'Martial and boundaries' conference paper - script

 

Martial and negotiable boundaries of authorship and friendship

 

This is a paper I gave in June 2024 at a conference in Köln, my first time visiting Germany. I liked Köln very much and our hosts were fantastic. I'll post the handout separately.

GN Cologne script

 

‘Tell me, Priscus, if you turned into a lion, what sort of lion would you be?’

 

·      Friendship is a funny business.

·      This killer line from Martial (12.92) arrives just a few poems from the end of dodecalogy, addressing a friend who keeps asking him what sort of person he’d turn into, if he suddenly became rich and powerful, locuples and potens.

·      ‘Do you really think anyone can tell you how they’d behave then?’, he asks in return. And then comes the punchline:

 

Dic mihi, si fias tu leo, qualis eras?

 

·      It’s a great comeback, and feels very modern: ‘money will change a person’. But there are a couple of snags.

·      I’ll get onto those shortly.

·      First, I want to run through some basic context around Martial and his genre.

 

·      We’ve all read him, or read in him, or mined his 1500-odd epigrams for soundbites about daily life in ancient Rome.

·      We all know where he was from, and when, and about his early forays into epigram –

o   The book or books about the games that inaugurated the Flavian Amphitheatre, and the remnant of which comes down to us in the peculiar form of the Liber de Spectaculis,

o   and the two books of Greek-titled gift-tag poems, Xenia and Apophoreta.

·      Afterwards he settled down to the twelve numbered books that he proposed as his literary legacy,

o   Building up the tiniest of ancient genres into something the same shape as Virgil’s Aeneid, and not much smaller.

·      This much is familiar, and so is his genre, epigram,

·      Though to Romans it was not familiar. It was weird, a thing Greeks did, and there was nothing to be gained by emulating them.

o   Catullus had tried, more than a century before,

o   But Catullus had tried lots of things that hadn’t really panned out; and by Martial’s day, hardly anyone was reading him.

·      Epigram remained securely Greek, and the Greeks were welcome to it, as far as Rome was concerned – both before, and all the more so after, Martial’s time,

o   The exceptions being Romans who played at being Greek for a few couplets, before getting back to their day jobs.

§  Trajan and Hadrian would fall under that heading, in time to come.

o   For all his talk of Marsus and Pedo, Martial’s main models were Greeks – though that’s a whole other story.

·      So, for Martial to specialise in epigram was weird to begin with,

·      And he consciously sets out to make it weirder.

·      Elevating epigram to epic scale is already the act of a highly peculiar author –

o   It reminds me of those people who make models of cathedrals out of matchsticks.

·      The organisation his books according to Latin principles of variatio, rather than by thematic category, is a striking departure within his chosen genre,

·      And foregrounding an authorial personality to such a degree is without precedent,

o   Aligning Martial’s mode with Latin Satire, and laying the groundwork for his younger contemporary, Juvenal,

§  Who at this stage was still in the lawyering business.

·      What is more, Martial is at the cutting edge when it comes to talking about epigram –

o   It’s been noted that only in the first century AD do epigrammatists begin to reflect on and critique their genre by name.

o   Martial may take his lead here from his main Greek model, Lucillius, but as in so much else, he takes it so much further.

·      This is an author concerned to push at the limits of his chosen genre.

 

·      With all that said, let’s come back around to Martial 12.92. I said there were a couple of complications.

·      We can start with an obvious one:

·      Priscus wonders what it would be like to become rich and powerful, but the Priscus we know from reading Martial’s later books is already rich and powerful.

·      He’s the friendly addressee of epigram 10.3, one of those epigrams in which Martial complains that anonymous rival poets have been contaminating his brand by interpolating their own inferior epigrams into circulating copies of his books.

o   Being called on in that way carries the implication, from past precedent within the corpus, that Priscus is in a position to do something about that.

·      More recently and conspicuously, he has been the dedicatee of the verse epistle that opens Book 12, in which the poet looks forward to hosting his important friend when he visits Spain –

·      Expressing the hope that Priscus will lend his keen critical eye and help Martial revise the book, before it goes to Rome to be published. I excerpt this on your handout.

·      Book Twelve goes on to address five flattering epigrams to Priscus (12.1, 12.4, 12.14 12.62), one of which (12.14) fills out his name:

o   He is Terentius Priscus, probably the same man to whom Plutarch dedicates his work on the passing away of the Greek oracles,

o   And identified by Ruud Nauta with, among others, the Prisci of 6.18 and 9.77. (also 7.46, 8.12 – p.69)

o   I am not Nauta, and I do not believe that named characters in Martial can be straightforwardly separated into real and fictional – I have no magic sieve,

o   But the case of Terentius Priscus seems like a no-brainer.

·      In any case, and regardless of his relation to real persons, Priscus is well known to Martial’s readers across the Empire – and subsequently, across the centuries – as a man of wealth and influence.

 

·      I did say there was more than one complication. Here’s another: lions are fantastic! Seriously, the lions of the Martialverse are great.

o   I borrow the term ‘Martialverse’ from Francesca Sapsford’s doctoral thesis on cycles in the dodecalogy – it’s a coinage, on the model of terms from media fandom such as ‘Xenaverse’ and ‘Buffyverse’, and I find it a useful shorthand for the composite narrative world produced by Martial’s grand serial fiction.

o   It’s not a bad idea to think about Martial’s books and epigrams as though they were seasons and episodes of a show, that spark internal connections and build a continuity as the show progresses,

o   And this kind of perspective can sit well with the recent work on ‘cycles’ in the dodecalogy.

·      We could, then, view Martial’s lions as forming a kind of cycle across his books. He starts writing about them very early on, and he sometimes comes back to them in the later part of the collection.

·      Inspired apparently by Flavian munera of the kind that had powered the Liber de Spectaculis,

·      Book 1 takes as one of its major motifs the edifying spectacle of trained lions that permit hares to skip in and out of their mouths – they never bite down,

o   thereby displaying the power of the new imperial dynasty to tame and civilise a world that till recently had seemed arbitrary in its violence.

·      There are eight poems on this theme in this one book (1.6, 14, 22, 44, 48, 51, 60, 104), and already in the third of them, which is on your handout, Martial jokingly concedes that he is milking the topic hard.

o   Martial likes self-referential jokes and self-put-downs of this kind, a famous one being the poem that closes Book 1, epigram 118, also on your handout.

o   I love how it’s addressed to a reader who is already well over a hundred epigrams in, and I like to think of it as an ancient prototype of those car bumper stickers that say, ‘If you can read this, you’re too close’.

·      Under the Flavians, lions in the Martialverse redeem their nature, and give the audience a show they will always remember.

o   ‘Whoever sees them’, says Martial in the last poem in the cycle in Book 1, ‘skims those other sights’ – which included leopards, tigers, bears, even elephants – ‘and reckons them sideshows’, minora, though previously they might have thought them fit for the gods.

·      The lions sleep for most of Books 2-7 – we learn only that they can forget their training, and have dreadful halitosis (2.74, 6.93) –

·      But in Book 8 we find Domitian praised for presenting a paragon among lions in the arena – “what beauty, what dignity... what joy he took from a mighty death” (8.55) –

o   The ‘he’ of that claim being the lion, sent by the deified Vespasian and Titus as a sign that they endorse the Flavian heir.

·      There’s a lion that is best friends with a sheep in Book 9, though that one’s weird – the thing they both most like to eat is lamb.

 

·      Most strikingly though, in the closing books, lions take on an important and surprising new role as a figure for satirical epigram and its number one poet.

·      10.65 addresses an effeminate Eastern Greek called Charmenion who wants to be Martial’s best friend. The plainspoken and virile Spanish poet tells this slick fellow to leave him alone, because they have nothing in common – ‘A dove is not so different from an eagle, or a fugitive doe from a stark lion.’ Shaggy Martial is the lion in this equation.

·      At the end of the same book, in another of his epigrams against rival poets who interpolate epigrams of their own into circulating copies of Martial’s books, our poet tells an anonymous imitator that he will never succeed in passing off his inferior work as Martial’s own – ‘Why are you trying to slip foxes into a pride of lions?’. That one’s on your handout.

·      And at 12.61, some person called Ligurra is afraid – and/or hopes – that he may become the target of Martial’s satirical epigrams, but is told that his sins aren’t interesting enough to make the cut –

o   Though I suppose this gives him his fifteen minutes of fame after all.

·      ‘Lions of Libya aim their roars at bulls; they don’t maul butterflies.’ That’s on your handout as well.

·      Here we have Martial identifying as a lion for the second time, and then just thirty poems later, he asks Priscus, ‘If you turned into a lion, what kind of lion would you be?’

 

·      I told you it was odd,

·      And odder still if here, in the final instalment of Martial’s miniaturist epic, the reader recalls the lion-cycle to which the poet drew such attention in the book that opened it.

·      Lions of Libya don’t maul butterflies, but they don’t bite down on hares either,

·      And that’s not because hares are beneath their dignity – we all know hare is delicious.

·      It’s because they can be thoroughly tamed. The closing line of the lion-cycle in Book 1 is norunt qui serviant leones (1.104.22) – the lions know whom they serve,

o   And are on best behaviour for the dynasty that has brought them all this way for Rome’s entertainment.

 

·      We should note that 12.61 also directs Ligurra towards Martial’s unnamed and unspeakable competition, the kind of interpolating wannabe about whom he complained to Priscus in 10.3. You might want to look at the excerpt from that epigram on your handout.

 

·      Now, it’s true that Book 10 presents itself as a special case –

·      By the usual story, it’s the book that Martial first published in AD 95, but withdrew from circulation after Domitian was assassinated the following year,

·      Reissuing it in a substantially new second edition in 98, once things had settled down,

o   ...As Martial himself more or less explains, though in guarded terms, in the immediately preceding epigram. (10.2)

·      How an author in first-century Rome is realistically supposed to pull a book from sale is an interesting question – you’d think that once it’s out there, copies would keep on being made, since that’s how it normally works,

o   But I suppose if he leaned hard enough on bookshops and gave them shiny new exemplars, along with promises of future favours, it might have worked.

o   In any case, it’s an apt literary motif that helps reposition him as he moves beyond the boundaries of the Flavian,

o   While also drawing attention to his affinity with Ovid.

·      If we want to play at biography, we can say that textual hygiene must have very much on Martial’s mind in those three years,

·      But malicious interference in his text is a familiar motif by this point in the corpus – in fact, it’s most prominent right at the start, in Book 1 –

·      And it’s striking how often in the Martialverse questions of delimitation bring friendship and authorship into dialogue.

·      Let’s go back to that start now, for another reminder of just how strange an author Martial is, within his chosen genre.

 

·      Book 1 begins with an epistolary preface.

·      As far as we know this has never been tried in epigram before,

·      But it’s a gambit that Martial will repeat in Books 8 and 9, dedicating those to Domitian and to his friend Toranius respectively;

o   and again in Book 12, to Priscus, creating a kind of ring-composition with the opening book;

·      though not in the revised Book 10, the one that really needed if, if any of them did...

·      And the epistle that opens Book 1 has no addressee. It never struck me before how odd that is.

 

·      After the preface, we go straight into a very famous epigram about being very famous – my version is on your handout.

 

·      I put it to you that any poet who tells you they’re the empire’s most wanted author, in the very first poem of their first book, is not being straight with you,

·      And I additionally propose that he means you to notice, because he addresses you as lector studiose, a reader who’s paying close attention;

·      And he means for your scepticism to help frame your experience of the ambitious new literary project on which he is embarking.

·      Though I won’t go into detail on it today,

·      Martial does a complicated dance around real and fake authorship-claims throughout Book 1, all of it predicated on his self-declared fame as what we would now call a global brand –

·      A brand which is based not – or not yet – on the book that is now in his readers’ hands,

o   And which is in any case only the first instalment in a much larger planned serial work,

·      But on various and unspecified juvenilia,

·      Works from his teenage years, that he begs us not to look at because he is so embarrassed by them...

o   Though in the end, because obviously we’ve nagged him so much,

o   He tells us exactly where we can find copies for sale, if we really insist. That’s on your handout too.

·      It’s against this backdrop of consciously weird and messed-up self-promotion, that Martial brings to prominence the twinned themes of impersonation and plagiarism,

o   Of people pretending that their work is Martial’s, or that Martial’s work is theirs,

·      All the while emphasising that a book is not a ‘Book of Martial’, simply because it is a book, and was written by Martial.

·      No ancient epigrammatist before or after Martial does anything like this – any of it.

·      Nobody complains that their work is being misappropriated or modified.

·      This is not part of the genre’s internal conversation, still less a real-world problem for practitioners.

·      I’ve argued elsewhere that literary plagiarism and its aligned phenomena are not so much a real-world problem for Martial as they are a literary and metafictional opportunity,

o   A motif that both celebrates and complicates his distinctness as an outsider poet in a marginal genre,

o   Who at the same time wants us to believe he’s somehow a global hit...

·      And I’ll leave that little mess lying there, rather than developing it further today and repeating myself.

 

·      What I want to concentrate on in the rest of today’s paper is that porousness between author and imitator, in its interplay with the equally fuzzy boundary between author and friend,

 

·      And I’d like to begin with another figure to whom Martial turns for literary protection and guidance, his namesake, Iulius Martialis.

·      Like Priscus, he’s invoked programmatically as a close critical friend who can help Martial tidy up his work before it meets its public,

o   in his case at the opening of Book 6 (6.1).

·      ‘Mihi care Martialis’, Martial calls him on that occasion, ‘Martial who is dear to me’.

o   He’s carissime Iuli at 9.97 and iucundissime Martialis at 10.47, the Martial that Martial loves best of them all,

o   And care Martialis again at 5.20, where our Martial wishes the two of them could just hang out always and never have to put up with other people; people who are boring because they’re not them.

·      His character in the Martialverse firms up with each repeat appearance.

o   We first meet him as ‘Lucius Iulius’ near the end of Book 1 (1.107), and thereafter he’s in almost every book (exceptions: 2 and 8).

·      Now, I’m not so postmodern as to imagine that Pliny made Martial up,

·      And perhaps Martial really did have a longstanding friend in real life who shared both his cognomen and the birthday that inspired it,

·      But ‘Julius Martial’ – really?

·      Viewed as a character in the Martialverse, which is the only way that Martial’s far-flung readers ever got to meet him, he’s too good to be true.

·      His aspirational name isn’t the only thing that makes him the poet’s ideal and socially elevated other self.

·      In the programmatic sequence that opens Book 3, sent to Rome from Cisalpine Gaul, Martial gives his verna liber detailed directions so it can find its way to Julius’s domus, his house in town.

·      He says it will need no letter of introduction: peccat | qui commendandum se putat esse suis, ‘he causes offence who reckons he needs commending to his own family’ (3.5.11-12),

·      So Martial doesn’t need to write one, and Book 3 doesn’t get one. Mi casa es su casa.

 

·      Of the various Julius Martial poems there’s one that stands out for most readers.

 

·      Epigram 4.64 invites readers into Julius’s suburban villa on the Janiculan. Your handout has some well-known lines from it,

·      Well known in part because they are reproduced on the 20^th-century monument next to the toposcope on Monte Mario, well to the north of the ancient city.

o   You could call it Janiculan at a stretch; it’s more or less part of the same ridge. These days it’s a lover’s lane, festooned with padlocks.

·      On the hill we would call Janiculan, beside the Passegiata, Rome’s Villa Lante – now home to the Finnish Institute, and built on the footprint of an ancient villa – bears the first two lines of that same extract.

·      It’s making the implicit claim, of course, that this very spot could well have been Julius Martial’s suburban pad.

·      But it gives only the first two lines –

o   ‘From here, on the one side, you can see the seven imperious hills and take in all of Rome’ –

·      Because the longer it went on from there, the sillier it would look. The hinc at the start of line 11 is matched by an illinc 7 lines later, introducing a second vista that continues till line 24,

·      Establishing a detailed view of traffic on the Tiber, Flaminia, and Salaria.

o   You can’t see any of the illinc from ‘our’ Janiculan, or indeed, most of the stuff that’s supposedly hinc.

·      In all, Martial’s panoptic view occupies fourteen lines of text,

o   Ranging from the Alban Hills in the south right through the city to the grove of Anna Perenna and onwards to Fidenae and Rubrae,

o   While also delivering a detailed, bird’s-eye view of traffic on the Tiber, Flaminia, and Salaria.

·      No matter how broadly you choose to define the Janiculan ridge, I don’t think you’ll find a single spot from which even most of these features are visible.

o   The Villa Lante version only gives two lines, the Monte Mario version, only five, out of fourteen.

·      This makes the villa an impossible composite, located everywhere and nowhere on its chosen hill,

o   So liminal between civic amenity and rustic charm that even its favourite guest can’t say which is which.

·      But whatever you call, it, you’ll think it’s your own, he tells us – tuam putabis. And he tries his best to do so.

o   His poem opens and closes with the self-same line, establishing bragging rights by name-association: Iuli iugera pauca Martialis.

 

·      The villa’s library, as we learn in a poem in Book 7 (7.17) that calls back to this one, is the first destination of the poet’s libelli on their way to worldwide fame, in copies corrected in the author’s own hand –

o   Corrections that give added value (premium), implicitly because Julius Martial will see among them emendations that he himself has proposed,

o   Again blurring the line between the narrating persona we call our Martial, and the recurring character whom he calls his Martial.

 

·      Of course, Julius Martial needn’t be Martial. But then, Terentius Priscus needn’t be Priscus.

o   There’s a Priscus in Book 1 (1.112) who’s the worst kind of patron, someone Martial can’t possibly respect now he has got to know him.

o   In Book 7 (7.46), Priscus is once more a patron. This time he has notions of poetic talent, but he’s deluded.

o   Listening to him recite is torture for all concerned – Martial actually uses the word excrucio –

excrucias multis pariter me teque diebus,

   et tua de nostro, Prisce, Thalia tacet. (3-4)

o   That’s in a poem not so long after the one on Julius Martial’s library.

·      Realistically I know that there are more Romans than there are names, so they have to play nice and share,

·      But Martial’s twelve books aren’t about real Romans – and never can have been, even a little bit,

o   Except potentially, and on one level, for a few well-connected readers whose lives centred around Rome at that exact time.

o   He himself brags late in the corpus that his readership takes in frontline centurions in Dacia, and, more shockingly still, even some British people. (11.3) –

o   And he’s explicit that most of his recurring characters are aliases or composites.

·      For his wider readership there is, or there are, just Priscus or Priscuses,

o   Wandering in and out of the corpus, and behaving as expected or otherwise.

·      As Fitzgerald has more or less said, this sense of bustle and semi-familiarity is a large part of what gives Martial’s books their charm.

·      The contingent social realities that may have helped shape individual poems are gone forever, better stuff for historical fiction than for scholarship;

·      For most of Martial’s readers they’ve never been there to begin with;

·       And sometimes this fuzzy sense of identity throws up surprising effects, for readers working their way through his miniaturist epic as a work of serial literature.

 

·      One of my favourite examples is Martial’s best friend who’s not called Martial. His name is Rufus.

·      Look him up in the index to the Loeb and you will get the impression that he is easily parsed. You will find him, or them, under five neat subheadings –

o    Camonius, Canius, Istantius, Iulius, and Safronius –

·      With the leftovers filed under ‘Rufus, addressee, identity unknown’.

·      Camonius dies young – that’s all he does in his three appearances in the corpus –

·      And some the others have distinctive traits –

o   Canius is a fellow poet,

o   Istantius occupies the role of discerning patron that will later be occupied by Priscus –

·      But as often as not, we meet Rufus as plain old ‘Rufus’.

·      Whoever he is, he’s a pal, and Martial’s always glad to see him...

·      And then he dies far from home, in Cappadocia. It’s a shock to the family: his father outlives him.

·      The news comes in 6.85, a substantial poem of twelve lines that is placed near the end of that unusually short book,

·      And giving both nomen and cognomen as befits the epitaphic mode. I excerpt this on your handout.

·       The loss of Rufus lets Martial explore one of the classic Hellenistic epitaphic scenarios –

o   The Greek Anthology is well stocked with literary epitaphs for young men who die far away and leave their family no body to bury –

·      As well as echoing Catullus’s poem on the death of his brother. (Carmen 101)

·      But never mind the literary opportunities: the poet is clearly devastated. It’s a memorable act of mourning.

·      And then four poems later (6.89), it’s: Oh, hi, Rufus! Have you heard the latest gossip?,

o     About a heavy drinker they both know, who’s pissed back into the pot he drank from.

·      Perhaps even in the same papyrus column, Rufus has risen from the grave,

·      And six poems later Book 6 has ended and we’re left asking, ‘What?!?’.

·      Of course, we can straightforwardly go biographical and say ‘This must be a different Rufus’ –

o   What the index would call a ‘Rufus, addressee, identity unknown’,

o   Morphing perhaps into the Istantius Rufus who becomes prominent in Books 7 and 8 –

·      And that’s fair enough;

·      But the near-juxtaposition creates a weird effect,

o   Especially since the book ends so prematurely and without closure just a few poems later,

·      And I think Martial means it to.

·      Nobody these days thinks his books are thrown together at random.

 

Conclusion

 

·      Time to wrap up.

·      Like Martial says in his bumper-sticker epigram at the end of Book 1 (1.118), it’s good not to run on too long.

·      I’ve no big conclusion, no moral,

·      And lions in the Greek Anthology is a rabbit-hole down which I have no intention of venturing today.

·      I’ll close simply by noting that even before Book 1,

o   In the Saturnalian gift-tag poems that may or may not have been among the inept nugae that he deprecates as part of his Great Reset,

·      Martial is already picking away at the boundaries of social and textual relations alike.

·      At the end of my handout I quote selectively from the opening of the Apophoreta, a title that I translated for The World’s Classics as Doggy-Bags, party favours to carry away home.

·      It makes a pair with the Xenia, and editions of Martial traditionally present the two volumes as Books 13 and 14, though they’re universally acknowledged to be products of his early career.

·      Both books already display the author’s tendency to witty self-deprecation.

·      The Xenia declares at the outset that it is disposable literature, fated to end its days as kitchen paper, and that the bookseller is charging far too much for it,

o   Leaving cash-strapped customers with no option but to send these poems, in lieu of the gifts they might otherwise have just about afforded.

·      The Apophoreta explicitly alternate between gift-tags for rich friends and for poor ones, but Martial anticipates and cheerfully owns the charge that the tags themselves are poor stuff –

o   These poems, he says, are apinae, ‘hick stuff’ or ‘junk’,

o   A word his readers will meet again at some later date, in that Book One poem about his worthless juvenilia.

·      So, rich friends and poor ones get poems that describe – and in a pinch can stand in for – gifts of high and low value respectively,

·      But poems of uniformly low quality – or so their author declares –

·      And of which his readers can claim authorship any time they like,

·      Because they get to decide when the book is over.

·      If we get bored, says Martial, we can call time at any point –

o   closure is never more than a couplet away –

·      Or we can hit fast-forward, skipping the actual poems and reading only the headings that introduce them,

o   a feature carried over from Greek epigram-books but used here in a way probably never before seen,

·      And thereby constructing for ourselves a poetry-book that contains no poetry, because Martial won’t mind what we do with the materials he’s giving us.

·      His job as author is done; ours is about to begin.

·      As he’ll later tell Avitus in the sixteenth epigram of Book 1, already conspicuously at home in the role of grizzled genre veteran,

o   ‘You’re reading good poems here,... – and a few that are so-so, and a lot that are bad; a book doesn’t happen any other way.’

·      Quae legis hic... aliter non fit, auite, liber –

·      It’s the lector studiosus who makes literature happen, and Martial wouldn’t have it any other way.

·      Thank you for your time.