise – one example of this is the Earinus-cycle of Book 9 celebrating the charms of Domitian’s eunuch favourite of that name, which, Holzberg argues, are intended covertly to suggest the hypocrisy of the emperor, who had earlier issued an edict forbidding castration.32
Holzberg’s arguments (subsequently rejected by him, as we shall see) are open to criticism on several grounds. For one thing, his attempted defence of the obscene pieces on the basis of the moral outrage allegedly expressed therein falls foul of Martial’s own claim that their aim is to titillate and to amuse.33 Nor does it seem possible to detect a difference in ethos between Loukillios’ satiric epigrams and Martial’s: the primary intent of both is to create amusement, but Martial succeeds in this aim a good deal better. Finally, since the dangers of voicing criticism of an emperor were, as Holzberg clearly shows,34 very considerable, potentially lethal – hence in his view the necessity of wrapping up dispraise in encoded form and staying below the radar by writing in a generically insignificant form – one wonders why Martial would have taken such a risk and what he hoped to achieve thereby, or why indeed, given the reciprocities intrinsic to the patronage system, he would have chosen to bite the imperial hand which fed him.
A broadly similar approach to Holzberg 1986/1988 has lately been adopted by Spisak,35 who contends that Martial writes in the tradition of iambic poetry, which seeks to enforce social hygiene. According to Spisak, Martial’s – predominantly satiric – epigrams are to be construed as serious criticisms of the corrupt mores operative in contemporary Rome. Evidence marshalled in support of this view includes the poet’s remark that his aim is parcere personis, dicere de vitiis, ‘not to attack individuals by name, but to speak about vices’36 and his complaint in 10.4 to ‘Mamurra’37 that the latter’s preference for poetry on played-out mythological themes stems from a refusal to confront his own immorality, something which he would be compelled to do if he read Martial, whose pages ‘smack of humankind’.38 A particular focus of Spisak’s argument is the patronage system which prevailed in Martial’s Rome. This was based on an implied social contract, and the epigrammatist’s many complaints about the iniquities and humiliations visited by rich grandees upon their clients,39 himself included, constitute in Spisak’s view a heartfelt protest against the breaking of that social contract, that is to say, against the perversion of the patronage system by his supposed social betters, who, in the poet’s opinion, are the embodiment of cynicism, selfishness and bad faith.
Now any decision on how seriously to take Martial must inevitably be to some degree impressionistic; certainly a poem such as 5.20, where the epigrammatist expresses a philosophically tinged wish to be free of the wearisome daily round imposed by the clientela-system and instead to retreat into a leisured ease in company with his friend Julius Martialis, can with some justice be seen as articulating a sincere – if ultimately vain – desire to amend his lifestyle.40 This said, Spisak’s contention that Martial voices a serious critique of the workings of the patronage system calls for qualification in several respects. For one thing, it ignores the large element of opportunistic role play in Martial’s construction of his persona: at one moment he becomes an impoverished client, reduced to a condition of utter destitution, at another, a comfortably off host whose dinners are the target of solicitations by importunate parasites. Then there is the grotesque exaggeration with which Martial deliberately imbues his accounts of client service.41 Lastly, there is the fact that in his poems on the topic Martial sets out to make both patron and client appear ridiculous. Two representative instances will illustrate this. The first is 10.15:
Cedere de nostris nulli te dicis amicis.
sed, sit ut hoc verum, quid, rogo, Crispe, facis?
mutua cum peterem sestertia quinque, negasti,
non caperet nummos cum gravis arca tuos.
quando fabae nobis modium farrisve dedisti,
cum tua Niliacus rura colonus aret?
quando brevis gelidae missa est toga tempore brumae?
argenti venit quando selibra mihi?
nil aliud video quo te credamus amicum
quam quod me coram pedere, Crispe, soles.
You say that you yield to none of my friends (amicis). But what, tell me, do you do, Crispus, to make this true? When I asked for a loan of 5,000 sesterces, you refused, though your heavy coffer was not big enough to hold your cash. When did you give me a measure of beans or corn, though a Nile-born tenant ploughs your land? When did you send me a short toga in the season of chill winter? When did half a pound of silver come my way? I see no other reason to make me believe that you are my friend, Crispus, than your habit of farting in my presence.
What is comic here, apart from the patently risible conclusion, is Martial’s barefaced, reductive stripping down of amicitia42 to the level of a straightforward financial transaction and Crispus’ obdurate deafness to Martial’s catalogue of exigencies. A second instance of clientela-comedy is 7.39:
Discursus varios vagumque mane
et fastus et have potentiorum
cum perferre patique iam negaret,
coepit fingere Caelius podagram.
quas dum vult nimis approbare veram
et sanas linit obligatque plantas
inceditque gradu laborioso,
– quantumque cura potest et ars doloris! –
desit fingere Caelius podagram.
Refusing any longer to endure and put up with the hurrying hither and thither, the wandering all over Rome first thing in the morning, and the haughty salutations of the powerful, Caelius began to feign gout. In wanting very much to prove it genuine, he anointed and bandaged his healthy feet and walked with laboured steps. See just how effective can be the cultivation and art of pain! Caelius has stopped feigning gout.
Here, apart from the jokey medicalised inversion of the idea that art can imitate life, the subject of gout, a well-worn comic routine in antiquity as now,43 is the clearest possible indication of the spirit in which the poem is to be read: a further twist is that it is the poor client who falls victim to the disease, conventionally the consequence of too-rich living. Martial’s emphasis, then, is not on the moral iniquities of the client–patron system, but on the creation of a fantastical and ridiculous situation which the institution of clientela allows him to conjure up.
We turn now to Sullivan’s groundbreaking study of 1991, ‘groundbreaking’ not in the sense of introducing important new theoretical perspectives, but as the first work of modern times to attempt a critical overview of Martial, unencumbered by the moral and aesthetic objections which have led to his being undervalued, or studied in such a way as to filter out aspects of his work thought objectionable. Sullivan deals head-on with Martial’s sycophancy towards Domitian and his sexual explicitness (legitimated by the genre in which he is writing) and, committed to restoring him to the classic status which he enjoyed in earlier eras, constructively opens up a number of topics, most of which we have not touched on hitherto. These include Martial’s capacity to tailor the tone of a poem to the particular character or standing of its addressee;44 the popping up of political colour in unexpected places;45 Domitian as ‘overreader’ of the epigrams;46 Martial’s Españolismo, pride in his Spanish homeland;47 felicities of style (mastery of form and language, use of variation and structuring within the individual book, realism of detail,48 fondness for dramatic openings, linguistic inventiveness);49 the tension between epigram’s place at the base of the generic hierarchy and its worth as an (alleged) mirror of life. If one criticism may be levelled at the volume, it is its succumbing at times to an autobiographical approach which by 1991 seemed decidedly outmoded. Thus Martial, on the evidence of the poems, supposedly had ‘a pervasive fear and resentment of female sexuality’,50 ‘a predominantly paederastic orientation’, not to mention a castration anxiety:51 risky inferences, given that attacks on sexually uppity females had long been a stock-in-trade of satiric writing and that paederastic poems were a well-established sub-genre of epigram.52
Writing shortly before Sullivan, H. A. Mason53 also interrogated Martial’s classic status and came to the conclusion that at his best he deepens our sense of the human condition, a pronouncement to which he was led by the famously poignant lament, 5.34, for the girl-slave Erotion. He then made the fatal error of condemning 5.37, also on Erotion but containing an unexpected concluding squib against the hypocritical Paetus,54 as spoiling the effect; but Mason failed to realise that the two pieces must be read together if Martial’s intentions are to be unlocked: a pattern of thematic and structural interplay repeated again and again in the paired epigrams and poetic cycles of Books 1–12 and the Liber Spectaculorum.
Mason’s praise of Martial’s power to engage our deepest emotions looks the odder in that, almost simultaneously with him, Laurens was speaking of his ‘chilly objectivity’55 and Offermann complaining, only a few years earlier, that Martial was affektlos, ‘unemotive’.56 Laurens’ argument was that, in contrast to brief lyric poems and elegies, epigram is distinguished by its intellectuality and lack of subjectivity, though his expression ‘chilly objectivity’, tinged with criticism as it is, may also take aim at the dispassionate, unsympathetic attitude which Martial displays towards the victims of cruel and unusual deaths in the arena,57 an aspect of Martial which, as noted above, caused profound offence to Seel.58 Offermann, in an article examining Martial’s versified adaptations of Catullus, starts from the same premise as Laurens, the ‘objectivity’ of Martial: he uses this however as a cudgel with which to belabour the epigrammatist, who, we are informed, emotionally impoverished his Catullan models, producing superficial,59 banalised imitations, emptied of the impassioned lyricism which was Catullus’ defining quality. But to accuse Martial of unintentionally trivialising60 his originals is to miss the point entirely. This was precisely what Martial set out to do, as for example in 7.14, which spoofs Catullus 3 on the death of Lesbia’s passer (sparrow), deliciae meae puellae, ‘the darling of my girl’: Martial here substitutes for the Catullan passer a deliciae recently lost by his own puella, of a very different sort however from the feathered original – a 12-year-old slave whose penis had not yet attained its full length of a foot and a half.61 Thus the discreet eroticism of the Catullan prototype has been deliberately transformed into the blatantly sexual. A similar process of staining and debasing is at work in 7.94, one of a number of reworkings by Martial of Catullus 13:62 in it Fabullus is told that Catullus will give him an unguentum of such wondrous fragrance that, when Fabullus smells it (olfacie[t]), he will ask the gods to make him all nose. In the Martialian adaptation Papylus, by smelling (olfecit) an unguentum, turns it into garum, that is, the extremely malodorous sauce made of rotting fish which the Romans used to season their food. The act of smelling, then, in both cases provokes a transformation – of Fabullus’ person in Catullus, but of the unguentum itself in the imitation: a calculated degradation of the original, since the transparent implication of 7.94 is that the halitosis which taints the unguentum is the product of dubious oral–genital practices on Papylus’ part.63
Critics of Martial have been much exercised by the inconsistencies in his presentation of himself, touched upon earlier in the chapter, which are such a defining feature of the epigrammatist’s oeuvre: inconsistencies which see him for example at one moment a patron wealthy enough to attract the attention of greedy parasites, at another a threadbare client; at one time a bachelor, elsewhere a married man. With an eye to these biographical incongruities and a modernist tendency to view the speaking ‘I’ of a poem as a pure construct, there has been a tendency in recent Martial scholarship to emphasise the fictionality of the first-person voice, an understandable reaction to earlier unsatisfactory, literalist readings of the epigrammatist. Broadly speaking, two approaches to the issue of Martial’s self-contradictions have been developed. The first explains the inconcinnities in self-representation as a function of fictional role-playing: the ‘I’ slips into different roles according to the requirements of the individual context, that is, the given social situation which the poet proposes to explore, the mask which he dons for that end, and the particular attitude which he wishes to affect – a literary strategy associated particularly with genres which sit low on the generic ladder, iambus, mime and epigram. A second approach postulates for Martial’s books of epigrams a constant speaker figure which is deliberately shaped by the author as a questionable personage. It is precisely the self-contradictions and inconsistencies of this first-person speaker which constitute the character of the comic outsider and unreliable poet figure, making him into a focus of readerly interest per se. Both approaches, particularly the first,64 have much to be said for them, but it remains important however to distinguish the utterances of the fictional speaker, which certainly predominate in the corpus, from those that have an authentically autobiographical feel: that is to say, poems which are largely or entirely non-scoptic in flavour65 – grave epigrams, epigrams about objects, on villas of patrons, panegyrical pieces on the emperor, encomia directed to friends or patrons, accounts of extraordinary or notable events which occurred to identifiably real personages and, not least, pieces conveying data relating to Martial himself which were empirically verifiable by his contemporaries. Such details include his possession of a Nomentan estate, his loss of an amanuensis called Demetrius, his equestrian status, his possession of the Right of Three Children, and so on. In all such cases it would be excessively sceptical to deny that, whatever the degree of poetic elaboration to which these are subjected, they are ultimately underpinned by a nucleus of fact.66
We have considered above the reading of Martial outlined by Niklas Holzberg in his 1986 article and developed more expansively in his 1988 monograph on the poet. In a particularly graphic example of the vagaries of Martial scholarship, Holzberg, in a second monograph dating to 2002, has completely thrown over his earlier view of the epigrammatist. In order to demonstrate just how complete has been Holzberg’s critical volte-face, a certain amount of reiteration of his previous opinions is unavoidable here. In 1986/1988 Martial was seen as having ‘a serious view of the world’, ‘informed by ethical yardsticks’, a social critic:67 now his intention has become merely to amuse and to entertain, albeit on a high literary level.68 This radical change of stance, whereby the poems are ‘close to reality’ (realitätsnah) but by no means autobiographical,69 naturally has a knock-on effect for the three topics which were at the core of Holzberg’s previous studies: the erotic pieces, the poems on patronage, and Martial’s attitude to Domitian. Earlier, the first of these were read as moral satires policing sexual ethics:70 now they are ‘far from exercising moral criticism’ – why, asks Holzberg, would a moral critic use deliberately obscene language?71 Rather, their purpose is to amuse and arouse sexually, their graphic and explicit language encouraging the reader to visualise the deed in question.72 As for the poems on patronage, for Holzberg 1988 these proffered a critique of social inequality and injustice, of which Martial, in his persona of poor client, was a victim.73 In 2002, they are no longer seen as documents of social history: their aim has become to provoke laughter at client and patron alike, poems on client–patron relationships being merely a sub-class of Spottepigramme, ‘epigrams aimed at mockery’.74 In keeping with the tendency in Latin scholarship of the 1980s to see imperial panegyric as uttered with forked tongue, that is, seeming to eulogise while subtly undercutting the subject of praise,75 Holzberg 1988 regarded Martial as a subtle critic of the regime: for example, the cycle of poems in Book 1 on the hare miraculously spared by the lion in the arena allegedly hints at the emperor’s power to destroy and Martial’s well-founded anxiety that Domitian should display an indulgent attitude towards his epigrams;76 similarly the sequence of pieces in Book 6 assailing women who arrantly flout the provisions of the Julian law on marriage, newly reaffirmed by Domitian, obliquely expose, it was argued, the ineffectuality of the emperor’s efforts at moral reform.77 In 2002, Domitian is no longer seen as an historical figure subject to a hidden critique by Martial, but as a poetic fiction integrated within the thematic texture of the epigrammatic corpus, a position developed at book length by Holzberg’s pupil Sven Lorenz, discussed in Chapter 4, and encapsulated in Holzberg’s remark ‘panegyric speech is […] quite simply made subject to epigrammatic and hence witty speech.’78
These revisionary views of 2002 seem in essence correct and the Holzberg–Lorenz analysis of Domitian as a literary construct an important and productive step forward, methodologically speaking. One caveat is perhaps in order. Given that approximately 150 poems, roughly a tenth of Martial’s surviving output, are devoted to the theme of clientela, it seems injudicious, with Holzberg, to dismiss these as merely epigrammatic jeux d’esprit. Their sheer number, and the known fact that literary men depended on patrons for practical and material support,79 make it likely that the poet’s constant complaints about the dearth of old-style patrons80 and the stinginess of their modern equivalents have some underpinning in socio-historical reality and are not just a satiric routine – especially since Martial’s protests find ample echoes elsewhere.81
The recent book-length study by Fitzgerald, while not eschewing topics which have traditionally been of concern to Martial specialists, pointedly strives to break new ground, an aim in which it largely succeeds.82 In a neat piece of advocacy, Fitzgerald declares the brevity and quotidian character of the epigrams perfectly accommodated to the present age, with its penchant for the soundbite. This idea is picked up in relation to the spectacle entertainments of the Flavian amphitheatre, as captured in the snapshot-like accounts of the Liber Spectaculorum which, in Coleman’s elegant formulation ‘perpetuate the ephemeral’.83 This early book,84 with its flesh-creeping accounts of staged executions and triumphalist vindication of the veracity of ancient myths now bloodily re-enacted for the delectation of spectators,85 has generally not been to the liking of contemporary readers.86 But, in an extended analysis,87 Fitzgerald notes its appealing occasionality, cleverly references the taste for spectacle which is common to ancients and moderns alike, investigates the ideological dimension of the restaging of antique myths and lastly interrogates how to reconcile the three accounts, two panegyrical, one cynical, of the recreation in the arena of the story of Mucius Scaevola, which entailed a criminal alter ego ‘voluntarily’ thrusting his right hand into the flames, as did his mythical prototype.88 At the front and centre of Fitzgerald’s study are Martial’s foregrounding of his reader (a development of an innovatory Ovidian manoeuvre) and the fictional dialogue in which the poet constantly engages with the consumers of his work:89 among notable adversaria here are the remark that male readers will enjoy a transgressive thrill from knowing that the naughty bits are being shared with Martial’s female readers,90 and that the emperor and the reader are the final arbiters of Martial’s verse, with the piquant consequence that the traits which may be frowned upon by the former on moral grounds are precisely the ones which will recommend themselves to the latter.91 Other key preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s volume are the heterogeneity of the individual books of epigrams, allowing the poet inter alia to integrate the macropolitical and the social within each, as discussed above, and the subtle juxtaposing or counterpointing of two or more epigrams within the compass of a single book: this is rightly identified as an important dimension of Martial’s poetic architecture, and one aspect of his ability to structure the poetic liber, a feature of his art which, as noted in Chapter 4, has attracted a good deal of critical attention over the last 20 years or so.92
Lastly, a few words on Rimell’s 2008 monograph Martial’s Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram. This is not a book for the non-specialist, but a series of metapoetical musings in a stream-of-consciousness style on various themes in Martial: space, death, numbers and calculation, the Saturnalian ethos of the poems, the dialectics of epigram. The volume is not without value, however. Rimell rightly cautions that the structural principles at work within individual epigram books, poetic cycles and motifs based on thematic connections and the like, enthusiastically embraced by Martial scholars of late as a counterweight to the poet’s strategy of artistic variation, ‘often fail to add up to a comforting sense of wholeness and artistic rationale’.93 Rimell’s most original contribution is to draw attention to Martial’s number games, his penchant for totting up sums and compiling lists of objects of tangible value, an aspect of the palpable materialism and materiality of Martial’s world examined by Roman.94 And in studying Martial’s sustained intertextual dialogue with Ovid, a major focus of her work, she takes further Pitcher’s valuable observation that Martial reverses the trajectory of Ovid’s exilic poetry.95 Whereas the banished Ovid sent his poems from a far-off place to Rome, Martial’s poems, more acceptable to the regime, move outwards from the metropolis to all corners of the Empire.
To conclude then by summarising briefly the prevailing trends in scholarship on Martial, the picture looks something like this. The critical emphasis presently falls on his intertextuality and metatextuality; he is above all viewed as a poeta ludens, a poet at play, a supreme and cleverly allusive literary artist, whose work is no longer regarded as either freighted with a weighty moral message or alternatively as morally null: and even those parts of his corpus which have traditionally been taken as serious, the politico-panegyric poems, can now arguably be seen as infused with his characteristic wit and playfulness, taking them out of the purview of a strictly historicist analysis and in its stead emphasising the poetological and typically epigrammatic nature of their content. Nor again is Martial’s notorious sexual explicitness perceived as a problem in the 2000s, for all that this is tied to a sexism, ageism and homophobia that will raise eyebrows in many quarters. But even here it is important to remember that such concepts were alien to the intellectual horizons of the Romans, whose attitude to frank discussion of matters erotic was a paradoxical combination of the insouciant and the prejudice-laden to which scoptic epigram was perfectly placed to give expression.
The Influence of Martial on Subsequent Poets
AS THE FATHER of epigram, Martial inspired all later epigrammatists, but his influence was not confined to that genre.1 In particular, the satiric character of many of his best pieces offered a source of inspiration for poetic satire, beginning with his younger contemporary Juvenal, whose earlier pieces in particular (Satires 1–7) are heavily indebted to Martial.
Like Martial, the satirist rejects hackneyed mythological themes, taking life in the city of Rome as his subject. He shares many of Martial’s attitudes, such as an idealisation of country life, a misogynistic distrust of female sexuality, a prejudice against wealthy freedmen, and an identification with impoverished clients whose services to their wealthy patrons are often met with ingratitude. He takes over names used by Martial for stock types, such as Chione or Latinus, and on occasion specific scenarios, as in the following passage from Satire 6:
Quaedam parva quidem, sed non toleranda maritis.
nam quid rancidius quam quod se non putat ulla
formosam nisi quae de Tusca Graecula facta est,
de Sulmonensi mera Cecropis? omnia Graece:
[cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.]
hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas,
hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta. quid ultra?
concumbunt Graece. dones tamen ista puellis,
tune etiam, quam sextus et octogensimus annus
pulsat, adhuc Graece? non est hic sermo pudicus
in vetula. quotiens lascivum intervenit illud
ζωὴ καὶ ψυχή, modo sub lodice loquendis
uteris in turba. quod enim non excitet inguen
vox blanda et nequam? digitos habet. ut tamen omnes
subsidant pinnae, dicas haec mollius Haemo
quamquam et Carpophoro, facies tua computat annos.
Some things may seem trivial, but husbands shouldn’t have to tolerate them. What is more insufferable than all women thinking they aren’t attractive unless they’ve turned from Etruscans to Greeklettes, from residents of Sulmo to pure Athenians? They say everything in Greek: it’s in this language that they express their fears, they pour out their anger, their joys, their worries, all their intimate secrets. What’s more, they even make love in Greek. Young girls might get away with it, but do you, whose 86th year is knocking at the door, still talk in Greek? This language isn’t becoming [is immodest] in an old crone. Whenever that wanton ζωὴ καὶ ψυχή2 is uttered, you’re using in public words that should only be spoken under the bedcovers. For what groin is not aroused by such a seductive and naughty utterance? It has fingers. But don’t preen yourself – though you say these things more seductively than Haemus or Carpophorus, your years can be counted on your face. (Juv. Sat. 6.184–99)
A comparison with Martial 10.68 demonstrates Juvenal’s debt to Martial as well as highlighting the differences between the two poets:
Cum tibi non Ephesos nec sit Rhodos aut Mitylene,
sed domus in vico, Laelia, Patricio,
deque coloratis numquam lita mater Etruscis,
durus Aricina de regione pater;
κύριé μου, μéλι μου, ψυχή μου congeris usque,
pro pudor! Hersiliae civis et Egeriae.
lectulus has voces, nec lectulus audiat omnis,
sed quem lascivo stravit amica viro.
scire cupis quo casta modo matrona loquaris?
numquid, quae crisat, blandior esse potest?
tu licet ediscas totam referasque Corinthon,
non tamen omnino, Laelia, Lais eris.
Although your home is not Ephesus or Rhodes or Mitylene but in Patrician Street, Laelia, and although your mother, who used no make-up, came from the sunburnt Etruscans and your dour father from the district of Aricia, you are continually piling on the Greek – κύριé μου, μéλι μου, ψυχή μου3 – shame on you, a countrywoman of Hersilia and Egeria! Let the bed hear these expressions, and not every bed, but one that his girlfriend has laid out for a naughty lover. Do you wish to know how you, a virtuous married woman, sound? Could one who wiggles her bum be more enticing? But though you learn all Corinth by heart and reproduce it, Laelia, there’s no way you’ll ever be Lais.
Juvenal has adopted the basic premise of the epigram – that it is shameless for respectable Roman women to use in public sexually arousing Greek endearments – as well as many specific details, such as the allusion to country towns to exemplify strict old-fashioned Roman morality, the sarcastic quotation of Greek, the suggestion that such language should be restricted to the bedroom, the laughter at the expense of a married woman who erroneously imagines that she will thereby make herself attractive to lovers. Martial, however, directs his attack, as often, at a named individual, her name chosen for the sake of the alliterative play (Laelia cannot become Lais, a famous Greek courtesan) which forms the witty culmination of the poem.
While the thematic indebtedness of Juvenal to Martial is palpable, Juvenal also adapts the material of the epigram to suit his own satiric purposes. The passage is part of his lengthiest work, the sixth Satire – a sustained attack on Roman wives: accordingly he portrays the use of Greek as a vice common to all these women, who moreover employ the language in every possible situation. And whereas in Martial the contrast is between respectable women and prostitutes (cf. ‘not every bed, but one that his girlfriend has laid out for a naughty lover’), Juvenal emphasises the contrast between youth and age. No amount of Greek can make Martial’s Laelia into a Lais, though whether this is due to lack of physical beauty, charm or sexual expertise is left for the reader to decide: the main point is the verbal play so characteristic of the poet. Juvenal on the other hand, with the hyperbole typical of his Satires, makes the target of his ridicule absurdly old, with cruel emphasis on her physical unattractiveness.
Just as Juvenalian satire was influenced by Martial’s scoptic epigrams, so English satirists such as John Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) were inspired by epigrammatists like John Harington (1560–1612), who in turn took their inspiration from Martial. Other prominent satirists owing a debt to Martial included François de Maynard (1582–1646), and Francisco de Quevedo, one of the most important Spanish writers of the seventeenth century, for whom Martial frequently acts as a source of inspiration, both linguistic and thematic, especially in attacks on sexually active older women, hypocrisy and physical deformity.
But it is the genre of epigram above all on which Martial has exerted the profoundest influence, an influence which continues to the present day.
In the Roman period, the most important exponent of the genre after Martial was Ausonius in the fourth century CE. Like Martial’s, his poems are greatly varied in theme and length. He owes a particular debt to his predecessor in his scoptic pieces, for example the series on a cunnilingus, though he does not generally imitate his use of primary obscenities. Martial’s influence is especially evident in the following poem, on the subject of an effeminate man married to a promiscuous wife, both of whom play the pimp for each other, gaining profit by blackmailing their sexual partners; the poet warns that this situation will only continue as long as they are young, since, once grown old, they will be the ones who will have to pay for their sexual enjoyment. Ausonius borrows from Martial the name of Zoilus, whom Martial likewise had characterised as a passive homosexual, as well as the theme of the older woman forced to pay for sex (e.g. Mart. 11.62). Structurally, the piece resembles Martial in its technique of setting up a situation which is paradoxically reversed in the second part of the poem. Ausonius also adds his own original touch in making the activities of the couple mutual.
Semivir uxorem duxisti, Zoile, moecham:
o quantus fiet quaestus utrimque domi!
cum dabit uxori molitor tuus et tibi adulter,
quantum deprensi damna pudoris ement!
sed modo quae vobis lucrosa libido videtur,
iacturam senio mox subeunte feret.
incipient operas conducti vendere moechi,
quos modo munificos lena iuventa tenet.
You who are only half a man, Zoilus, have married a wife who is an adulteress: Oh what profits you will both gain at home! When your pounder/grinder gives money to your wife and her adulterer gives to you, how much will those caught in the act pay for the loss of their modesty! But the lust which now seems lucrative to you will soon incur loss once old age comes on. The adulterers whom now your pimping youth keeps for profit will begin as hired labourers to charge for their services.4 (Ausonius, Epigrams 101)
In the fifth and sixth centuries the highly Romanised Vandal culture of North Africa produced two notable epigrammatists: first, Luxorius of Carthage, who included in his work Martialian satiric themes such as sexual and physical abnormalities and invective against professional types and the elderly. His epigrams also owe much to Martial in his use of a range of metres and the frequent employment of obscenity, though they lack Martial’s humour. Second, there is a collection of anonymous epigrams, probably the work of one author and published as a single book.5 These resemble Martial in their variety of subject matter, though they are generally free from obscenity and include epigrams on Christian themes. The influence of Martial is seen in specific instances, such as the introductory address to the reader (78), two scoptic pieces attacking sexual vices (118–19) and poems describing material objects after the manner of Martial’s Xenia and Apophoreta. In a further echo of Martialian technique, the following piece concludes with a witticism involving a pun on the double meaning of ludus:6
De magistro ludi neglegenti
Indoctus teneram suscepit cauculo pubem,
quam cogat primas discere litterulas.
sed cum discipulos nullo terrore coercet
et ferulis culpas tollere cessat iners,
proiectis pueri tabulis Floralia ludunt.
iam nomen ludi rite magister habet.
On a negligent schoolmaster
An untrained teacher took on boys of tender age to get them to learn their elementary letters. But when he disciplines his pupils without imposing any terror and idly stops getting rid of their mistakes with the cane, the boys throw away their writing tablets and take part in the Festival of Flora (lit. ‘play [in/at the] Floralia’). Now he rightly has the name of ‘Games master’.7 (85)
Following centuries of neglect, it was not until the fifteenth century that Martial’s poetry again became a source of inspiration for writers of epigram. The pioneer here was Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471), originally from Palermo, whose first work, The Hermaphrodite, consisted of two books of epigrams in Latin dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici. The work contained poems addressed to friends and enemies, satiric epigrams and epitaphs for those who had died of the plague, but was most conspicuous for its explicitly sexual pieces which gained for its author both fame and notoriety, the latter leading to book-burnings and threats by one pope to excommunicate any who read it. So persistent was the controversy surrounding the obscene epigrams that Beccadelli eventually wrote a recantation of the dedication to Cosimo. Particular disgust was aroused by epigrams on sodomy such as the following (1.13), heavily dependent on Martial 3.26, which we discussed in Chapter 3:
Solus habes nummos et solus, Lentule, libros,
solus habes pueros, pallia solus habes,
solus et ingenium, cor solus, solus amicos:
unum si demas, omnia solus habes.
Hoc unum est podex, quem non tibi, Lentule, solus,
sed quem cum populo, Lentule mollis, habes.
Nobody but you has money, Lentulus, and nobody but you books, nobody but you has boys, nobody but you has cloaks, nobody but you talent, nobody but you intelligence, nobody but you friends. If you discount one thing, nobody but you has everything. That one thing is your anus, Lentulus, which you do not have alone for yourself, but have in common with the public, effeminate Lentulus.
Beccadelli’s epigram is a witty adaptation of Martial’s original, where it is Candidus’ wife that he shares with everyone else. Although he follows his model closely, however, there are significant differences between the two which serve to highlight Martial’s superior skill. First, in the list of Candidus’ possessions, Beccadelli replaces the colourful details of gold plate, murrhine ware and the Massic and Caecuban wine of Opimius’ vintage with the much blander and more generalised money, books, boys and cloaks. More importantly, the surprise ending is handled inexpertly: whereas Martial leads his addressee into a false sense of security in line 5, waiting till the final punchline (6) to reveal the surprise turn, Beccadelli’s unum si demas (‘if you discount one thing’) in line 4 gives the game away too early, and the key word podex (‘anus’) is likewise introduced in the penultimate line (contrast Martial’s uxorem, ‘wife’, placed in emphatic position at the beginning of the final line). Finally, the joke is spelled out clumsily and in unnecessary detail (for instance, the reader should be left to work out for himself or herself that Lentulus is mollis, ‘effeminate’).8
Another group of epigrams from the same era is especially interesting, beginning a tradition that has continued to our own day – the pasquinades, verse lampoons attached to a battered ancient statue of Menelaus and Patroclus, known as ‘Pasquino’, which was unearthed in 1501 and placed by Cardinal Oliviero Carafa at the corner of his house in a square near the Piazza Navona.9 These pasquinades frequently attacked the clergy, especially the popes, and were indebted to Martial10 for their satirical wit, metre and style, as in the following piece, which adopts the typically Martialian bipartite structure of a statement followed by a comment thereon:
Papa Pius moritur Quintus. Res mira tot inter
pontifices tantum quinque fuisse pios.
Pope Pius V is dying. It’s a marvellous thing that among so many popes there have only been five who were pious.
Alexander VI, father of the notorious Borgias, came in for special attention:
Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum:
emerat ipse prius, vendere iure potest.
Alexander sells keys, altars, Christ: he bought them first himself, so he can legitimately sell them.11
Especially pointed is the following epigram, occasioned by the recovery of the body of Alexander’s son Giovanni from the Tiber after he had been murdered by his brother Cesare:
Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sexte, putemus,
piscaris natum retibus ecce tuum.
Lest we think that you are not a ‘fisher of men’, Sextus [Alexander VI], look, you are going fishing with nets for your son.
In Great Britain, from the sixteenth century on, Martial exerted a considerable influence on the epigram, both Latin and English. Particularly notable as an exponent of the neo-Latin epigram was the Scottish Humanist George Buchanan.12 Born in Stirlingshire in 1506, he spent a number of years in France and Portugal before returning to his native country, where he served as tutor to both Mary, Queen of Scots and her son, the future James VI. In Martialian satiric epigrams he found a useful tool for attacks on the Catholic Church, a stance for which he was to be condemned by the Portuguese Inquisition and which, in his later years, saw him as a leading light in the Protestant opposition to Mary. The following, which probably dates to his time in France, owes much to Martial in its outrageous wit and obscenity:
Cum monachus monacham premeret gemibunda, ‘Mihi’ inquit
‘Vae miserae haec inter ludicra perdo animam’.
Quam pius antistes verbis solatur amicis,
Inguinaque inguinibus, osculaque ore tegens,
‘Hos aditus ego praecludam, tu ne exeat’ inquit,
‘Quicquam animae porta posteriore, cave.’
As a monk was lying on top of a nun, she groaned out: ‘Alas, poor me, I’m losing my soul in this sporting!’ The pious priest consoles her with loving words, covering her loins with his loins, her mouth with his lips. ‘I’ll close off these exits,’ he said, ‘but you make sure that no part of your soul gets out by the back door.’13
Another prominent poet of the period, Thomas Campion (1567–1620), followed in Martial’s footsteps by attacking vices rather than individuals. His themes included the avariciousness of lawyers, quacks, cuckolds, false prophets and, in a more contemporary vein, tobacco, and venereal disease, as in the following couplet:
Ad Calvum
Insanos olim prior aetas dixit amantes;
Non sanos hodie dicere, Calve, licet.
To Calvus
In times past they once called lovers unhealthy [in mind] (insanos), Nowadays, Calvus, they can be called not healthy (non sanos). (1.75)
Especially popular in England was John Owen (1565–1622),14 who was dubbed ‘the English Martial’ though in fact of Welsh origin. His three books of Latin epigrams were published in 1607. Not only were there five English translations of his poetry, but his fame spread to continental Europe, where he was rendered into French, German and Spanish, and became better known than Shakespeare. Like Martial, Owen was a provincial immigrant to the capital (London), depending there for his livelihood on the support of wealthy patrons; these included Lady Mary Neville and her father the Earl of Dorset, and even the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. He also followed his Roman predecessor in composing epigrams on a wide variety of subjects which encompassed serious themes such as the praise of King James I, as well as comic/satiric themes. Invective pieces were directed against character types common in Martial such as lawyers and doctors, and defects such as sexual misdemeanours, physical deformities and hypocrisy, but also included more contemporary targets, in particular the Catholic Church. He had a taste for wordplay which exceeded even Martial’s, nicely illustrated in this example:
Ad Ponticum
Saepe rogas, ‘Quot habes annos?’, respondeo: ‘Nullos’.
Quomodo? quos habui, Pontice, non habeo.
To Ponticus
You often ask ‘how many years do you have’ (i.e. how old are you)? I reply ‘none’. How is that? What I have had, Ponticus, I do not (now) have.15
The following epigram, which exploits the Martialian theme of changing one’s profession but not one’s lifestyle,16 replicates Martial’s style in its balance and chiastic structure, as well as his characteristic playing on names:
Ad quendam pauperem medicum
Qui modo venisti nostram mendicus in urbem,
paulum mutato nomine fis medicus.
Pharmaca das aegroto, aurum tibi porrigit aeger:
tu morbum curas illius, ille tuum.
To an impoverished medic
You who recently came into our City as a mendicant, change your name a little and become a medic. You give medicine to an ailing man, the sick man hands you gold: You cure his disease, he yours. (Epigrams, 1.21)
In English literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the genre of epigram enjoyed special popularity. Notable among these epigrammatists was Ben Jonson, who followed Martial’s example in employing the genre for a wide variety of subjects including epitaphs, epistles and philosophical reflection. Similarly inspired by Martial are his satiric attacks on named individuals, such as the following epigram, which exhibits his model’s typical bipartite structure, pointed ending and wordplay:
On Sir Cod the Perfumed
That Cod can get no widow, yet a knight,
I scent the cause: he wooes with an ill sprite.
Similarly Martialian in form and spirit is this couplet by John Donne (c.1572–1631):
Antiquary
If in his Studie he hath so much care
To hang all old strange things, let his wife beware.
The following amusing epigram by Robert Herrick (1591–1674), written in the mid-seventeenth century, takes its inspiration from Martial 3.85, in which a husband who has taken revenge on his wife’s lover by cutting off his nose is mocked for his stupidity, since the offending organ is still intact:
Upon Scobble
Scobble for Whoredome whips his wife; and cryes,
He’ll slit her nose; But blubb’ring, she replyes,
Good Sir, make no more cuts i’ th’outward skin,
One slit’s enough to let Adultry in.17
Moving forward 100 years, this epigram by Robert Burns (1759–96) rivals Martial in its use of wordplay and pointed ending:
Epigram on rough roads
I’m now arrived – thanks to the gods!
Thro pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin roads
Is no this people’s study:
Altho I’m not wi Scripture cram’d,
I’m sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,
Unless they mend their ways.18
In Chapter 5 we remarked on Martial’s general lack of appeal to the Romantic poets, but the following couplet by one of the founders of the Romantic movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), is an exception:
On a volunteer singer
Swans sing before they die – ’twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
From a later period, this two-liner by Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) makes use of two pronounced features of Martial – wordplay and concluding witticism:
On his books
When I am dead, I hope it may be said,
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
Many of the examples we have cited so far have consisted of a single couplet, a form common enough in Martial but by no means the norm.19 Our next sample, a well-known composition by Ezra Pound (1885–1972), is written in free verse and at greater length. It owes much to Martial: the sexual theme, the use of numeric hyperbole, the two contrasting subjects, the theme of outward appearance and behaviour cloaking morals of a very different stamp, the man who becomes a father through his wife’s adulteries (cf. 6.39), and the witty ending:
The temperaments
Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and something approaching a rape
Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend Florialis,
And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in his demeanour
That he passes for both bloodless and sexless.
Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and writes of nothing save copulation,
Has become the father of twins,
But he accomplished this feat at some cost;
He had to be four times cuckold.
In the twentieth century, the stand-out exponent of epigram was the poet and scholar J. V. Cunningham, who both translated Martial and composed original epigrams in Martialian style. The following concisely witty piece is one of which Martial himself would have been proud. It borrows both his themes (parody of the epitaphic form; the adoption of the persona of a disgruntled husband20) and the typically epigrammatic structure whereby the first line sets up a false expectation (i.e. that this is a straightforward epitaph) which is amusingly overturned in the second line. Additionally, the English rhyming verse form allows for an extra layer of humour in the use of the slightly stilted term ‘decease’ to rhyme with ‘peace’:
Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.21
To take one more example of many, the following piece makes use, Martial-style, of a meaningful name (Lip), combined with wordplay in which a seemingly innocuous initial statement (‘used his head’) is revealed in the course of the poem to possess a secondary, obscene meaning:
Lip was a man who used his head.
He used it when he went to bed
With his friend’s wife, and with his friend,
With either sex at either end.22
Epigram as a poetic genre is not so popular nowadays, but the term has acquired the more general sense of ‘a pointed or antithetical saying’ (OED definition), an extended use which, like the definition of epigram in a strictly poetic sense,23 owes much to Martial. Some of the best examples are the witticisms of Oscar Wilde, father of the ‘soundbite’, such as: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,’ or: ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’
Translations and adaptations of Martial
Over the years enthusiasm for Martial has inspired numerous attempts by poets, both amateur and professional, to render his poems into the closest equivalent in their own vernacular.24 In English, this activity has been pursued since the sixteenth century, and still continues today. The best of such translations or adaptations capture the spirit of the original as well as being able to stand up to scrutiny as successful epigrams in their own right. They also reproduce, as far as possible, key elements of Martialian wit, such as conciseness of expression or use of puns, and adhere to the original linguistic register, offering, for example, a modern equivalent of a Latin obscenity, as in Laurie Duggan’s clever rendition of 2.42, an epigram discussed in Chapter 2:
The bathwater Grant sponged his date25 in
would smell worse if he’d dunked his pate in.
The following versions by Peter Whigham are equally successful:
Oysters
Tipsy from Baiae’s streams but lately sent,
This wanton bivalve thirsts for condiment. (13.82)
A bedside lamp
To me are bedroom joys revealed;
Enjoy at will, my lips are sealed.26 (14.39)
Martial’s epigram 10.8 (Nubere Paula cupit nobis, ego ducere Paulam / nolo: anus est. vellem, si magis esset anus, ‘Paula desires to marry me, I don’t want to marry Paula: she’s an old woman. I would be willing, if she were even older’) has attracted at least two admirable renderings. The first, by Peter Whigham, reads:
Marriageable age
Paula would wed: I pray to be exempted.
She’s old. Were she but older, I’d be tempted.27
Not only does this reflect the structure and conciseness of the original, but an extra element of humour is added in the punning caption ‘Marriageable age’. Equally pithy is Turner Cassity’s version:
Paula wants me; I give her the cold shoulder,
She’s an old woman, though if she were older…28
In cutting out the reference to marriage, however – in Martial highlighted by the emphatic placement of nubere (‘to marry’) – an essential point is obscured: the speaker would be willing to marry Paula if she were a very old lady, because she’d soon die and he would inherit her money.
Although Cassity’s versions often gloss over elements of the original, they are successful and amusing creations in their own right. To illustrate further, consider his translation of 6.67 (Cur tantum eunuchos habeat tua Caelia quaeris, / Pannyche? vult futui Caelia nec parere, ‘do you ask why your Caelia has only eunuchs, Pannychus? Caelia wants to get fucked but not to have children’), which runs:
You ask why eunuchs have your Caelia’s whole,
Undivided attention? Birth control.29
This rendering reflects Martial’s structure and is equally witty, though it misses the obscenity in the second line; also ‘birth control’ is normally practised by married couples, whereas Caelia has adulterous relations with her slave eunuchs in order to avoid an incriminating pregnancy.30
The authors of the notorious Index Expurgatorius appended to their literal translations verse renditions, some of which are very funny. Here is their version of 3.96 (lingis, non futuis meam puellam / et garris quasi moechus et fututor. / si te prendero, Gargili, tacebis, ‘you lick, you don’t fuck my girl, and yet you talk like a lover and fucker. If I catch you, Gargilius, you’ll shut up’):
You gamahuche the girl I love,
And give her not the manly shove,
Yet brag about the deed you’ve done,
As if you were a fucktious one;
But if I catch you at the trick,
I’ll stop your talking with my prick.
The term used for oral sex, ‘gamahuche’, might sound quaint to our ears, but it was nineteenth-century vulgar slang and thus appropriate in its day as a rendering of Martial’s lingis, ‘you lick’, which bore an offensive tone.31 The hilarious second line misses the coarseness of Martial’s non futuis, ‘you do not fuck’, though the translation’s lack of precision is compensated for in the last line, where the threat which Martial had expressed in a more subtle fashion (tacebis, ‘you’ll be silent’, i.e. ‘I will make you suck my prick’) is spelled out with the addition of an obscenity merely implied in the original.
There is in fact a common tendency among translators to interpret rather than merely translate, often making explicit a joke which in the original is couched in more cryptic language: they thereby deprive the reader of the satisfaction of working out the meaning for themselves.32 Take, for instance, Gary Wills’ rendition of 12.20 (Quare non habeat, Fabulle, quaeris / uxorem Themison? habet sororem, ‘do you ask, Fabullus, why Themison has not got a wife? He has his sister’):
Of course we know he’ll never wed.
What? Put his sister out of bed?33
This captures Martial’s wit,34 but it spells out the point – brother–sister incest, a point which in the original is conveyed by a play on the double sense of habere, ‘to have, possess’ and ‘to have sexual relations with’.
1.30 is the first of several attacks by Martial on lethal physicians:
Chirurgus fuerat, nunc est vispillo Diaulus.
coepit quo poterat clinicus esse modo.
Diaulus was a surgeon, now he’s an undertaker. He’s begun to be a medic the only way he knew how.
Cassity’s very amusing translation runs:
A surgeon first, he’s now an undertaker;
And now, as then, ships clients to their maker.35
Again, this makes explicit a meaning which Martial has expressed more subtly, though here Cassity has the excuse that the poet’s wordplay is next to impossible to reproduce in English: in order to point to the similarity between the occupations of doctor and undertaker, both of whom deal with dead bodies, Martial says ‘he’s begun to be a medic the only way he knew how’, leaving it up to the reader to appreciate the bilingual wordplay in the use of the Greek term clinicus (‘medic’), etymologically associated with the Greek kline, which can mean both a ‘bier’ and a ‘bed’.
In his version, T. W. Melluish36 compensates for the difficulties of rendering Martialian wordplay by introducing some of his own:
Once a surgeon, Dr Baker
Then became an undertaker,
Not so much his trade reversing
Since for him it’s just re-hearsing.
Another instance of a translation which introduces for comic effect elements not present in the original is Olive Pitt-Kethley’s rendition of 3.43, an epigram ridiculing an aged man who dyes his hair:
Mentiris iuvenem tinctis, Laetine, capillis,
tam subito corvus, qui modo cycnus eras.
non omnes fallis; scit te Proserpina canum:
personam capiti detrahet illa tuo.
You simulate youth [pretend to be young], Laetinus, by dying your hair; so suddenly a raven, who were lately a swan. You don’t deceive everybody. Proserpina knows you are white-haired. She will drag the mask from your head.
In turning this epigram into English verse, Pitt-Kethley not only offers a fair rendition of the original but she outdoes the master, adding her own humorous touches, such as the use of ‘plumage’ which carries over the avian metaphor from her first line, ‘The Queen of Shades’ (which sounds like the Queen of Spades) for Proserpina, and especially the brilliant concluding pun:
You were a swan, you’re now a crow.
Laetinus, why deceive us so,
With borrowed plumage trying?
The Queen of Shades will surely know
When she strips off your mask below –
In Death there’s no more dyeing.37
From the point of view of Martial’s translator, the most problematical epigrams are those containing, or even dependent on, contemporary allusions. Two solutions are possible: either to retain these, or to find a modern equivalent which will be meaningful to the translator’s readership.38 The first method has the virtue of retaining the specifically Roman flavour of the epigrams; conversely, with the second, one of the values of Martial’s poetry – as a source for Roman social history – is forfeited. But in the latter case, the interested reader may always consult the literal prose translations and the many scholarly commentaries now readily available. It is the latter approach, in fact, which has yielded some of the most successful versions, even if they may be regarded as adaptations rather than translations.
Laurie Duggan’s work is exemplary in this regard. Take, for example, 1.18:
Quid te, Tucca, iuvat vetulo miscere Falerno
in Vaticanis condita musta cadis?
quid tantum fecere boni tibi pessima vina?
aut quid fecerunt optima vina mali?
de nobis facile est; scelus est iugulare Falernum
et dare Campano toxica saeva mero.
convivae meruere tui fortasse perire:
amphora non meruit tam pretiosa mori.
Tucca, why does it please you to mix young wine stored in Vatican jars with vintage Falernian? What great good have very bad wines done you or what harm very good wines? It doesn’t matter about us, but it’s a crime to murder Falernian and put fierce toxins into pure Campanian. Perhaps your guests deserved to perish, but so costly a jar did not deserve to die.
Here is Duggan’s adaptation:
You watered down red
from the Hunter Valley
with a cask of factory white
and called it rosé.
Your guests were fair game
but did the Hunter have to die?
By transferring the setting to 1980s Australia, Duggan has preserved the sense that the poetry is located, like the original, in a specific social milieu, enabling the reader to experience the thrill of recognition of the familiar which would have been experienced by Martial’s original audience.39
To take one further example, the following lines are an adaptation, with preservation of the Martialian hyperbole, of 8.20 (Cum facias versus nulla non luce ducenos, / Vare, nihil recitas. non sapis atque sapis, ‘although you compose 200 verses every day, Varus, you never give a recitation. You are not wise, and yet you are wise’):
Dransfield, who wrote
200 poems each day,
was wiser than his editor
who printed them.
Duggan’s poem is interesting, since it is based on an actual event for which we have the testimony of the author himself:
we went to see the much-celebrated Michael Dransfield in his loft in Brown Lane, Paddington [a suburb of Sydney]. Dransfield showed us some new poems that had the times of writing on them – 10.15 a.m., 10.30 a.m., 11.05 a.m. and so on, at least ten or so per day. […] At the time none of us liked Dransfield’s work, but I think it was largely a resentment that he had been ‘taken up’ by the established poets. This was not quite jealousy on our part. The only writers we wanted acclaim from were those whose work we respected.40
Unlike Martial, who insists that his satiric attacks are directed against fictitious people and that proper names are used to represent character types, rather than as pseudonyms for particular individuals, Duggan here attacks a real – though not living41 – target. It is intriguing, however, to speculate about the degree to which real-life experiences underlie Martial’s satiric poems, despite his avowal to the contrary.
In discussing translations of Martial we have concentrated on the short satiric pieces partly for reasons of space and partly because it is to this type of epigram that Martial owes his continuing fame. But it might be fitting to conclude with an early rendering of the poet’s best-known and most translated piece, ‘On the happy life’ (10.47), which not only conveys the artistry of the original to a fair degree but also stands as a successful poetic creation in its own right. Here is Martial’s original, followed by the translation of Ben Jonson:
Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:
res non parta labore, sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis;
lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici;
convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;
non tristis torus et tamen pudicus;
somnus qui faciat breves tenebras;
quod sis esse velis nihilque malis;
summum nec metuas diem nec optes.42
The things that make the happier life, are these,
Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease,
Not labour’d for, but left thee by thy sire;
A soil not barren; a continual fire;
Never at law; seldom in office gown’d;
A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound;
A wise simplicity; friends alike-stated;
Thy table without art, and easy-rated;
Thy night not drunken, but from cares laid waste;
No sour, or sullen bed-mate, yet a chaste;
Sleep, that will make the darkest hours swift-pac’d;
Will to be, what thou art; and nothing more;
Nor fear thy latest day; nor wish therefor.
Notes
Preface
1 Laudant illa, sed ista legunt, 4.49.10.
I. Why Read Martial?
1 The Liber Spectaculorum has traditionally been thought to deal with the games held by Titus to inaugurate the Flavian amphitheatre, but this dating has recently been thrown into question by a demonstration that certain details fit a Domitianic time frame, so that the ‘Caesar’ of the Liber Spectaculorum may be at one moment Titus, at another Domitian, or alternatively Domitian throughout: see further Coleman (2006) xlv–lxiv and Buttrey (2007).
2 This is the one piece of information about Martial’s life for which we have independent evidence outside his own poetry, in the form of a statement by Pliny the Younger (Ep. 3.21) that he provided the poet with his expenses for the journey home.
4 Cf. the remark of Sherwin-White (1969) 111: ‘despite Martial’s survival the comment is perhaps just […] Martial’s pleasanter poems are written much in the tone of Pliny’s letters […] both pass for minor classics, full of charm, but not “eternal”’.
7 Cf. Lorenz (2002) 20, Roman (2010) 116–17. As Lorenz 232–3 notes, it is impossible to tell whether these urban pieces had been written while Martial was still domiciled in Rome and subsequently inserted in Book 12, or whether they were newly composed for the book.
8 See L. C. Watson (2004).
9 For the perception that Martial’s city is a literary construct, rather than a piece of factual reportage, with a particular slant or ideology imparted to it by its author, see Roman (2010) 88–9.
10 Until chased off by a Domitianic edict.
12 The tomb might be small but it holds an occupant so important as to put it on a par with the most famous tombs of antiquity, the Mausoleum and the Pyramids of Egypt.
13 E.g. Cloud (1989) 205–7, Fowler (1995), Gold (2003) and Roman (2010) 88–9.
14 Cf. also 1.30, 6.53 discussed below, 8.74, 10.77, 11.74. For the unreliable qualifications of doctors, see Jackson (1988) 57–8.
15 Although Roman fathers had the legal right to choose whether or not to rear their children, so that a newborn of suspicious appearance (e.g. black) could be rejected, there must have been cases where the resemblance to the real father was not apparent immediately, with embarrassing consequences in later years. For the purported attractiveness to upper-class women of low-born lovers, cf. WW (2014) on Juv. 6.279.
16 Saller (1983), id. (1982) 123–4, Cloud (1989) 206 and Gold (2003).
18 See White (2009) 268–87 and, for plagiarism, Howell on Mart. 1.52 and McGill (2012) 8–28 (terminology and concept) and 74–111 (plagiarism as a theme in Martial).
19 See Coleman (1990) 44.
20 Pasiphae, wife of Minos, king of Crete, fell in love with a bull, which was induced to mate with her after Pasiphae was disguised as a heifer at the contrivance of the famous craftsman Daedalus.
21 Cf. Coleman (1990) 62–4.
24 Martial offers numerous other insights into the bathing experience: for a discussion, see Fagan (1999) 12–39 (ch. 1, ‘A visit to the baths with Martial’).
25 The friends and patrons addressed by Martial are predominantly men, though his readership encompassed females as well (see Chapter 2), including patronesses like Marcella (12.21, 31): we can only speculate about how these would have reacted to some of his more overt misogyny.
26 5.34 (cf. also for Erotion 5.37 and 10.61); also 1.88, 101, 6.52.
27 Even in apparently innocent cases: cf. P. A. Watson (1992).
28 E.g. 1.84, where a man who gets a large family by having sex with his female slaves is ridiculed, not for his treatment of the slaves, which is taken for granted, but for refusing to conform by marrying and getting legitimate offspring: see further our discussion in Chapter 3; Bradley (1994) 49–50.
29 An exception is Seneca (Ep. 47.7, 95.24), the only Roman writer to engage with slavery from the slave’s viewpoint, who condemns the practice of making young male wine waiters perform in the bedroom afterwards if required.
30 Presumably the slave was part of the inheritance and the freedman has a perfect right to enjoy a relationship with him, but this relationship is expressed as if he is intruding on another man’s property. For further discussion on this poem, see WW (2003) 278–82.
31 For Roman attitudes to wealthy parvenus, cf. Duff (1928) 67–8. Petronius’ character Trimalchio is the outstanding example of the way such people were perceived.
32 E.g. Sullivan (1991) 188–91.
33 For the attractiveness of young boys to Roman men, see Williams (2010) 20–9, 78–84 and for paederastic practices with slaves (in contrast to the Athenian custom of relationships between upper-class men and boys), id. 19, 31–40.
34 See L. C. Watson (1994).
35 See Garland (1995) 73–86. A particularly striking instance of this from the Life of Elagabalus in the Historia Augusta is quoted by Beard (2014) 77.
36 Aelia is presumably old, so the piece combines the themes of physical deformity and invective against older women.
37 On physiognomy Garland (1995) 87–104; Corbeill (1996) 14–56 for Roman laughter at physical failings resulting from the connection between corporeal and moral flaws.
38 In Zoilus’ case the non-Roman traits of red hair and a dark complexion also betray his servile origins: and slaves were thought morally inferior (Bradley 1994: 65).
39 Cf. Plin. Ep. 4.14.9, where he refers to his own occasional pieces as ‘hendecasyllables’ after their metre, but says they could equally be called epigrams, idylls, eclogues or poematia (little poems). Varro and Cicero had used the term of short invective or laudatory poems. On epigramma, see further Puelma (1996), whose claim (126–7) that the term is not attested of literary epigram till the first century CE has been thrown into doubt by recent discoveries: details in Livingstone and Nisbet (2010) 6 n.5.
41 ‘Epideictic’ refers to any speech which is not forensic or deliberative, but over time comes to be especially associated with encomium (Lauxtermann (1998) 525). For the development of courtly epigram in the period covered by the Garland of Philip, see Laurens (1965).
42 Loukillios wrote under Nero (50s and 60s CE) and possibly Vespasian; Nicarchus was a contemporary of Martial. Their satiric poetry is found in AP 11.
43 In contrast to Martial’s frequent mention of Roman models, only one Greek epigrammatic predecessor is named in the entirety of his corpus: Callimachus (4.23). But, even if their influence goes unacknowledged, Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic Greek epigrammatists are a significant presence in Martial: cf. Neger (2014).
44 E.g. AP 11.249, on a farmer who bought a field smaller than an atom, imitated by Mart. 11.18 on the gift of a farm which is not as big as the poet’s window, etc.
45 Nisbet (2003) 72. Compare Mart. 12.32, a pitiless account of the eviction of the feckless Vacerra and family from their lodgings for non-payment of rent.
46 E.g. AP 11.80, where a boxer’s fellow contestants erect a statue to him, not, as might be expected, for his prowess in the art, but as the concluding phrase reveals, because he was so inept at pugilism that he never inflicted any damage on them. Other instances: AP 11.68, 80, 83, 85, 133, 194, 205, 214, 294.
47 For a comparison of these two poems see also Kruuse (1941) 253–4. There are some 17 instances of overlap between Martial and Loukillios, according to Burnikel (1980), who helpfully analyses these. See also the discussion in Sullivan (1991) 86–8 and 88 n.17.
48 The relevant references are conveniently assembled by Citroni on Mart. 1 praef. 10ff. See also now Mindt (2013) 139–48.
49 Allegedly a specifically Roman genre; see Quint. Inst. 10.1.93: ‘satire, at any rate, is all our own creation’ (as opposed to other genres inherited from the Greeks).
50 As Catullus notoriously did in poems 29 and 57 against Julius Caesar.
51 It has been argued, for instance, that Domitius Marsus may have been responsible for establishing the witty point as a key feature of Latin epigram: see e.g. Byrne (2004) 260–1.
52 On Martial’s debt to Catullus, see Paukstadt (1876), Offermann (1980), Swann (1994), id. (1998) and Fedeli (2004).
53 Notably the programmatic poem 1, poems 2 and 3 on the passer, 5 on basia, ‘kisses’, 13, 23–4 on Furius, 57, 85, 95.7–8 and 101. A sensitive analysis of Martial’s reworkings of these and other Catullan poems can be found in Fedeli (2004).
54 Some discussion in L. C. Watson (2003 [2004]) 8–9.
55 For the source text, see Catullus 16, and for Martial’s repetition of this disclaimer, see conveniently Howell ad loc.
56 For some of these points see L. C. Watson (2003 [2004]).
57 Though he occasionally wrote longer pieces.
II. Obstacles to the Understanding and Appreciation of Martial
1 Other criticisms: Sullivan (1991) 115.
2 Cf. Hodge (1992) 270–2, especially 271: ‘the public toilet was a place of communal resort […] usually consist[ing] of a large open room […] surrounded on all sides by a row of seats […] allowing the occupants to consort in happy camaraderie.’
3 Starting with Kleberg (1957).
4 Pieces of meat eaten by athletes.
5 For lesbians portrayed as masculine, see e.g. Hor. Epod. 5.41–2, Lucian, Dial. Meretr. 5, Hallett (1997).
6 See e.g. Parker (1997).
7 For negative attitudes to oral sex, see Krenkel (2006) 265–302; for cunnilingus, as being appropriate to slaves or social inferiors because it serviced women’s pleasure, ibid. 297.
8 Dewar (1994) 209, Coleman (1998b) 337.
9 Waters (1964) and B. W. Jones (1992) make the point that Domitian is represented negatively in the senatorial tradition because his attacks were directed against that class, but from the viewpoint of humbler persons such as the equestrian Martial, he may have been seen in a more favourable light.
14 Whether Domitian insisted upon this formula or merely encouraged it is unclear: see Nauta (2002) 383. At all events, Martial uses the appellation as a marker of the obsequiousness demanded by Domitian and in counterpoint to the new spirit of freedom under Trajan.
15 Frustra, Blanditiae, venitis ad me / attritis miserabiles labellis: / dicturus dominum deumque non sum. / iam non est locus hac in urbe vobis (1–4); non est hic dominus, sed imperator, / sed iustissimus omnium senator (8–9); hoc sub principe, si sapis, caveto / verbis, Roma, prioribus loquaris (12–13).
16 St Augustine illuminatingly complains in Conf. 6.6 regarding that day quo, cum pararem recitare imperatori laudes, quibus plura mentirer, et mentienti faveretur ab scientibus (‘on that day on which, when I was preparing to recite his praises to the emperor, lying extensively in the process, but my lies finding favour with those in the know’). Turner Cassity (in Sullivan 1993: 229) puts it well: ‘[Martial] flatters the emperor Domitian in the exact spirit and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill out grant applications.’
17 Cf. Fitzgerald (2007) 114–15.
21 See particularly Ahl (1984), Garthwaite [Ahl’s pupil] 1990, 1993 and 1998 (on Martial and Domitian: other pieces on Statius and Domitian take a similar tack) and Holzberg (1988) 74–85. We return to these matters in Chapters 4 and 5.
22 First, it proposes that Domitian, who had a markedly literary bent, was insufficiently astute to pick up the encoded criticism of his regime (not to mention the dangers of such criticism under an emperor allegedly as paranoid as he: cf. B. W. Jones (1992) 39: ‘Martial was neither a hero nor a fool’). Second, by arguing that poets bit the imperial hand which fed them, it posits an improbable violation of the cardinal code of the patronage system, viz. the mutual bestowal of benefits. Third, it simply ignores the fact that when it came to panegyric, no hyperbole was deemed too extreme to be acceptable.
23 See Dewar (1994), Johnson (1997), Nauta (2002) 413–37, Grewing (2003) and especially Römer (1994), who offers (101–2) a devastating critique of the Ahlian ‘concealed criticism’ approach (see n.21 above). Holzberg (2002) has now recanted his former views (cf. n.21).
24 See also 8.53.15 with WW (2003).
25 Cf. the similar continuity in panegyric themes used by Statius (of Domitian) and Pliny (of Trajan) noted by B. Gibson (2011) 117–23. Römer (1994) 104–5 amusingly notes that if, with Ahl and his followers, hyperbolic praise is to be read as encoded criticism on the basis that it is too fantastical to command assent, then Pliny’s Panegyricus too would have to be understood as a concealed attack on Trajan.
26 8.21 being a particularly ingenious and subtle instance (L. C. Watson 1998).
28 Coleman (1990 [2000]) 39.
30 ‘Martial seems almost to flaunt his need for money and to press the point in embarrassingly obvious ways,’ observes Gold (2003) 592, who adduces several examples of condemnations by critics on this score.
31 5.6, 5.19, 6.10, 6.87, 7.60, 8.24, 8.82, 9.18.
32 ‘Blatant mendicancy’ is from Sullivan (1991) 17; similarly Sullivan 121 (‘a money-obsessed client’), 122, 124, 128 and 153: cf. n.30 above and Seel quoted by Vioque on Mart. 7.16.
33 See conveniently Spisak (2007) Chapters 2 and 3 and Kay on Mart. 11.105.
34 On the issue of whether such a sum allowed an eques to live comfortably, see Saller (1983) 250–3.
35 Nam tui Catulli / plenus sacculus est aranearum.
36 The meaning of the phrase ‘on the other side’ is both obscure and contentious: it cannot be gone into here.
37 L. C. Watson (2004) 314–15.
38 See, in addition to the poems discussed immediately below, Mart. 3.38.9–10, 9.49, 10.15.7.
39 Cf. especially Mart. 2.46.7–8: ‘but you gaze unconcerned at the wintry state of your girt-up friend (oh it’s criminal) and the threadbare chill of your escort’, and 7.92.7–8: ‘I complain that my cloak is chilly and threadbare; you hear, and you don’t know what I need, Baccara.’
41 On Martial’s use of obscene language, see P. A. Watson (2002) 223–31.
42 An explicit translation with copious notes had been published in the Victorian period, but was presumably not generally available: see Chapter 5.
43 See Morwood (2012) 169. Leary (2012) 137 points out that even in 2005–6 the reading list for A-level Martial in the UK did not include obscenity, though censorship at school level is more understandable.
44 Artful Dodge 18/19 for 1990.
45 1 praef.; cf. 1.35, 6.82.4–6, 8 praef. 10–14, 11.20. See also Chapter 1. Not only had Catullus and other predecessors made extensive use of primary obscenities, but it was part of his audience’s expectations that epigrams worth reading would contain such vocabulary.
47 See conveniently Leary’s commentary (1996) 4.
48 See Kay on Mart. 11.2 intro.
49 The writers of the relatively elevated genre of love elegy, for instance, had to make use of euphemistic language when talking of things erotic.
50 The evil eye, a destructive glance of envy cast by a person or demon at someone who was fortunate, was especially to be guarded against in circumstances where envy might be warranted, e.g. at the baths where the naked bathers’ physical attributes were on display, or at times of great success or happiness such as triumphs and weddings. The phallus was thought to lessen its effect by averting the gaze to itself; in the case of phallic dwarfs the laughter evoked acted as a further distraction to the envious. See further RE 19.1733–44 s.v. phallos, Dunbabin (1989) 42–4, Garland (1995) 109.
51 The Latin is vena, ‘vein’ – used metaphorically for the penis.
52 The Latin uda leges (lit. ‘wet [i.e. aroused], you will read’) is mistranslated by Ker ad loc. as ‘may, when in your cups, read’– a possible translation of uda, but clearly not what Martial had in mind, and a good example of the difficulties faced by earlier readers, especially those relying on translations!
53 Patavium, modern Padua, was known for the strict morals of its inhabitants.
54 The ideal wife would comply readily with her husband’s sexual demands, but too great an interest in sex might suggest adulterous propensities.
55 In Cicero’s orations, for instance, although the genre was too elevated to admit explicitly obscene language, innuendoes hinting at sexual vices are frequently directed at opponents. See Richlin (1992) 96–104.
56 Or rather, Octavian as he then was. The epigram, which dates from the time of the siege of Perugia (41 BCE) was a piece of political propaganda: see Kay on Mart. 11.20 intro.
57 Although individuals are named, these are fictitious personages created as representatives of different vices (cf. Mart. 1 praef., 10.33.10).
58 This may also be an example of ridicule directed against older women (cf. Chapter 1) – the implied message being that since ‘Lesbia’ is so old and unattractive, she can only get sex if she pays for it.
59 Fellatio is a substitute for ordinary sex – in Martial’s satire, people are often depicted as engaging in one kind of sexual practice only.
60 Not only did Nerva not hold the office of censor, but he himself had written risqué epigrams (Plin. Ep. 5.3.5).
61 Married women were especially the concern of the marriage laws, adultery being defined as a sexual relationship with a married woman.
62 The fact that the book will be ‘clean’ is made explicit in the second poem: ‘matronae and boys and unmarried girls, to you my page is dedicated. You, who delight excessively in my bolder naughtiness and naked jests, read my four wanton little books. The fifth book jokes with our lord, so that Germanicus [Domitian] can read it without blushing in the presence of the Cecropian maiden [Pallas Athena].’
63 Cf. Mart. 5.24.10, Petron. Sat. 126.6, Juv. 6.82–113.
64 For mentula (cock) standing for obscenity in general, cf. 1.35.3–5: ‘these little books, like husbands with their wives, can’t please without a cock’.
III. Martial’s Humour
3 See conveniently on this issue WW (2003) on Mart. 2.77, also Henriksén on Mart. 9.50.2.
4 Cf. Cic. De or. 2.255 and 284, Quint. Inst. 9.2.22.
6 Ah scelus, ah facinus! (11.91.3).
7 The Greek technical expression is kat’ antiphrasin.
8 Cf. Tac. Ann. 3.33: ‘whenever [provincial] officials are charged with extortion, most of the charges are against their wives’.
9 See Gerlach (1911) 33–4.
10 Charisianus’ name puns on Greek charizesthai, ‘gratify sexually’, and charis, ‘sexual favour’: cf. Henderson (1991) 160.
11 Roman males were conventionally expected to pay the active/insertive role, women and effeminates the passive/receptive one.
13 Vessels made of murra, hugely expensive: see WW (2014) on Juv. 6.155–6.
14 Massic and Caecuban were wines of the highest quality and Opimian a famous vintage, named in Roman fashion after the consul of the year in which the wine was laid down, L. Opimius (cos. 121 BCE). It would hardly be drinkable by this date.
15 See Fusi (2006) 247. For the sarcastic use of solus habes, cf. 4.39.2–5.
16 Our translation of l. 6 attempts to catch both the primary sense of habes, ‘possess’, as well as a secondary sexual one at which Martial hints, ‘have sex with’. For a similar play on two senses of habere cf. 12.20.2.
17 See Fusi (2006) 247–8.
18 Granobs in Damschen and Heil ad loc. elegantly captures the point of the epigram: ‘Anlass zu Trauer gibt nicht Numas Ableben, sondern – Sprechpause vor dem letztem Wort – sein Überleben’, ‘the occasion for grief is not Numa’s death, but – with a pause before the last word – his survival’ (an English translation cannot replicate the sound-play in the German).
19 Cic. Rep. 2.25, Liv. 1.18.
20 Sullivan (1991) 237–40, Nisbet (2003) 7–8, Beard (2014) 12.
22 The question reflects surprise on the part of of Martial’s questioners. While this epigram, as we shall see, turns on the stock figure of the tyrannical uxor dotata, ‘well-dowered wife’, to marry a wealthy woman was in general regarded by Roman men as something desirable: see WW (2014) 43–4.
23 See WW (2014) on Juv. 6.136–41.
24 For the conventional ideal of wifely subjection to a husband see further WW (2014) 21.
25 Literally meaning ‘to veil oneself for [one’s husband to be]’. The syntax and sense of the verb encapsulate the submissiveness expected of a bride vis-à-vis her husband.
26 Literally referring to ‘leading’ the bride from her natal home to her new husband’s one. For a further comic misapplication of a sex-specific verb for ‘to marry’ to a person of the wrong sex, cf. 1.24.4 and 10.69.2: hoc est uxorem ducere, Polla, virum, ‘this, Polla, is taking your husband to wife’.
27 See conveniently WW (2014) on Juv. 6.30.
28 Schöffel ad loc. woefully misconceives the sense of 3–4, flirting with the idea that the lines are ‘proto-feminist’ in tone and commenting that they are ‘ill-fitted to exemplify the misogyny which is often imputed to Martial’. He is followed by Becker (2008) 290.
29 It is styled ‘Italian vinegar’ by Horace (Sat. 1.7.32), who appends to his description of the dispute in Satires 1.5 the comment: ‘pleasantly indeed did we prolong the dinner party in question’ (70).
30 The term in question, sportula, variously refers to a basket of food given by patrons to clients to take away, to a sum of money into which the basket was commuted, and to a dinner hosted by a patron for his clients, the meaning here.
31 Cf. Sen. Ep. 12.3, Pers. 3.105.
32 Some instances are listed in Kay’s introduction to Mart. 11.21.
33 That is, possessed psychically by the deity. On the whole subject, see the classic study of Dodds (1951).
35 Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) on Hor. Carm. 1.6.18.
36 Cf. C. P. Jones (1987).
37 Vivit, literally ‘lives’, in the final verse is a colloquial substitution for est, ‘is’, but also implies that by keeping his beard unshaved the billy goat escapes the life-threatening ministrations of Antiochus – a neat effect of ring composition with the opening line.
39 Other personal favourites are 2.20, 6.26, 7.79, 9.15, 12.20, which is discussed by WW (2003). Some additional instances: 1.29, 1.65 and 7.71, 3.15, 4.34, 4.39, 4.47, 6.9, 7.70, 7.75.
40 In an additional irony, the deity Quirinus, from whose name Quirinalis is derived, is associated with terms such as ‘populace’ or ‘throng’ (Giegengack (1969) 67–8).
41 Treggiari (1991a) 60–80.
42 The obscenity comes as a deliberate shock after the quasi-legalese of ll. 1–2.
43 A possibility negated by the oxymoron equitibus vernis. As the offspring of an upper-class male his sons would notionally be equites, ‘knights’, but, as their mothers are of servile status, they are in fact vernae, ‘home-born slaves’. See also Chapter 4 n.58.
44 As Howell notes ad loc., the archaic spelling pater familias is more common than pater familiae in this second sense, but the latter expression is chosen for the sake of the play on its two meanings.
46 Similar mock-modest sentiments are scattered throughout the corpus: see Citroni ad loc.
47 See especially Hor. Sat. 1.4.9–13.
48 Medical care was provided to Roman women in most cases by female physicians, medicae: see Jackson (1988) 86–8 and Flemming (2000) 360, who adds that – as happens here – a male (husband, father, or the like) would be involved in the process of treatment.
49 See WW (2003) on Mart. 12.20.2.
50 Roughly the ancient equivalent of our ‘opening her legs’. Cf. 10.81.4.
52 It is tempting to speculate that, given the emphasis in the poem on Leda’s potential death, Martial is hinting that she may end up being polished off by the multiple sexual ministrations of the doctors – ‘drastic’ medicine indeed. After all, doctors in the scoptic tradition are quite as likely to kill as to cure their patients (see e.g. WW (2003) on Mart. 6.53 intro.)!
53 Mart. 12.48.5–7 again conjoins the processes of eating and excretion, this time in a context of captation.
54 See Chapter 1 on Martial’s avoidance of attacks on real individuals.
55 ‘The Julian law regarding the checking of adultery’, originating with Augustus and revived by Domitian about 89–90 CE.
56 Her name is a linguistic hybrid, compounded of Greek telos, ‘fulfilment’, and the Latin diminutive suffix –illa.
57 Accusations of bridal leapfrog such as we find here have more to do with literary genre than real life, suggests Treggiari (1991b) 42–4.
58 Telesilla reappears in 11.97, where she is apparently so unattractive that sex with her is an impossibility.
59 On the earlier Telesilla, see Nisbet (2003) 80.
60 The name is compounded of Greek eu, ‘well’, and kleis, ‘key’.
61 For keys entrusted by Roman masters to their slaves, cf. Sen. De ira 2.25.3. Vallat (2006) 135 argues that the etymological play in 5.35 is actually twofold. The description of Eucleides’ supposedly illustrious stemma (l. 4) and of his (fabulously expensive) scarlet-dyed garment (l. 2) makes the reader initially derive his name from Greek kleos, ‘glory, distinction’, until this false etymology is shunted aside by the correct one, ‘well-keyed’, by the introduction of the delinquent key (Latin clavis, but in Greek kleis) in the concluding verses, 7–8.
62 Less convincingly, Canobbio ad loc. suggests that that the eyes of Charopinus, who is a hunter after dinner invitations, ‘gleam’ when contemplating food (cf. observare 7).
63 1.29, 38, 53, 72 and possibly also 66, though he is not there named.
65 Natum te, Clyte, nec semel putabo (18).
66 Cinnam, Cinname, te iubes vocari. / non est hic, rogo, Cinna, barbarismus? / tu si Furius ante dictus esses, / Fur ista ratione dicereris.
67 For other attacks on arrivistes in Martial, as well as Greek parallels to the present poem, the only one of its type in his corpus, see Grewing ad loc.
68 For a full definition see Quint. Inst. 1.5.10.
69 Some instances are noted by WW (2003) on 3.78.
70 According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ‘micturition’ signifies ‘the desire to make water; a morbid frequency in the voiding of urine’ and not simply ‘the action of making water’.
71 According to Holzberg (1986) 203–4 there are 192 epigrams on the subject of sex out of a total of 1,172 poems in Books 1–12 (13 and 14 and the Liber Spectaculorum avoid the topic), roughly 16 per cent of that number.
72 We think here of 3.72 (a sort of inversion of the ‘catalogue of charms’ in a female), 9.57 (nothing is worn smoother than Hedylus’ arse), 11.21 (on Lydia’s extreme vaginal looseness: not however as crude as Beccadelli’s imitation, Hermaphroditus 2.7) and 10.90 (on the unseasonableness of vaginal depilation in an old woman). It is noteworthy that in 12.43 Martial objects to some ‘all too well-turned’ verses of ‘Sabellus’ on debauchees for being much too explicit in their depiction of sexually deviant practices.
74 E.g. ankles, noses, penises or, as in the immediately following example, breasts.
75 For both points see conveniently Watson on Hor. Epod. 8.5–6.
76 Note particularly Catull. 86.5–6: ‘Lesbia is attractive: she is in every respect most beautiful and, what’s more, she alone has stolen all the charms from everyone.’
77 Cf. Verg. G. 3.440: morborum quoque te causas et signa docebo, and R. K. Gibson on Ov. Ars am. 3.43–4.
78 For the use in didactic poetry of the second person subjunctive with hortatory force in place of the more usual imperative, see R. K. Gibson ad loc.
79 L. C. Watson (2008) 274 n.31 assembles references.
81 See Ov. Ars am. 3.795–5 with R. K. Gibson, Mart. 11.104.11 with Kay.
82 According to Symmachus, presumably a doctor.
83 The comic possibilities of farting are well established in ancient literature: cf. WW (2003) on Mart. 4.87 and Cowan (2011).
84 Cf. WW (2014) on Juv. 6.584.
85 Horney (1932), Ember (1978), Richlin (1984).
86 The charge in question might with more justice be levelled at poems such as 3.93 and 10.90, but it should be noted that the (still-active) female genitalia which are the target of these pieces belong to fantastically superannuated females, so that the picture is coloured by the Greek and Roman perception that continued enjoyment of sexual activity by elderly women was unseemly and immodest.
87 See Kay on Mart. 11.2 intro. for a helpful discussion of Roman views on when it was, and when it was not, appropriate to talk in explicit language of sexual matters.
IV. Some Characteristics of Martial’s Poetry
1 ‘Scattered observations on epigram and some of the most distinguished epigrammatists’.
2 Lessing mentions as his predecessors Julius Caesar Scaliger, Vavasseur and Batteux. See further Barwick (1959) 3 and Weinreich (1926) 10–11.
3 In Lessing’s construction of things, the physical object upon which early epigrams were engraved engaged the interest or curiosity of the passer-by, and that interest was then satisfied by a reading of the inscription in question.
4 Lessing ([1771] 1967) 73, 82, 99–102.
7 Citroni (1969) 225, 238, 242, Kay (1985) 7–9, L. C. Watson (2005) 210.
8 For this last, see L. C. Watson (2006) 274 n.18.
10 Citroni (1969) 220, Sullivan (1991) 224. As L. C. Watson (2006) 272 notes, ‘Lessing was reluctant to allow that Martial’s sententious (and perhaps his epideictic) pieces could be classed as genuine epigrams.’
11 Kruuse (1941) 280–2 lists 389 poems with a tripartite structure as opposed to 587 which are bipartite; see also Holzberg (2002) 86–7 (apropos of 5.43).
13 See L. C. Watson (2006) 273 n.12 for a list: add Kirstein (2008) 466–71.
14 For a similar fiction, cf. 6.67, 7.34, 11.57. The puzzlement attributed to the addressee and expressed in each case by a question is of course merely a rhetorical device to draw in the reader.
15 For a sexual surrogate employed as here to father a child on a wife whose husband does not have sex with her, cf. the Naevolus of Juv. 9.70–91. To take nihil, ‘nothing’, in l. 4 of 10.102 as signifying ‘nothing of value, qualitatively speaking’, as does Hecker in Damschen and Heil ad loc., illegitimately eliminates the parallel between (the ironically named) Philinus (‘Lover’) and Gaditanus.
17 In Roman terms, he is a captator, ‘legacy-hunter’, a common satiric type, whose inducements to the targets of their scheming might include sexual or, as here, marital liaisons.
18 E.g. SB on 7.66 or Friedländer on 10.88 (‘a completely unintelligible epigram’).
19 See WW (2003) ad loc. for a summary of various suggestions.
20 Henriksén ad loc. gives a synopsis of five existing interpretations and adds a sixth of his own, retaining the same material in his second edition. Significantly, Nauta (2002) 44–5 takes issue with Henriksén, so the poem remains something of a non liquet.
21 See particularly Parker (1994) and Grewing ad loc.
22 We hope to write about this soon elsewhere.
23 Cf. the dark and draughty bathing establishments of Gryllus and Lupus in 2.14.12.
25 A Galla is the subject of 16 epigrams in total, all scoptic: with a single exception (5.84), these attack her for her sexual or amatory habits.
26 Viz. around the time that the baby was conceived. That husband and lover never had any sexual connection with Galla seems implausible.
27 In 6.39, on the hapless cuckold Cinna. See WW (2003) on l. 5 for the maxim in question.
28 In Damschen and Heil ad loc.
29 In Roman eyes, that is.
30 On the solecism, see WW (2014) on Juv. 6.456. For the debate regarding whether women should be educated to a high degree, which informs this whole section of the Satire (ll. 434–56), see WW (2014) 46.
31 Kay oddly fails to cite a parallel which would have lent support to his reading of 11.19, Catull. 57.7: uno in lecticulo erudituli ambo, ‘both [Caesar and Mamurra] with their little store of learning gained on one mini-couch’, where the ‘little learning’ is alike literary and sexual, a couch being used for both intercourse and study.
32 Cf. H. Lausberg (1998) §518–19.
33 The closest we can come is: ‘though youse are one, will you sit [singular verb], Calliodorus, as two [plural subject]? Get up: you are committing a solecism, Calliodorus.’
34 Cf. 9.37.10: his mentula is ‘one-eyed’.
35 Cf. Ov. Am. 2.10.21–2, the so-called symplegma (see Kay on Mart. 11.81 intro.). Interestingly, Lucian, Rhetorum praeceptor 23 also mentions the perpetration of solecisms in a sexually charged context.
36 An instance is jests about people with one eye (lusci), of which there are quite a number in Martial, e.g. 6.78, 8.9, 12.22. These may appear to us both frigid and distasteful, but evidently had considerable appeal for the Romans, who had a general propensity to make fun of physical deformities and in some cases at least found funny the joke greeting salve lusce, ‘good day, one-eyed person’. See further P. A. Watson (1982).
37 For the technique see Williams ad loc.
38 ‘She does not clip (non tondet), she doesn’t clip (non tondet), I say.’ The repetition of non tondet (in technical parlance, geminatio) and the assertive inquam, ‘I say’, both add weight to the remark in preparation for the antithetical radit.
39 Cf. Mart. 6.62.1–2: ‘a girl of none too good a reputation, such a one as those that sit in the middle of the Subura’, Adams (1983) 329–30.
40 Cf. the colloquial expression ‘I’m absolutely skint’, i.e. ‘I have parted with all my money.’
41 Attempts to associate radit with the glubit of Catull. 58.5, where Lesbia, figured as a prostitute, is said apparently to ‘peel back’ the foreskin of her customers, lack plausibility. Adams (1982) 168 sees the two verbs as belonging to the same semantic field, but is noncommittal as to their synonymity.
42 See conveniently Kay on Mart. 11.49 (50) intro.
43 Cf. Pers. 1.107–8: sed quid opus teneras mordaci radere vero / auriculas?, ‘but what need is there to scrape tender ears with abrasive truth?’ and Serv. on Verg. G. 1.94: rastra dicta, quia terram radunt, ‘hoes (rastra) are so called because they scrape (radunt) the soil’.
44 Cf. The Laws of the 12 Tables in Cic. Leg. 2.59: mulieres genas ne radunto, ‘women shall not lacerate their cheeks [at a funeral]’.
45 Literally, ‘the death of Argus’. For this mythically based derivation of Argiletum, probably incorrect, see Williams ad loc.
46 References are collected by Kay on Mart. 11.84 intro.
47 And in terms of the thematics of satire, more conventional: see preceding note.
48 See e.g. Kay on Mart. 11.59 intro. ‘the epigram is simple and uninspired in thought, and has consequently had more read into it than is there’. He notes other examples of excessive interpretational ingenuity at 11.14 and 33 intro., and 73.6 and 94.8.
49 Kay on Mart. 11.1 intro. analyses this claim according to categories (Martial’s poetry may bore its readers; they have better things to spend money on than his epigrams; his epigrams are bad, fit only for recycling as scrap paper). To the references which he cites, add 1.70.17–18, 1.113, 2.86.9–10, 3.1.1, 4.82, 4.86.10–12, 6.82, 7.90, 9.26.7–8, 9.50 and 14.1.7–8.
50 Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura / quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber.
51 ‘Triginta toto mala sunt epigrammata libro.’ / si totidem bona sunt, Lause, bonus liber est.
52 Farnaby and Collesso. The latter quotes for the respective generic specialities of each Muse Hor. Carm. 1.24.2–3, 1.1.33–4 and Verg. Aen. 9.525. But caution is in order (see Nisbet and Hubbard on Hor. Carm. 1.24.3) and it is just as likely that Martial simply means that the name won’t fit into verse, without having in mind particular metres.
53 Not however by adopting an exotic metre, something that Martial firmly rejects in 2.86, or by varying the metre within a single poem, as is occasionally done in Greek verse (see Hansen (1976) 37–9 for instances), which could have permitted him to accommodate a metrically awkward name. The epigrammatist rejects such licences (9.11.13–15).
54 E.g. 3.37.2, 5.52.5, 8.31.1, 12.39.
55 So Hirschfeld (1881) 113–14, this being the closest Latin equivalent of ‘Hippodame’, for the etymology of which see the text immediately below. The speculative Latin name is formed from domare, ‘to subdue’, and caballus, a vulgar term for ‘horse’.
56 See WW (2014) on Juv. 6.311 and Kay on Mart. 11.104.14.
57 E.g. Hyg. Fab. 253. Further references in RE 8.1725 s.v. ‘Hippodameia’.
58 Female prostitutes were often slaves or freedwomen, so it becomes relevant that Hippodame’s mother named her (l. 6). In a formally constituted Roman marriage a father gave his name to his child, but if the mother in an informal relationship was a slave, any child born of that union took its name and status from its mother, in the present case presumably also called Hippodame (cf. RE 8.1725 for non-mythological instances of the name).
59 The pedestrian explanation of Moreno Soldevila ad loc. does not persuade.
60 Kirstein (2008) 479 notes that the key purpose of riddling epigrams such as 4.31 is ‘involvement of the reader’ (Leserinvolvierung), who is incited to answer the various questions posed by these, to crack their code.
61 Selected instances: 1.50, 3.45, 3.67.10, 3.78 (discussed in Chapter 3), 5.53, 9.25, 11.82, 11.99 (discussed in Chapter 3), 11.104.11–14, for which see Hinds (1998) 130–5, an important discussion.
62 Fitzgerald (2007) 167–86, Offermann (1980).
63 In 3.85 only the adulterer’s nose is said to be lopped off, but in the companion piece 2.83 both nose and ears are lost.
64 For such sanctions see WW (2003) on 3.85 and WW (2014) on Juv. 6.44. The particular form of punishment, removal of ears and nose (previous note) is however purely Greek and thus comically inapposite in a Roman context.
65 Qui potuit Bacchi matrem dixisse Tonantem, / ille potest Semelen dicere, Rufe, patrem.
66 Howell ad loc. suggests that Martial was targeting a recent poet who had ‘actually called Jupiter Bacchus’s mother’. Perhaps so, but the scenario may equally be invented.
67 E.g. Ter. Eun. 260: ille […] miser famelicus, ‘that wretched starveling’ and Martial’s Selius (2.11 and 14). On the great frequency of such individuals in Martial see Agosti (2009) 78 n.8.
68 Otherwise the name of horses belonging to a hero or to deities: details in Agosti (2009) 82.
70 Details in McKay (1959) 201–3.
71 Ov. Met. 8.739–40: ‘this Erysichthon was a man who scorned the gods’.
72 Callim. Hymn 6.40–64, Ov. Met. 8.755–64.
73 Pepedit, misellus, pedit, crepando, compressis natibus.
74 For lexical subtleties in ll. 4–6 additional to those noted immediately below in the text, see Agosti (2009) 84–7.
76 Corbeill (2004) 26–33. For the particular joke compare the parody of a prayer at Ar. Pax 96–101: ‘you must speak auspiciously and make no foolish noise […] and lock up arseholes’.
77 Cf. Offermann (1980) 116–18, Fedeli (2004) 176–8.
78 For further Catullan touches in 3.12, see WW (2003), noting in addition the paradox that Fabullus in the original, although the guest, is to bring ‘a good and big dinner’, whereas his Martialian namesake, although the host, offers no food.
80 Morbosus is slang for a male who takes the passive role in anal sex, roughly equivalent therefore to cinaedus ll. 1 and 10 and pathicus l. 2.
81 The Roman couch being employed equally for study and sleeping, the ‘learning’ is both sexual and literary.
82 When echoing a Catullan original, Martial regularly adopts its metre as well.
83 Another poem which Martial likes to imitate: Offermann (1980) 115–16, Fedeli (2004) 168–70. Pessimus is however recontextualised here to express a moral, rather than an aesthetic judgement.
84 As expressed in the proverbs pares cum paribus congregantur, ‘like associates with like’, and its inverse malum malo aptissimum, ‘the wicked is best suited to the wicked’. For a canonical expression of the idea that like gets along with like, cf. Cic. Acad. 2.55.
85 The inspiration for transforming the homosexual pair of Catullus 57 into a married couple may have been a feeling that Caesar and Mamurra were as good as married, a situation formalised in the homosexual nuptials of Mart. 12.42, Tac. Ann. 15.37 and Juv. 2.
87 See WW (2014) on Juv. 6.38–81.
88 A Catullan device of which Martial elsewhere makes extensive use.
90 The suggestion is found in Farnaby ad loc. and Jocelyn (1981) 278–9.
91 Fitzgerald (2007) is a notable exception to such neglect.
92 Lessing criticised 5.37 because of the harsh contrast between the two parts (cf. Offermann (1980) 129), but the unexpected contrast in tone is precisely the point.
93 ‘He has come into 20 million, and yet he goes on living.’
94 Respectively, a lament for the dead and a piece devoted to mockery.
96 In the sense that the putative heir is allowed to drink the testator’s wine while the latter is still alive, but is confined to inferior vintages and is moreover female (traditionally minded Romans disapproved of women drinking alcohol).
97 In poetry ‘Falernian’ (l. 5) and ‘Caecuban’ (l. 9) conventionally stand for wines of the highest quality.
98 See especially the so-called Postumus ode, Hor. Carm. 2.14.
99 Cf. Catull. 68.46: carta […] anus, 78b.4: fama […] anus. Martial no doubt also had in mind the personification vetuli Falerni in Catull. 27.1.
100 The name of this Catullan addressee, or its female counterpart Fabulla, occurs 12 times in Martial’s oeuvre, nearly always in a context which evokes a Catullan original or theme (L. C. Watson (2003 [2004]) 8–9). Here the adjective formosa in l. 1 is Catullan – although the primary frame of reference there is lists of wifely virtues typically found in hymeneal or epitaphic contexts.
101 Youthfulness: the desirability of this in a bride may be inferred from the statistics amassed by Lelis et al. (2003) 121–5, who list 31 (upper-class) women, two-thirds of whom were married by 15; cf. also Plin. Ep. 5.16 (a puella not yet 14 and about to be married) and 8.10 (Pliny’s young bride was unaware, puellariter, of her pregnancy). Beauty: cf. WW (2014) on Juv. 6.162. Chastity: see WW (2014) 19–20, with further bibliography.
102 Cf. the more explicit 8.31, on a similar topic to here, which begins: ‘you make an admission about yourself and not a pretty one, Dento, when you seek paternal rights after marrying a wife’, 11.88 and 3.77.
103 The more usual formulation is ius trium liberorum.
104 The catalogue form adopted here, with single-word honorific terms listed asyndetically, apes the procedure of elogia for wives, e.g. CLE 237: Amymone Marci optima et pulcherrima, / lanifica pia pudica frugi casta domiseda, ‘Amymone, excellent and most beautiful wife of Marcus, a spinner of wool, dutiful, virtuous, frugal, chaste, a stay-at-home’.
105 2.92, 3.95.5–6, 9.97.5–6.
106 Nauta (2002) 383, also Lorenz (2002) 123.
107 WW (2003) on 3.75, intro. ‘If’, it should be noted, does not imply the possibility of Fabullus succeeding. The impotent in Martial remain irreversibly so, the consumption of aphrodisiacs or digital stimulation, for example, having no positive effect whatsoever: cf. 3.75, 11.46.
108 The point is most obvious in 1.5, where ‘Domitian’ is made to contribute a (jokey) epigram in response to 1.4, an apologia for the obscenity of Martial’s verse addressed to the emperor. As Lorenz (2002) 119 points out, ‘Domitian’, despite being in person all that ‘Martial’ and his books are not, is presented as accepting these, and (ibid. 121) as a favourable reader of the books – despite the ‘fact’ that they could not have been to his taste.
109 Lorenz (2002) 208. For the first of Lorenz’s points, see also 119, 195–6 and 248; for the second, 50, 75, 136, 146, 162, 186–7.
110 As Lorenz (2002) 210, among others, notes, there is great continuity between the modes of panegyric employed in Books 1–9 (written under Titus and Domitian) and 10–12 (written under Nerva and Trajan).
111 For the distinction between crude and more subtle forms of propaganda, see conveniently Kennedy (1984) 158–9, who adds important bibliography.
112 Cf. particularly the Liber Spectaculorum, on the games held early in the life of the Flavian amphitheatre and the so-called ‘hare and lion’ cycle of Book 1. The staging of games was a particularly important dimension of imperial euergetism.
114 See WW (2003) on 3.44.
115 Mart. 3.45, 50, 44.11.
116 ‘Caecilianus is actually a Catiline in the guise of Cicero’ is Henriksén’s formulation.
117 See conveniently SB’s Index of Topics under ‘Theatre and amphitheatre’, with the subheading ‘Domitian’s edict’.
118 Cf. Lorenz (2002) 146.
119 That support is spelled out in 5.8.1–3, 5.14.2 and 5.23.2–4, all poems which otherwise have an overtly comic tone.
120 See Garthwaite (1990) (pursuing an approach first developed in his Cornell thesis of 1978), followed by Holzberg (1986) 208–13, id. (1988) 66, 70–1 and Boyle (1995) 97–8. For a rebuttal see Johnson (1997), also Holzberg (2002) 66, 70–1, completely rejecting his earlier views, and n.124 below.
122 Censor maxime principumque princeps, / cum tot iam tibi debeat triumphos, / tot nascentia templa, tot renata, / tot spectacula, tot deos, tot urbes, / plus debet tibi Roma quod pudica est. Similar in tone and subject matter is 6.2, though even this ends with a joke.
123 It is in this light that we should read the cheekily obscene 6.45.1–2: ‘you have had your fun, it’s enough. Marry, you lecherous cunts. Only virtuous love is permitted you’.
124 In criticising Garthwaite’s subversive reading of the poems in Book 6 on the renewal of the Julian laws, Lorenz (2002) 162 notes that Telesilla (6.7) is a comic speaking name (see Chapter 3), while Proculina (6.22) and Laetoria (6.45) bear names that have little association with the upper classes, so that the law would not really have affected them, any more than the Zoilus of 6.91, also on the Julian law, since he is a freedman.
126 This is not the place to pursue the technical ins and outs of White’s theory. The main rebuttals are by Fowler (1995) and Nauta (2002) 108–20.
127 4.7, 12, 38, 71 and 81.
128 Fitzgerald (2007) passim.
130 Lorenz (2004), an invaluable guide to the topic.
V. Reception and Scholarship
1 For discussions, see Sullivan (1990), id. (1991) 253–312 and id. (1993).
2 Sullivan (1990) 151; Cf. Sullivan (1991) 306 n.105.
3 On Martial’s reception in Renaissance Italy, see Hausmann (1976).
4 Cited by Sullivan (1990) 158.
7 In Flowers of Epigrammes (1577) cited by Sullivan (1990) 151.
8 On Burmeister, see Fitzgerald (2007) 190–6.
9 The practice survives in modern translations and in our own commentary (WW 2003) – though our selection, unlike previous such works, includes a fair sample of obscene poems.
10 M. Val. Martialis Epigrammata: in usum scholae Westmonasteriensis (1655).
11 In this edition much obscenity was edited out (e.g. the last line of 3.82, which contains the verb fellare, was omitted), though a few things slipped through the net, such as 3.74, a poem which might have been expected to be left out because it contains the word cunnus.
12 A pun: the Greek letter Φ (PHI) is interpreted as ‘fie’ as in ‘fie on you!’
13 The epigrams, including the obscene ones, had previously been translated into Spanish by Ramirez de Prado (1607).
14 See Roberts (2008) 296, 303–6. An exception is Fletcher’s translation of selections from Martial (1656), where the basis for inclusion is independent of sexual content. Though coy at times, e.g. mentula, ‘prick’, is omitted, as in 3.75 (‘Lupercus, now thy — has left to stand’), elsewhere explicit language is used, e.g. 9.4 (‘when for two guilders, Galla, thou might’st swive’), or 11.66.3, where fellator is (mis)translated ‘a lick-twat’.
15 E.g. in Buck’s complete translation of 1921. By contrast, when Fletcher (see previous note) had used ‘swive’, the slang term was not archaic and so was more lexically appropriate.
18 ‘Approach to an interpretation of Martial’: Seel (1961).
19 At that stage we had only the excellent Citroni (1975) and Howell (1980) on Book 1 and Kay (1985) on Book 11, as well as the more modestly sized Carratello (1981) on the Liber Spectaculorum.
20 The Oxford DPhil commentary of Bowie (1989) on Book 12 remains unpublished. Damschen and Heil (2004), a series of brief interpretative essays on each of the poems in Book 10, is hardly a commentary in any meaningful sense.
21 Highet (1954) 19. By ‘little’, Highet evidently meant that Martial was a moral pygmy.
22 Implicit throughout the article, but spelled out on p. 75, ‘everything is utterly and directly real’.
23 Seel (1961) 73–4 for the latter point.
24 Speaking of Ausonius – but Martial is clearly also in his sights (cf. p. 61) – Seel revealingly describes the former as having composed ‘a row of epigrams and centos of such crude directness that good taste can do no better than avert its gaze from these’ (58).
27 Seel’s views, albeit expressed more trenchantly, essentially echo those of Lessing two centuries earlier: see Citroni (1969).
28 The main difference is the absence of the highly condemnatory tone adopted towards Martial by Seel.
29 Seel (1961) 62–3, 73 (‘Hofnarr’), Bramble (1982) 611.
30 A view of Juvenal which has been substantially qualified by recent scholarship.
31 A fact proclaimed in the first instance by the title of Holzberg’s piece, which tweaks Seel’s: ‘Neuansatz zu einer Martial-Interpretation’.
32 Holzberg (1986) 208 n.49 references John Garthwaite’s Cornell thesis for this view. See now Garthwaite (1993).
33 Notably in 1.35, 3.68, 3.86 and 11.16.
34 Holzberg (1986) 209–13.
37 This fictional character evidently takes his name from the corrupt but historical Mamurra of the Catullan corpus.
39 Roughly 150 poems in all.
40 So Heilmann (1984) 48–54. Holzberg (2002) 81–2 attempts to get round the serious reading of 5.20 by arguing that it is a sly appeal for financial support from the rich Julius Martialis, following on from the failed request to Domitian for assistance in the immediately preceding poem, and that the epigram in fact contains humorous touches.
41 Various examples of this are noted by Holzberg (2002) 79.
42 The polite term, literally ‘friendship’, applied by the Romans to the client–patron relationship in order to disguise its intrinsic inequalities.
43 Details in WW (2003) ad loc.
48 ‘There is a preoccupation with the particularity of things’, in Sullivan’s felicitous phrase (236).
49 Sullivan (1991) 217–30.
52 In fairness to Sullivan it should be noted here that recent modifications of the theory of the persona or ‘speaking I’, which has held the field for so long, have pointed out that it illegitimately excludes the agency of the author in choosing to deal with one topic rather than another or, in the case of scoptic poetry, to attack one target over another, i.e. personal prejudices or predilections may have a part to play: see e.g. Rosen (2007) 220–2. It might for example be argued that 4.42 shows a genuine appreciation of boyish beauty, and is not simply a literary exercise of a tralaticious kind.
56 Offermann (1980) 130–1 and passim.
57 Or his jeering ‘humour of wretchedness’ on view e.g. in 12.32, mocking the eviction for arrears in rent of the impoverished Vacerra and his family.
58 Seel (1961) 54–7, 59–61.
59 Offermann (1980) 119, 122–3, 123–4.
60 Ibid. 119, 121, 122–3.
61 Mentula cui nondum sesquipedalis erat, an echo of another Catullan poem, 97.5, dentis sesquipedalis [habet], ‘his mouth has teeth a foot and a half long’.
63 For the Greek and Roman belief that the breath of practitioners of oral sex was foul, see WW (2014) on Juv. 6.51.
64 Becker (2008) 284 rightly points out, apropos of the second approach, that biographical and attitudinal inconsistencies on the part of the first-person speaker do not invariably generate comedy.
65 That is to say, epigrams falling broadly under the heading of epideictic.
66 In general on the issues explored in this paragraph, see Nauta (2002) 48 and the useful synthesis of Becker (2008).
67 Holzberg (1988) 58, 63, 72–3 et alibi.
68 Holzberg (2002) 7, 43, 47.
70 Holzberg (1988) 56, 58, 63.
72 Holzberg (2002) 112–14.
73 Holzberg (1988) 65–73.
74 Holzberg (2002) 75, 77.
75 The trend was initiated by Ahl (1984) and developed in relation to Martial in a series of articles by Ahl’s pupil, John Garthwaite, notably Garthwaite (1990) and id. (1993).
76 Holzberg (1986) 209–10, id. (1988) 76–9.
79 See e.g. White (1993).
80 1.107, 8.55, 11.3, 12.36.
81 E.g. in Juv. 7 or the Younger Pliny’s necrology for Martial, Ep. 3.21.
82 We confess that we find some of the thematic juxtapositions between poems posited by Fitzgerald less than convincing and his interpretation of the Latin at times strained.
85 Although the context of these re-enactments is historical, the underlying idea, the verification of myth by a reality, is a literary trope: see Grewing (2003).
86 Though aspects of the book will undoubtedly remain distasteful to modern readers, the perspicuous and massively detailed commentary by Kathleen Coleman (2006) has been enormously helpful in enabling specialists and non-specialists alike to understand it better.
87 Fitzgerald (2007) 34–67.
89 Fitzgerald (2007) 139–66.
92 As a coda to the above summary, we note here some interesting remarks thrown out en passant by Fitzgerald: that there is a tension in Martial’s poems between the occasional and the transcendent (17); the intriguing if slightly fanciful suggestion that the frequently broached subject of slavery is a synecdoche for Martial’s genre, since both are at the base of their respective ladders (103); that Martial’s labile poetic ‘I’ typically oscillates between a position of superiority and one of inferiority (123); and that his pose of social subordination is compensated for by an aggressively struck stance of gender domination (137 n.53).
95 Pitcher (1998). On Martial’s creative adaptation of Ovid’s poetry of exile and of the Ovidian corpus more generally, see the important paper of Hinds (2007).
VI. The Influence of Martial on Subsequent Poets
1 See also Sullivan (1990), id. (1991) 253–312 and id. (1993).
3 ‘My lord, my honey, my soul’.
6 Ludi magister properly means ‘schoolmaster’; but the word ludus also means ‘game’; the Latin for a festival is ludi, ‘Games’: hence the verb ludo, ‘I play’, can mean to take part in a festival.
7 See further Kay (2006) 84–6.
8 Though Parker (2010) finds Beccadelli not very witty in general, Sullivan (1991) 263–4 points to two amusing pieces: a poem where the book is sent off on a journey, as are a number of Martial’s books, and ends up in a brothel (2.37) and an epitaph for the whore Nichina (2.30).
9 The statue is still used for the same purpose, though in 2005 the epitaph (in Italian) on ‘Pasquino’ for Pope John Paul II was more complimentary than those for most popes (‘You were born a Pole, you died a Roman. You were the priest who removed the borders from the City and let the people speak. You have been a sovereign. Pasquino mourns you’).
11 Cf. Mart. 2.20: Carmina Paulus emit, recitat sua carmina Paulus. / nam quod emas possis iure vocare tuum, ‘Paulus buys poems, Paulus recites his poems. For what you buy, you may legitimately call yours.’
12 See Ford (1982), McFarlane (1981).
13 In Latin, anima means both ‘breath’ and ‘soul’, the latter believed to be an airy substance emitted from the body at one’s final breath. When the nun complains in ll. 1–2 that she is ‘losing her anima’, she means that her soul is damned as a consequence of illicit sex. But Buchanan, perhaps thinking of the expression animam anhelare, ‘to breathe out one’s soul’ in the heat of passion (viz. experience a ‘petite mort’), has the monk take the nun’s words in a more literal sense. Having closed up the nun’s vagina and mouth, he cautions that she should not vent her anima through the other available orifice (sc. by farting!).
14 See J. H. Jones (1941).
15 The second line perhaps inverts Martial 1.15.6 […] solum hoc ducas, quod fuit, esse tuum, ‘you should consider only the past as yours’.
16 E.g. 1.30 and especially 8.74: oplomachus nunc es, fueras opthalmicus ante. / fecisti medicus quod facis oplomachus (‘you are a gladiator now, you were formerly an eye doctor. You did as a doctor what you do as a gladiator’), where there is a similar wordplay on the names of the professions.
19 Many also use to advantage the English rhyming endings which were not, however, a feature of Latin verse.
20 Cf. Mart. 4.24: ‘Lycoris has buried every girlfriend she had, Fabianus. Let her make friends with my wife.’
21 Cunningham (1971) 120.
23 Cf. the OED definition of epigram: ‘a short poem ending in a witty or ingenious turn of thought, to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up’.
24 For collections of translations, see Sullivan and Whigham (1987) and Sullivan and Boyle (1996).
25 Australian slang for ‘arse’.
28 See Cassity (1990) 45.
30 Cf. Mart. 6.39 where he says that the husband, who has many children bearing a suspicious resemblance to his various slaves, would have had even more if two of the wife’s lovers hadn’t been eunuchs.
32 A fundamental aspect of Martial’s style: see Chapter 4.
34 Donald Goertz’s less successful version (Sullivan and Boyle 1996: 330), ‘Brother never / had a wife: / he had sister / all his life’ gets the pun at least, though the early positioning of ‘brother’ anticipates the joke.
36 See Sullivan and Whigham (1987) 71.
37 Reproduced in Sullivan and Whigham (1987) 137 and Sullivan and Boyle (1996) 384.
38 A third possibility – simply to cut out all proper names and Roman allusions – is hardly satisfactory.
39 To a Sydneysider living at that time, robust Hunter Valley reds were the ne plus ultra of wine, and rosé, in the days before it had become fashionable, was an inferior wine, popularly believed to be a mixture of red and white plonk.
41 Michael Dransfield died of a drug overdose at the age of 24 in 1973.
42 ‘The things which make life happy are these, my dear friend Martialis: wealth not gained by hard work, but inherited, land not unproductive, a continual hearth fire, no lawsuits, a toga rarely worn, a carefree mind, a gentleman’s strength, a healthy body, wise lack of guile, friends of one’s own kind, easy company, a simple table, a night not drunken but free from cares, a bed not austere and yet virtuous, sleep to make the dark hours seem short, wish to be what you are and don’t prefer anything else, don’t fear your final hour but don’t pray for it either.’
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Abbreviations for classical authors and works and journal titles are those listed in the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2012), edited by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow. For journals not listed in the OCD, we have used the abbreviations of L’Année philologique.
AP
Anthologia Palatina (also known as the Greek Anthology).
RE
Pauly, A., G. Wissowa, et al., eds. 1893–1980. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart.
SB
Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 1993. Martial: Epigrams. Loeb Classical Library. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.
WW (2003)
Watson, L., and P. Watson, eds. 2003. Martial: Select Epigrams. Cambridge.
WW (2014)
——— 2014. Juvenal: Satire 6. Cambridge.
Commentaries, editions and translations of Martial
In the endnotes we have followed scholarly convention by not including a date when the reference is to an author’s commentary on a specific poem or line in a poem, e.g. Kay on Mart. 11.105.
Bowie, M. N. R. 1989. ‘Martial Book XII: a commentary’. Oxford DPhil thesis.
Canobbio, A. 2011. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton liber quintus. Naples.
Carratello, U. 1981. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton liber. Rome.
Citroni, M. 1975. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton liber primus. Florence.
Coleman, K. M. 2006. M. Valerii Martialis liber spectaculorum. Oxford.
Collesso, V. 1720. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammatum libri XIV. London.
Damschen, G., and A. Heil, eds. 2004. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton liber decimus […] Text, Übersetzung, Interpretationen. Frankfurt.
Farnaby, T. 1615. M. Val. Martialis epigrammaton libri. London.
Fletcher, R. 1656. Ex otio negotium or, Martiall His Epigrams. London.
Friedländer, L. 1886. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton libri mit erklärenden Anmerkungen versehen. Leipzig.
Fusi, A. 2006. M. Valerii Martialis epigrammaton liber tertius. Hildesheim.
Grewing, F. 1997. Martial Buch VI: Ein Kommentar. Göttingen.
Henriksén, C. 2012. A Commentary on Martial, Epigrams Book 9. 2nd rev. edn. Oxford.
Howell, P. 1980. A Commentary on Book 1 of the Epigrams of Martial. London.
——— 1995. Martial: Epigrams V. Warminster.
Kay, N. M. 1985. Martial, Book XI: A Commentary. London.
Ker, W. C. A., ed. 1919–20. Martial: Epigrams. Loeb Classical Library. 2 vols. London.
Leary, T. J. 1996. Martial Book XIV: The Apophoreta. London.
——— 2001. Martial Book XIII: The Xenia. London.
[Martial] 1655. M. Val. Martialis epigrammata: in usum scholæ Westmonasteriensis. London.
Moreno Soldevila, R. 2006. Martial Book IV: A Commentary. Leiden.
Paley, F. A., and W. H. Stone. 1875. M. Val. Martialis epigrammata selecta. Select Epigrams from Martial with English Notes. London.
Schöffel, C. 2002. Martial Buch 8. Stuttgart.
Shackleton Bailey: see Abbreviations.
Sullivan, J. P., and P. Whigham, eds. 1987. Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands. Berkeley.
Sullivan, J. P., and A. J. Boyle. 1996. Martial in English. London.
Vioque, Galán G. 2002. Martial, Book VII. A Commentary. Leiden.
Watson: see Abbreviations.
Williams, C. A. 2004. Martial Epigrams Book 2. New York.
General
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Burnikel, W. 1980. Untersuchungen zur Struktur des Witzepigramms bei Lukillius und Martial. Wiesbaden.
Buttrey, T. V. 2007. ‘Domitian, the rhinoceros, and the date of Martial’s Liber de Spectaculis’. JRS 97: 101–12.
Byrne, S. N. 2004. ‘Martial’s fiction: Domitius Marsus and Maecenas’. CQ 54: 255–65.
Cassity, T. 1990. ‘The undeceived’. Chicago Review 37: 42–51. [Reproduced in Sullivan 1993.]
Citroni, M. 1969. ‘La teoria lessinghiana dell’epigramma e le interpretazioni moderne di Marziale’. Maia 21: 215–43.
——— 1989. ‘Marziale e la letteratura per i Saturnali (poetica dell’ intrattenimento e cronologia della pubblicazione dei libri)’. ICS 14: 201–26.
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——— 1998a. ‘The liber spectaculorum: perpetuating the ephemeral’. In Grewing 1998, 15–36.
——— 1998b. ‘Martial book 8 and the politics of AD 93’. PLLS 10: 337–57.
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