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...