Where the gate drips with rain next to Agrippa's portico and the stone is slippery-wet from the constant runoff, a water-flow heavy with winter ice fell upon the neck of a boy who was passing under the dripping roofs; and when it had performed its brutal execution on the poor child, the fragile dagger melted away in the still-warm wound. Does Fortune place no limit on her own cruelty? What place is safe from Death, when waters turn cutthroat? (4.18)
This touching scene from ancient Rome's Gashlycrumb Tinies is rich in geolocationali cues: the icicle forms under the leaking Aqua Virgo, built to feed the Baths and Stagnum of Agrippa (a shallow artificial lake used for mock sea-battles and such) on the Campus Martius. Rising in marshland to the east and running below ground till it curved into the city from the north, it still flows (following papal restoration in the 1450s) and feeds some of Rome's greatest tourist attractions — the Trevi Fountain and the Bernini waterworks of Piazza Navona. The arched urban section has been buried by centuries of sediment: part can be seen in Via del Nazzareno, and more is now brilliantly showcased in the basement of Rome's new La Rinascente department store, a great coffee stop.
Martial's boy child is impaled at a spot where the Virgo crossed the Via Lata — the final, urban stretch of the Via Flaminia, Rome's great north road. Today it is the main shopping street, Via del Corso, running straight as a die from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. The arch on which the Virgo crossed Via Lata had been remodelled by the Emperor Claudius as a monument to his victory in Britain in AD 43; the new arch seems to be trailed on coins issued AD 46-7 but was only dedicated in 51/2, perhaps (Anthony Barrett's suggestion) as the culmination of a wider Claudian overhaul of the Virgo. All trace of it had vanished by the Middle Ages but bits and pieces were found (and in the usual way, mostly promptly lost) during demolitions and excavations in 1562, 1641, and possibly 1869. We can thus say with certainty that it crossed the modern-day Corso at the southern end of Piazza de Sciarra, where Via del Caravita comes in from the Pantheon side. There's a kiosk there now.
As Sven Lorenz noted (2004) in one of the most important articles published on Martial, 'Waterscape with Black and White' (AJP 125: 255-78), there is a lot of water in Martial, Book 4 — water, and black and white things (the white including snow). Water imagery already had strong metapoetic connotations (Callimachus), and Lorenz pushes (boldly at the time) for a reading of Book 4 as complexly intratextual — a work that takes itself seriously as literature and invites its readers to enjoy it as more than the sum of its 98 small parts.
One internal echo I'm not the first to note (observed in passing by Rosario Moreno Soldevila in her voluminous Brill commentary) is similarity of description between 4.18 and 4.3, part of an opening sequence praising Domitian as a ruler who combines enlightened patronage of culture with tough military leadership (the emperor had assumed the title 'Germanicus' a few years previously for his victories over the Chatti). His campaigns in the grim north have made him impervious to cold — "He laughs off waters set hard by grasping frost". This cumbersome four-word periphrase for 'ice' (concretas pigro frigore...aquas is very like 4.18's (hiberno praegravis unda gelu). Both poems are eight lines long (no big deal) and line 7 of each is a rhetorical question (perhaps more significant).
But what do we DO with that? Domitian's so tough and manly, such a good soldier for Rome, he shrugs off bad weather that can literally kill the weak and unwary? Or, Domitian laughs at (ridet) what kills small kids? Back in the day, John Garthwaite had argued for finding anti-Domitianic political subtext in Martial's intratextual connections; Lorenz though he was whistling in the dark; here the ambiguity may tempt you, if you're that kind of reader. A mediocre princeps' self-glorification, for conquests in the frozen north, rains icy death on unwitting posterity: in talking to and across each other, are 4.3 and 4.18 (and why stop there?) telling us something about the staying power of Domitian's own achievements? Echoes, juxtapositions, potential cross-connections — these characteristic features of Martial's bookmaking technique proliferate possibilities for meaning, even as they veil their egocentricity coy author in ambiguity.
Domitian's boy is dead, too — but as the son of a God, he gets to play snowballs in heaven (4.3.7-8). Peace and goodwill, all.
Martial's boy child is impaled at a spot where the Virgo crossed the Via Lata — the final, urban stretch of the Via Flaminia, Rome's great north road. Today it is the main shopping street, Via del Corso, running straight as a die from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. The arch on which the Virgo crossed Via Lata had been remodelled by the Emperor Claudius as a monument to his victory in Britain in AD 43; the new arch seems to be trailed on coins issued AD 46-7 but was only dedicated in 51/2, perhaps (Anthony Barrett's suggestion) as the culmination of a wider Claudian overhaul of the Virgo. All trace of it had vanished by the Middle Ages but bits and pieces were found (and in the usual way, mostly promptly lost) during demolitions and excavations in 1562, 1641, and possibly 1869. We can thus say with certainty that it crossed the modern-day Corso at the southern end of Piazza de Sciarra, where Via del Caravita comes in from the Pantheon side. There's a kiosk there now.
As Sven Lorenz noted (2004) in one of the most important articles published on Martial, 'Waterscape with Black and White' (AJP 125: 255-78), there is a lot of water in Martial, Book 4 — water, and black and white things (the white including snow). Water imagery already had strong metapoetic connotations (Callimachus), and Lorenz pushes (boldly at the time) for a reading of Book 4 as complexly intratextual — a work that takes itself seriously as literature and invites its readers to enjoy it as more than the sum of its 98 small parts.
One internal echo I'm not the first to note (observed in passing by Rosario Moreno Soldevila in her voluminous Brill commentary) is similarity of description between 4.18 and 4.3, part of an opening sequence praising Domitian as a ruler who combines enlightened patronage of culture with tough military leadership (the emperor had assumed the title 'Germanicus' a few years previously for his victories over the Chatti). His campaigns in the grim north have made him impervious to cold — "He laughs off waters set hard by grasping frost". This cumbersome four-word periphrase for 'ice' (concretas pigro frigore...aquas is very like 4.18's (hiberno praegravis unda gelu). Both poems are eight lines long (no big deal) and line 7 of each is a rhetorical question (perhaps more significant).
But what do we DO with that? Domitian's so tough and manly, such a good soldier for Rome, he shrugs off bad weather that can literally kill the weak and unwary? Or, Domitian laughs at (ridet) what kills small kids? Back in the day, John Garthwaite had argued for finding anti-Domitianic political subtext in Martial's intratextual connections; Lorenz though he was whistling in the dark; here the ambiguity may tempt you, if you're that kind of reader. A mediocre princeps' self-glorification, for conquests in the frozen north, rains icy death on unwitting posterity: in talking to and across each other, are 4.3 and 4.18 (and why stop there?) telling us something about the staying power of Domitian's own achievements? Echoes, juxtapositions, potential cross-connections — these characteristic features of Martial's bookmaking technique proliferate possibilities for meaning, even as they veil their egocentricity coy author in ambiguity.
Domitian's boy is dead, too — but as the son of a God, he gets to play snowballs in heaven (4.3.7-8). Peace and goodwill, all.
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