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.