Martial by the Numbers

A lot of what I do for my research is looking into how Martial’s books are structured, looking to argue that you can indeed actually read a book of epigrams as a sequential book, and that the authorial persona encourages you to do so. Whenever I tell people that I’m examining the structure of books of epigrams, though, their eyes tend to glaze over. I get it – structure isn’t a particularly exciting sounding subject, and at times it can be a bit boring… But today, I wanted to spend a little bit of time looking at Martial “by the numbers” (as my blogpost title suggests) to try and show you how structure and numerical approaches to a text can be interesting, or at least furnish some interesting results.

I’m going to share two things with you: firstly, a couple of graphs I’ve mocked up for my own personal understanding of Epigrams 7 (the specific book most of my thesis has focused upon) showing how Martial structures by variation in a diagrammatic manner. Secondly (something I recently spent most of the morning doing), a brief exploration of the booklengths of Martial’s books, and what sort of questions these numbers throw up and/or answer.

So, without much further ado:

Book 7 – Metrical Variation & Poem Line Lengths

Martial is a poet typified by his variatio (variety in English) – he throws a medley of different themes together to create a riot of different associations and juxtapositions. The result is dizzying at times (check out Fitzgerald 2007 on this), but can also be quite pleasing – the sexual depravities (as Martial sees them) of the women Philaenis at 7.67 & 7.70 form a brief frame around a couple of poems on Romans of outstanding morality. After reading these four poems in sequence, however, we might ask ourselves how upright the subjects of 7.68 & 7.69 actually are in the bedroom…

Variatio is a strong feature of light verse, or nugae as the poets had been saying since at least Catullus, and Martial at one point tells the emperor Domitian (tongue-in-cheek?) that

I have indeed tried to vary [my subject matter] through the mixture of jokes, lest every verse should heap up its own praise for your celestial reverence, which could tire you more easily than it would sate us. (8.praef.8-11)

Variation of subject matter, then. But subject matter is not the only kind of variety going on in Martial, and if you look at the Latin you can easily tell that the structure of his poems is different. Martial uses a variety of different metres (most commonly the elegiac couplet, the hendecasyllable, and the scazon – also known as choliambics), and not only do they look different (the second line of the elegiac couplet is slightly indented) they also sounded different. Roman poetry worked through stressing long and short syllables, and certain metres had different associations. (Llewelyn Morgan’s Musa Pedestris book is brilliant on this, by the way.) So not only does Martial’s poetry discuss different things, it also sounds different and evokes a variety of different connotations (scazons, for instance, are often involved with invective humour).

So let’s take a quick look at how Martial spreads out his different metres across book 7:

The file’s come out a bit small (you should be able to enlarge the graph by clicking on it), but you’ll be able to see the variation at work. I gave each metre in book 7 a number, and then plotted the points. The bottom (y) axis is the progression of poems in the book, the side (x) axis plots the metres. These are: 1 Elegiac couplets; 2 hendecasyllables; 3 scazon; and 4 hexameter (there is one single poem of a single hexameter line in the book). Scazonic verse appears the most at the start of the book (getting the ruder poems out of the way faster?), and hendecasyllables punctuate the general flow of elegiac couplets. The hexameter poem precedes the end of the book with a bang.What comes across is that Martial varies up his metre to evoke a different sound and general ‘feel’ (I guess the academic term would be “mood”) as his work progresses.

So far so good. Let’s look at poem line lengths in book 7:

This time the y axis continues to be the progression of poems, but the x axis is each poem’s number of lines. Interestingly, this graph is much more jagged – variation is taking place on a more frequent basis. Indeed, in general Martial seems to juxtapose a long poem with a short one, perhaps giving the reader a chance to rest as they continue through the text. If a book was full of really long poems we’d be more likely to put it down. Is Martial trying to egg his reader on all the way through? He certainly wants his reader to read him all the way through in his second preface (this could easily be another blog post in itself). Once again we see variety in Martial, but not the sort of variety that most people analyse – scholars are generally more interested in thematic interplay (as am I, to be fair). What this analysis here offers, however, is a look at the overall architecture of the book.

Still reading? Let’s move onto a broader overview of the corpus.

Book Lengths

Scholarship on Latin poetry and the ancient book has traditionally focused on the book length. In the Augustan period (usually seen as the “Golden Age” of Latin poetry, which sidelines great authors like Martial to the dustbin of the “Silver Latin” age) a ‘good’ poetry book would not be much longer than 800-1000 lines. If a book doesn’t follow this scheme, or doesn’t display the same structure as Vergil’s Georgics, it is often deemed un-Augustan and thus ‘bad’.

I may have a bit of a bee in my bonnet, but it seems odd to judge works by their overall length. What is more interesting to me, however, is whether or not each book of Martial would have been written out on its own individual scroll. Be warned, reader – a lot of this discussion gets a bit ethereal and speculative. Van Sickle set the bar quite high in the 1980s, at the length of 1000-2000 lines per papyrus scroll of Homer. Each scroll could theoretically continue multiple individual ‘books’ of a work (‘book’ referring to a significant section of an individual work, a bit like ‘chapters’ today but longer).

Where would this leave Martial? Let’s have a quick look at book lengths of Martial (counted up more-or-less by hand by me, so apologies for any minor inaccuracies). Caveat: these lengths do not include prose prefaces with their prefatory epigrams, which precede books 1, 2, 8, 9, and 12.

• Book 1: 821 lines
• Book 2: 546 lines
• Book 3: 644 lines
• Book 4: 670 lines
• Book 5: 645 lines
• Book 6: 615 lines
• Book 7: 737 lines
• Book 8: 661 lines
• Book 9: 910 lines
• Book 10: 898 lines
• Book 11*: 809 lines
• Book 12*: 719 lines

*: Books 11 and 12 both have one poem that is slightly lacunose (i.e. missing lines), so their original length would have been a bit longer.

Alright. First observations: Book 2 is the shortest book at 546 lines, and book 9 at the lengthiest (910+ preface with its own 8-line epigram). In general I’d say that Martial’s ‘standard’ book would have been c. 650-700 lines long. Multiple books could fit on a single papyrus scroll relatively easily (perhaps paired up?) if we follow Van Sickle.

I would like to note, however, that the production of papyri in the ancient world effectively amounted to pasting sheets of papyrus together and then rolling them up, so any book length would theoretically have been possible. Martial frequently refers to his work as libelli (little books) rather than libri (books). While this is a part of his self-deprecation in writing light verse (nugae), this could also reflect the reality that his libelli were shorter papyrus rolls that the libri.

Moving away from speculative analysis, however, it is interesting that book 2 is so short. Arguments for this have been made that the book was a release soon after or alongside book 1, and so book 2 held the ‘overflow’ of extra poems (see Sullivan on this). This may have been the case, but my interest is piqued by the nature of book 2 itself. This book is (more than any other of Martial’s books) rather obsessed with its own length. The prefatory letter and first poem of the book both refer to its size. Here’s a brief extract of 2.1:

Indeed you could bear three hundred epigrams,
My book, but who would bear and read you through (perlegeret)?
[8 more lines]
You consider yourself safe with so much brevity?
Ah me, how long you’ll be to many anyway!

Martial says that his reader should read him all the way through (perlegeret) because the book is so small (the bit I didn’t include says that this libellus is shorter and better for it than a liber), ending on the worry that even though the book is so brief it’ll be considered long at any rate. Given that this is the shortest book of the corpus, could we see a bit of playfulness here? The shortest book of the corpus states its brevity, but chastises the reader who thinks it’s too small. Paying attention to numbers can add some extra nuance to our understanding of the book.

Indeed, the longest book is book 9 – a work obsessed with monuments and fame. This is the last book before Domitian is assassinated, and (perhaps too) fittingly forms the peak of a crescendo of panegyric that began in book 7. What could be more fitting than having the book that exults in the poet’s highest point of literary success also be his longest?

I’m sure there are more observations that I could make about length in Martial (perhaps I’ll write a paper on it someday), but for now I think we can say that by paying attention to the parts of the book that we don’t normally ‘read’ – the length, the variation of metre – we spot some interesting features of Martial’s Epigrams.

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, W. (2007) Martial: The World of the Epigram, Chicago & London.

Morgan, L. (2010) Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse, Oxford.

Van Sickle, J. (1980) ‘The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book’ Arethusa 13, 5-42.

Further Reading

I cannot recommend enough William Johnson’s 2010 magnum opus “Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire”, which gives a stellar reconstruction of the ancient book roll (p.17ff.) and a careful reading of ancient literary culture in general.

Martial’s Audiences: Ancient Fans?

This week’s post is inspired by some research I’m about to look more fully into, and is related to the exploration of Martial’s general reader (as discussed last week). The question I’m interested to explore is whether or not Martial had ‘fans’, and if that term is even applicable in the ancient world. Let’s take a look at one of the poems in book 7 on a certain Pompeius Auctus:

“If it pains you, Urbicus, to purchase my trifles
And yet pleases you to know my lascivious songs,
You should search – and perhaps you know him – for Pompeius Auctus;
He sits at the first shrine of Mars the Avenger:
Drenched in law and refined by the varied uses of the toga,
This man is not my reader, Urbicus, but my book.
Thus he retains and recites my books when they are absent,
So that no letter from my writings perishes:
In short, if he should wish it, he could appear to have written them;
But the fame he prefers to favour is mine!
You can bother him from the tenth hour – for he will not be free before –
A small, little dinner will hold you both;
He will read, you drink; although you won’t want it, he will boom;
And when you say ‘now that’s enough,’ he will read…” (7.51)

What really excites me about this poem is how Martial identifies Pompeius Auctus – he’s not just some normal person, indeed he’s very bizarre. It’s normal for a poet to personify their work by addressing it, but in this poem Martial’s book becomes the living, breathing Auctus. The man is respectable (steeped in the court rooms) but also a bit irritating – he keeps going on and on about Martial even when you tell him to stop. Auctus displays some attitudes of the lector studiosus – he reads Martial all the way through and can recite him from memory – but the reality of this isn’t necessarily the most helpful or fun thing in the world.

On the whole, I think this depiction of Auctus is more positive than negative, and the figure we are most invited to laugh at in this poem is Urbicus, who is depicted as Auctus’ opposite. While Auctus has bought the book (and really has no need for it anymore through constant, amateur recitation), Urbicus does not want to (presumably out of miserliness). This is what irritates Martial, and this is what bids him to send Urbicus to the temple of Mars the Avenger (Martial’s avenger?) for his fit punishment. What gets Urbicus into this mess is his desire to get Martial’s work without spending a penny, but he gets a lot more than he bargains for in the ceasless Auctus. While Auctus might be a bit of a boor, Martial has a use for him just like his other amici, and knows exactly how to use him.

So as well as being an ideal reader for purchasing Martial’s work, Auctus also does something else for Martial – he cites his source. One of Martial’s most hated ‘bad’ readers is the plagiarist (Martial in fact is the earliest source to use the Latin plagiarius in this sense – cf. Epigrams 1.52), and it reveals the very real concern in his day that once a book was ‘published’ (made public) it fully left the author’s direct control. By praising Martial whenever he recites his work, Auctus does the poet a massive favour. Not only is he admitting the poet’s literary authority, he also praises his fame (or fama – a reputation for good words. See Hardie below). This is in direct opposition to another figure we met last week – the malignus interpres, who wants to write attacks into Martial’s poetry that (he claims) aren’t there. Is Auctus, then, one of Martial’s ideal readers? A named lector studiosus? He’s certainly read Martial again and again and praises his work, but he does so at the cost of being an irritation to those around him. This is definitely something I’d like to explore further – does the poet reject his own ideal reader in Auctus?

Another exciting revelation in this poem is the amateur recitation. When scholars talk about the performance context of Roman poets of the 1st century AD they generally assume that recitations by the poet are the most frequent way of receiving their work. But in this poem (and elsewhere), Martial depicts one of his readers doing the performance for him in an amateur setting – at dinner, after the 10th hour. We can imagine a rather intimate setting – a private recitation from one man to another. Indeed, no one else seems to be there to say “that’s enough now” to stop Urbicus. Maybe they’ve given up on him, or maybe, just maybe, these sorts of private recitations of poetry just after dinner were a part of elite pastime. There’s a lot more research for me to do on this, but it certainly opens up the potential for the reality of Martial’s general readership.

Auctus is at once a pain and a devoted fan of Martial’s work. I don’t think we can imagine hordes of screaming men & women charging at him whenever he appeared in public, but his works seem to have been appreciated, and in a variety of settings. Could Auctus be an ancient fan? He enjoys the poet’s work and engages with it frequently, sharing it with anyone who will listen, but the reality of ancient ‘fandom’ would have been very different from modern concepts. I am hesitant to use the term at this stage without a whole host of ‘buts’, but it is a nice idea. Maybe I’ll have more to say in the near future.

Further Reading

The concept of fama is given wide-ranging treatment by Philip Hardie in his book Rumour and Renown: Representations of ‘Fama’ in Western Literature.

Martial’s Audiences: The General Reader

What really makes Martial stand out for me from other Latin authors is the way in which he directly addresses us, the general, unknown reader of his poetry. This wasn’t entirely innovative – Ovid had done something similar in the Tristia nearly a century beforehand (which Martial alludes to more than once) – but what makes Martial special is the lengths to which he goes to speak directly to his reader, breaking the fourth wall, in a bid to control our approach to the text.

As I hinted last week, Martial privileges his general reader as much as he praises the emperor, but just as praising Domitian was all about control, so too does the epigrammatist try to encourage his reader’s towards a specific style of reading. Let’s begin with the first poem in Martial’s corpus of the Epigrams. After a relatively lengthy preface to his lector studiosus (eager/studious reader) setting out his poetic programme (I will no doubt return to this preface another day), Martial offers a snappy poem in praise of them (and himself):

“Here’s that one you read, whom you need,
Known throughout the whole world, Martial,
For his sharp little books of epigrams:
To whom, studious reader, the glory which
You gave him while alive and sensing it,
Few poets have after they are ashes.” (1.1)

So there we have it, the first poem of his collection. Here Martial establishes his own position of poetic authority, as he’s known throughout the world (or so he claims…). His reader is thanked graciously for providing the poet with his great success, and we are instantly flattered by the poet. As we read we feel gratified, and this is exactly the poet’s tactic here – he’s getting on our good side, trying to be our friend, and acting as a guide to his Epigrams. Naturally we can accept what he says about his poems – he’s so famous, and that has to be a reason. Of course he’d never lie to us – he’s so nice!

It has been argued that Martial is doing the ridiculous here in stating his own literary success in the first poem of the Epigrams before he’s shown us that his libelli (little books) are so sharp and witty. The argument runs that this must be evidence of a re-released book 1 (the special edition, if you will), or a joke at the audience’s expense, or Ovid’s – Ovid famously ended the Metamorphoses and his exilic poetry with claims of literary immortality. By claiming this same immortality in similar language Martial puts himself into the same position as a literary classic, but supersedes his elegiac predecessor by not needing to prove beforehand his worth (these arguments have been made by Patricia Larash in her PhD thesis, but also come out in William Fitzgerald’s book on Martial). But I wonder if something else is going on here.

For one, we know that Martial wrote a few other books of poetry before he began the Epigrams. There’s his Xenia and Apophoreta, two books of epigrams that read a lot like Christmas cracker jokes, and his Liber Spectaculorum, which celebrates the inaugural games for the Colosseum. By this stage, if we agree with this ordering of Martial’s books, he is already a somewhat established author. But this poem also acts as an introduction to the poet and his work. Martial is an incredibly arrogant poet, always telling us how good he is at what he does, trying to wrestle control of his own poetry, and herein lies the reality of his relationship with the general reader, his unknown audience members – he can never truly control them.

Martial is astonishingly open about how much he sells his work at the bookshops scattered throughout Rome and the provinces. True he had patrons (including the emperor), but his work was read by more than the narrow elite literary culture he performed in. In the world before publishers and copyright, an author’s work was sold directly to a bookshop to be copied and sold on. Once out of the author’s hands his work was literally out of his hands. He could not recall it, and he could not change how people interpreted it.

Indeed, Martial often moans at how his words are misrepresented by others (whom he dubs maligni interpretes – malignant interpreters), especially when the emperor is involved:

                              “What worse than Nero?
What better than the Neronian hot-baths?
Straight away, look, one of the malignants does not fall short,
Who speaks thus with somewhat rancid mouth:
‘Why do you prefer them to so many
Gifts from our Lord and God [Domitian]?’ I do prefer
The Neronian hot-baths, compared to the baths of a cinaedus.” (7.34.4-10)

(cinaedus was an insult against men who engaged in a passive sexual role with other men).

Even as Martial speaks someone misrepresents him, and it’s up to his lectores studiosi, his beloved general readers, to defend his honour. One such reader is asked to defend the poet in the courts with the cry of “my Martial never wrote that stuff!” In Martial’s world, then, it paid to have your readers on side, and he would pay the ultimate penalty if he misspoke.

But ultimately, it seems that Martial wanted to reach as many people as possible and let them enjoy his poems as much as he enjoyed writing them (and watching them be enjoyed):

“My Rome praises, loves, sings my little books,
And everyone holds me in their laps, everyone holds me in their hands.
Look! Someone blushes, pales, is stunned, yawns, is disgusted.
I want this: now my songs please me…” (6.60)

[There is much more I could say on the general reader in Martial, and more that I intend to say in my thesis. This won’t be the last blog post on the topic, I swear! This blog post also includes some thoughts I presented in a research paper at AMPAL  – the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient Literature – at Cambridge in September 2014]

Further Reading

Patricia Larash submitted a PhD on the general reader in Martial at Berkeley, California in 2004 – it’s not widely available, unfortunately, but you can buy it from ProQuest if your university gives you access.

William Fitzgerald covers Martial’s treatment of Ovid and compares it to Burmeister’s treatment of Martial in a chapter of his 2007 book Martial: The World of the Epigram.

Martial’s Audiences: Domitian

Last week I briefly covered how Martial’s poems can be both occasional and specific to the book, using Lucan’s birthday as an example. I also introduced Polla, a patron shared by both Martial and Statius, but she is not the only example. Indeed, Martial’s Epigrams are riddled with references to important men and women in the city of Rome, many of whom can be seen as the poet’s primary audience members. Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be exploring these audiences a bit further, focussing on specific groups and what we can say about them in terms of poetic and real-world impact.

This week I thought I’d go straight to the top. By Martial’s day the principate (emperorship if you will) was firmly established, and the emperor was the most important patron of the arts. If a poet had the emperor’s favour he’d well and truly made it, and if he hadn’t he could be exiled to the Black Sea like Ovid was, forgotten in the bargain bins of the local bookshops, or worse. Keeping the emperor on side was crucial, and Martial paints a picture of numerous important figures he charms in a bid to ensure continued support (Crispinus, Earinus, and Apollinaris to name a few). At times, though, Martial directly addresses the emperor and grossly flatters him.

Some of you may remember from my first post that Martial has had a difficult relationship with modern critics who hate the extent to which he flatters a totalitarian tyrant. Domitian was damned as a tyrant and seen as one of the ‘bad’ emperors by history, but this is largely due to the damnatio memoriae (having his memory surgically removed – statues torn down, edicts destroyed etc) that accompanied his assassination and the tactis of Nerva and Trajan (his two successors).

Generally speaking, if an emperor was ousted from power his successors would naturally emphasise how much better they were, generally in terms of restored liberty. The same thing happened, to an extent, to the emperor Nero. Neither of these men can or should be exonerated for their actions (Nero is notorious for persecuting Christians for example), but we should try to remember that these men dild not always act in the Disney-villain-esque manner that we are always told by the sources. Martial himself reports in book 9 that one of Domitian’s moral reforms ended the practice of child prostitution. As with most reviled political figures there are shades of grey at work rather than just black and white. Which of us is always perfect?

Be that as it may, some of the stuff Martial says about the emperor frequently makes me want to hurl. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Get a bucket ready:

“You, the greatest commander of the earth and parent of the world…” (7.7.5)
“Worthy of reverence, ruler of the Tarpeian palace [i.e. Jupiter],
Whom as Thunderer we believe our leader [Domitian] safe,
Each of us wearies you with their own prayers
And demands you give what you gods can:
Do not be enraged with me seeking nothing
For myself as if I were arrogant.
About Caesar I ought to ask you;
About me I ought to ask Caesar.” (7.60)

It’s ok. Take a moment to recover.

As you can see, Martial doesn’t pull any punches with his praise of Domitian. He turns him into a Jupiter-on-earth, an entity of limitless power, in his poems. We might find these flatteries too much to bear, but modern sensibilities rarely line up with ancient ones. Nowadays the idea of watching two men fight to the death (or near death) for our entertainment is broadly seen as revolting, for example, but this was just another way of relaxing for the average Roman. In the UK the age of consent in 16 and an age gap of 20 years between partners would raise an eye. In Rome, girls were frequently married off as young as 14 to men three times that age. With these huge differences in our societies at play we should be very wary about casting any judgements. To my mind, these gross flatteries can be understood in the realm of panegyric.

Panegyric was a genre of praise that grew in strength along with the principate. There are several examples of panegyric that survive to the modern day, one of which is Pliny’s Panegyric of the emperor Trajan. What is most striking about this piece is, as remarked upon by Susanna Morton Braund, that Pliny uses very similar phrases to Martial to glorify the new emperor despite damning Domitian. Those that have trouble reconciling Martial’s praise for Domitian should bear the example of Pliny’s Panegyric in mind – even ‘good’ emperors were praised to a sickening (by modern standards) extent. Far from being the only way of appeasing a horrible tyrant, then, Martial’s statements about the emperor seem to be more a part of the tone required for Roman panegyric to be successful.

Nevertheless, some see this overblown flattery by Martial as an attempt to be politically subversive. This line of argument usually stresses that the praise is too much to be taken seriously, and that a secret message must be buried within it. Most prominent amongst those that consider Martial to be politically subversive is John Garthwaite, who has written several articles on the topic.I won’t go into the nitty-gritty here, but we should always consider ancient literature in its context. By Domitian’s day imperial panegyric was reaching new heights, and not conforming to an expected level of praise could result in execution – Dio Cassius records one such case during Domitian’s reign for us. Whether or not Martial believed what he was saying is irrelevant (and ultimately impossible to reconstruct) – his ‘excessive’ praise should be considered in terms of expectations of the genre he was writing in. Not to conform and praise the emperor was a death sentence.

What is interesting about Martial is the way he presents himself as a part of Domitian’s world, praising himself by extention to the emperor. Note the final poem of book 7 where Martial wants Domitian to listen to his poems – Martial puts words into the emperor’s mouth and grants himself an imperial seal of approval:

“If my poems are read in the Parrhasian palace
(for they too are used to enjoying the sacred ear of Caesar)
Dare to say about me, as a candid reader:
‘That one stands out somewhat for your times,
And is not too much worse than Marsus and learned Catullus.’
This is enough: the rest I entrust to the god himself.” (7.99.3-8)

Domitian is turned into a god in Martial’s poetry, but at the same time Martial gives himself divine favour. While this is unsavoury to modern audiences, it reveals a power dynamic of praise and approval for Martial’s poetry. For those of you who remain unconvinced, consider this: Martial did not write every one of his poems as a florid expression of adoration for the emperor. Although he was a crucial figure to have on hand, he was not the be-all-and-end-all. In fact, as we will see next week, Martial privileges another figure with as much (if not more) power in his verse.

Further Reading

The article I mentioned above about Pliny’s Panegyric was written by Susanna Morton Braund in Praise and Protreptic in Early Imperial Panegyric: Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, a volume edited by M. Whitby.

John Garthwaite has written much on Martial, but a good introduction to reading Martial subversively is ‘The Panegyrics of Domitian in Martial Book 9’ in Ramus 22.

Happy Birthday Lucan!

It was the 1975th anniversary of the Neronian poet Lucan’s birth on Monday (the 3rd November). For those of you not in the know, Lucan wrote an epic poem on the theme of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (mid 1st Century BC). Lucan’s birthday was generally unremarked upon by most, but is actually relevant to my own research. Here’s why.

You see, in book 7 of the Epigrams Martial includes three poems on the theme of Lucan’s birthday, but he doesn’t specify the date (he only says haec est illa dies – this is that day… Informative). Now, to be fair on Martial, this is not the most important thing to include in the poem. The poet Statius (whom I mentioned in my introductory post) notes in the preface of his second book of Silvae that his own poem on the subject of Lucan’s birthday was written by commission (requested by Polla, Lucan’s widow), which suggests that this date was an important one for the literary world of Rome at the time. To Martial and Statius’ audience, then, the date of Lucan’s birthday was a known one – to put that exact information into their poems would be pointless and a waste of time.

But to me the date is important. When time is explicitly mentioned in book 7 it is always within the context of winter and December. Martial notably does not mention other times (except to state that they are in the future). So I looked up Lucan’s birthday in all the usual spots (wikipedia, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and Brill’s New Pauly), trying to find the source that tells us that Lucan was born on the 3rd November 39 AD (which all three of my sources claimed as solid evidence). But nothng cited a source to tell us why. Luckily one of my supervisors pointed me in the direction of a 4th Century AD biography of Lucan that was written by a man called Vacca. Here’s what he said:

natus est III Nonas Novembris C. Caesare Augusto Germanico II, Apronio Caesiano consulibus.

He [Lucan] was born on the 3rd day before the Nones of November [i.e. the 3rd] when Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus [i.e. Caligula] and Apronius Caesianus were consuls (Gaius for the 2nd time).

So there we go! I have a source to link the birthday of Lucan to the 3rd November 39 AD (and one that I can cite for other people who might want the information). Fantastic! But this doesn’t add up with December, does it? Only winter. I could point out that Martial’s book was composed in December and that his poem on Lucan is meant to be set in the past, but remember that the first Lucan poet states that “this is that day.” Not was. Is.

The only saving grace for my otherwise perfectly unchallenged December-as-a-temporal-setting theory is that Martial doesn’t explicitly name the date. But as I said above, if this was a notable event in the Flavian literary calendar then his audience would be expected to know the day.

Ultimately the problem I think I am having to deal here is with how Martial composed his books and poetry. Martial has frequently been referred to as an occasional poet (one who writes for specific events or occasions), and nowhere is this more explicit in book 7 than here. Fine, but my thesis is that Martial composed his poems with the book in mind. There are too many self-referential poems about how he writes his books and subtle repetitions of themes and words to link otherwise unlinkable poems together to argue otherwise. But not every poem was composed just for the book – they must have had other contexts. Remember Statius? He openly says that his poem on Lucan was requested by Polla. What that means is unclear – did she pay Statius for the poem? Was there just a request for the poets of the day to write something appropriate? How much input did Polla have? Could she have influenced his poetry?

By this stage it’s more or less conjecture, but it does seem likely that Polla asked Lucan to make his own poem and he took his hints from what would have been expected for a writer in that situation. Martial would have done something similar. Payment is unmentioned, but in the world of Roman clientela (a patron & client relationship) Polla would have seen such a composition as a favour for her to return in some way in some gift or service.

So what do these three poems do to my concept of the book as a carefully sculpted work? I don’t think they have too much of an impact on the overall December theme – rather they tie more into the themes of great contemporary literary writers (Silius Italicus, Martial, Juvenal), Nero as a contrast to Domitian (the line “what worse than Nero? What better than his baths!” comes from book 7) and composition in general. These poems, possibly reworked for publication within the book, are useful in that they remind us, the modern reader, of the multiple points of reception that Martial’s poetry could have. While Martial’s books are worked together to have some form of unity it is a messy unity because of the various people he had to please in his writing. Epigrams 7.21-23 thus serve as a taste of Martial’s contemporary world, and also show how one writer could acknowledge another in the late 1st Century AD.

If you’re interested in these poems I include my own translation below:

This is that day, which conscious of great birth,
Gave Lucan to the populace and, Polla, to you.
Alas! Nero cruel and more hated than no shade
This, at least, ought not have been allowed to you. (7.21)

Memorable from the great birth of the Apollonean bard,
Dawn returns: crowd of Aonians, observe the rites!
When this day gave you, Lucan, to the earth, it deserved
To have the Baetis mixed with Castalia’s water. (7.22)

Come, Phoebus, but as great you were, when to he thundering wars
You yourself gave the second plectrum of the Latian lyre.
Why should I pray for such a dawn? May you, Polla, often
Worship your husband and may he know he is worshipped. (7.23)

[N.B. The first prize for Latin epic would have been Vergil for the Aeneid]

Further Reading

If you’re interested in the topic of Martial’s interactions with his patrons the work of Ruurd Nauta is especially important. I can wholeheartedly recommend his Poetry for Patrons (though being a book by Brill it is rather expensive to buy). Otherwise, most modern introductions to Martial deal in some way with the patron/client relationship.

Craig Williams recently wrote a very good book called Reading Roman Friendship and deals with how Romans wrote about clientela as amicitia (friendship) amongst other things.