'Julius Martial'...really?

Before we get any further into the Monte Mario thing, I should confess that I've always had my doubts about Julius Martialis.

Like the Greek poets he took as his model, Martial puts a lot of probably-made-up people into his epigrams, with metrically convenient names that are often comically (in)appropriate to their role in the satirical scenario. Postumus, for instance, and Galla, and Cinna/Cinnamus, are there to set up the punchlines and take the falls. Someone has to be, and there was no profit in making real enemies. Martial's readers are in on the trick; he makes jokes about it (e.g. Epigram 3.11).

Martial also includes a lot of real people. Flattering epigrams were currency in the give-and-take of elite Roman friendship (amicitia). So, Martial wrote nice things about Pliny the Younger (Epigram 10.20), and Pliny did at least one nice thing for him -- covered his relocation expenses, when he moved back to Spain (Letters 3.21). Pliny was super-rich, Martial was witty and talented: friendship, yes, but also fair trade. Favours from the Emperor were all the more worth courting, and the hardworking and moral 'Domitian' of the first nine books of epigrams is Martial's best (and surely, increasingly confident) guess at what Domitian would like to read about himself. A gift of literature could help build the personal brands of addressee and poet alike.

Within the complex, messy world of Martial's sprawling serial fiction -- 'the Martialverse', as Francesca Sapsford termed it, drawing on the coinages of cult-media fandom around serial television drama ('the Xenaverse', 'the Buffyverse') -- Postumus and Pliny are equally real. In this virtual world of text, Postumus is a jumped-up chancer, and Pliny is eloquent and studious, and both these things are equally true; just as, for instance, it is absolutely true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, London. As long as the Holmesverse endures, Sherlock Holmes will always make his home on Baker Street.

This is unproblematic. It only gets tricky if you insist on tracking down, or indeed making, a 221B on 'our' Baker Street, in the larger and even messier universe outside the fiction. Similar things are true of Martial's Rome, but with the complication that many of its inhabitants are biographically real persons.

Worse: some of the poet's named characters are-and-aren't real, or are real off and on. Take for instance his 'Catullus': sometimes definitely the famous Republican poet whom Martial talks up as his role-model and best excuse, sometimes clearly not the poet, and sometimes... ISH. Any index that sets out a 'Catullus 1' and 'Catullus 2', and claims to be able to tell you which is which, is weaving strange fictions of its own.

What first worried me about Julius Martialis was his name (continued)...