Martial on Monte Mario: coda

Two last things to wrap up.

First, Monte Mario is not the only place we find 4.64 excerpted in modern inscription. It's also on the Janiculan -- the 'real' Janiculan, if we still believe in such a thing. Just two lines this time, in the loggia of Villa Lante:

HINC SEPTEM DOMINOS VIDERE MONTIS
ET TOTAM LICET AESTIMARE ROMAM

...which are the two lines that definitely work from there, even if nothing else does. Thanks to Shane Butler for pointing this one out to me!

Second is a site I came across when walking a section of the ancient Via Appia out past Ciampino, where it starts getting properly rustic. It's on this map (though the 'interactive' onward link doesn't presently work) as 'Tempio di Ercole', and there is a little information about it here.

This was triumphantly identified as Martial's shrine of the Small Hercules, from 3.47:

Where the Capena Gate rains with swollen drips...where the hallowed field of the Horatii sprouts green and where the shrine of the Small Hercules swarms with visitors -- there, Faustinus, was Bassus on his way in a fully loaded wagon, lugging all the bounty of a fruitful farm...

Readers who could mentally plot the points of Bassus' itinerary along the Via Appia would have seen Martial's punchline coming. Bassus is not bringing in the produce of his country estate to his urban domus, like a good Roman should; he is actually going the other way, loaded up for a weekend in the country with the contents of an urban hypermarket. So, there was a 'shrine of the Small Hercules' somewhere out along the Via Appia, further out of town than the rest of Martial's waypoints, which are more or less identifiable.

The 'cosiddetto Tempio di Ercole' is not it. It is not a temple of anything. It is an enclosed courtyard with little shops or offices opening off it, and archaeologists now agree that it was a late Republican mall. Something of the kind should always have been obvious, but such was the desire to pin the tail on the donkey -- somewhere, anywhere -- that the identification was made, and the name stuck.

The name still sticks, and the urge to fix Martial's playful texts ("why did the chicken cross the road?") to the fabric of urban and exurban reality ("there must have been a chicken farm here") is hard to resist, because people still assume that's what he's for.

Martial 5.42: two versions

Two versions of a poem much loved by translators.

Thieves may break locks, and with your cash retire:
Your ancient seat may be consumed by fire:
Debtors refuse to pay you what they owe:
On your ungrateful field the seed you sow;
You may be plundered by a jilting whore:
Your ships may sink at sea with all their store:
Who gives to friends, so much from Fate secures;
That is the only wealth forever yours.

-William Hay, 1755

Money will come and go: we all know that.
The most important thing in life
Will always be the people in this room.
Right here, right now.
Salud, mi familia.

-Dominic Toretto, 2011

Mycenae and Troy

The cities of Homer are sunk in dust, but live forever in his Iliad.

9.28

POMPEY, OR SOME SAY MARCUS THE YOUNGER

I lie here desolate beneath the dust, 

Mycenae, less to see than any knoll. 

And yet whoever who looks on Ilium, 

That famous town whose walls I trampled down, 

And purged the house of Priam — they shall know 

What strength I owned. If age has slighted me, 

I am content in Homer’s witnessing.

9.62

EUĒNUS OF ASCALON

I, sacred Ilium, that storied town 

Whose tower-studded walls were famed in song: 

Stranger, the dust of time has eaten me. 

In Homer, though, I rest inviolate, 

Behind my gates of bronze. Achaean spears 

That ruined Troy can never root me thence; 

I shall be reside upon the very lips 

Of every single Hellene yet to come.

Gregory of Nazianzus: two epitaphs for his brother

I'm currently at work on a selection from book 8 of the Anthology. This one is a collection of epigrams by a single author: Gregory of Nazianzus 'the Theologian' (d. 390), best friend of Basil of Caesarea and eventually Archbishop of Constantinople. Paton, translator of the Anthology for the Loeb series, is very sniffy about book 8 --

I should personally have preferred to follow the Teubner edition in omitting this book... Gregory evidently enjoyed making verses, but the epigrams make somewhat tedious reading, as there are so many on the same subject.

I think he's terrific, though. He is a learned poet, but his epigrams are personal and moving. Most of them are terribly sad. Basil dies; his parents die (his mother of a long and painful illness); his brother dies: and Gregory counts the rosary of his grief in chains of epigrams. Here are two for that brilliant brother of his. The second has Gregory's poetic signature worked in, a trait I've also seen in one of his poems for Basil.

91On Caesarius [his brother] 

Wisdom and everything it comprehends:
Geometry, the stations of the stars,
The stratagems of the logician’s art,
Grammar and history too, and speaker’s force:
Caesarius alone of mortal men
With subtle mind and soaring intellect
Could grasp them all. Alas! Now like the rest
He is become a scattering of dust. 

98
On the same 

Gregory’s handiwork. In sad regret
For best of brothers, I proclaim to men
That they should hate and scorn this mortal life.
Who was so fine as my Caesarius?
Who of all men could match him, or could claim
So great a name for wisdom? None that live;
But he has flown from life, gone suddenly,
As might a rose from all the other flowers,
As does the dew from off the leaves at dawn.

Impossible vistas, a speciality

Julius' mixed-up vistas are only a problem if we go to Martial for straight reportage -- but poets of his age were not invested in representing Rome and its hinterland 'as it really was'.

To get a better grip on what Martial does with Julius' villa, we can turn to a contemporary and fellow poet. Statius published the first three books of his Silvae in the early nineties, a few years after Martial's fourth book (AD 89), and included some remarkable descriptions of suburban villas. In Silvae 1.3, we visit the villa of Manilius Vopiscus at Tibur (modern Tivoli); in 2.2 the scene is Pollius Felix's seaside place at Sorrento, an upscale coastal resort then as it is today. Indeed, the modern visitor who goes in search of Pollius Felix should pack a swimming costume: you can still take a dip in his ancient private maritime grotto.

Vopiscus' place is harder to pin down with precision but visitors are pointed towards a set of ruins within the steep valley of the beautiful Villa Gregoriana. Have a look for yourself, in the online translation of the poem, part of the vast suite of resources made available for free online by the estimable A. S. Klein.

Fascinating place. IT DOESN'T ADD UP, not readily or in any systematic way. But this doesn't mean Statius is an idiot who wandered off from the tour and got lost.  In an article published in 1988 in Illinois Classical Studies (13: 95-11), 'Horace and Statius at Tibur: An Interpretation of Silvae 1. 3', Carole Newlands noted that in both 1.3 and 2.2., Statius "makes it impossible for the reader to reconstruct his patron's villas" (sound familiar)? Newlands developed and explored an argument already made in part by other scholars, along the lines that Statius' disorderly descriptions are in fact carefully designed; that the poet is hitting the reader with a sensory medley that evocatively recreates the WOW effect of visiting for the first time, all with a view to making the owner look amazing.

Newlands actually found these suggestions worked a bit patchily for some passages in Statius' descriptions, but they give a pretty good account of Martial 4.64. Julius' villa is being all it can be; it delivers everything a suburban home of this kind possibly could, all at once. As poetry for a patron, it makes perfect sense; it only becomes problematic if we insist on reading it as Martial's substitute for a panoramic photo, as what he sees through the telescope from the terrace.

And that's almost all I have to say about Martial on Monte Mario, except...