SOURCE: "Humanity and Humour; Imagery and Wit" in Martial: An Unexpected Classic, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 211-51.

[In the following excerpt, Sullivan focuses on the poet's structural and technical artistry. Sullivan analyzes Martial's arrangement of epigrams within individual volumes, the variety of endings and metrical forms in his epigrams, his innovations in poetic diction and imagery, and the different kinds of humor Martial employs in his verses.]

1. Evaluating Martial

It would be a bold critic who attempted to define authoritatively the nature of Martial's best poetry and explain precisely why he has been popular and acclaimed or neglected and patronised in different periods. The wild fluctuations of his reputation over the centuries will come as no surprise to those familiar with the dynamics of reader response to literature. Then again, he offers an easy target for feminist and cultural criticism in his misogyny and obscenity, and also, in his seemingly passive acceptance of Roman ideology, of autocracy, imperialism and social brutality, he is fair game for Bakhtinist critiques.

For all that he is an important poet, and a salutary preliminary to any evaluation would be to consider briefly what earlier critics have regarded as his main poetic achievements or virtues. The epigrammatist has been admired for his tenderness, his humour and his realism; for his innovative mastery of the Latin language, his extensive vocabulary and his brilliant gnomic dicta; for the technical expertise of his metrics, his vivid imagery and his skilful use of rhetorical devices; for his philosophy of life and his pedagogical value; for his devotion to his homeland (the laudes Hispaniae) and to the glories of imperial Rome; and also for his delight in paradox, unexpected turns of thought and, not least, his subtle irony and wit.

He has been damned, on the other hand, for his obscenity, for his adulation of his emperors from Titus to Trajan, his flattery of patrons, his bloodthirstiness, his lack of pity for the physically afflicted, his unconcealed hatred of women, his pederasty or his selective homophobia, his social snobbery against freedmen, his xenophobia, his obsession with money and gifts, his unjustifiably mendicant persona, his hypocrisy and envy and, not least, his poetic unevenness and frequent triviality.¹

Critical reactions to his work have been correspondingly extreme: his books were burned as an annual sacrifice by Andrea Navigero but his poetic practice was made the basis of a whole theory of poetry by Baltasar Gracian and his followers.

Some of the favourable and unfavourable judgments are unassailable—his unevenness, for example, is admitted, despite the mock-modesty, by the poet himself (1.16). And obviously much of the later aversion to his work is due to social, moral and religious reactions that take no account of the historical conditions and the literary constraints (and liberties) under which Martial wrote. An additional factor, perhaps, is that modern readers are often uncomfortable with the satiric vein in literature. Satire, allegorical, ironic, witty or indignant, makes us uncomfortable, witness the unease apparent in critical discussions of Swift's work by writers as disparate as Dr Johnson and F. R. Leavis. Not that all satire is au fond negative: saeva indignatio may be prompted by principles and expressed in language as valid as that found in 'life-enhancing' novels or passionate lyric poems.

A fundamental question, often posed, is whether Martial at his best is a serious poet. What are the touchstones that the critic should apply to determine the answer?

A recent, plausibly argued claim for Martial's merits runs as follows:

… Martial at his greatest is consonant with the humanity presented where it moves us most deeply. One of these moments occurs when, faced with the dread facts of death, we find the values we place on human life enhanced, and we feel that a precious thing is gone when valued people die. Most readers would agree that such feelings are more intense when death has cut short the possibility of valued life in the 'taking off of young people. ²

The poem put forward to exemplify this is generally taken as one of Martial's finest:

Hanc tibi, Fronto pater, genetrix Flaccilla,
  puellam
   oscula commendo deliciasque meas,
parvola ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras
   oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis.
Impletura fuit sextae modo frigora brumae,
   vixisset totidem ni minus illa dies.
Inter tam veteres ludat lasciva patronos
   et nomen blaeso garriat ore meum.
Mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa, nec illi,
   terra, gravis fueris: non fuit illa tibi.
(5.34)

Fronto, Father, Flacilla, Mother, extend
   your protection from the Stygian shadows.
The small Erotion (my household Iris)
   has changed my house for yours. See that
  the hell-hound's
horrid jaws don't scare her, who was no
   more than six years old (less six days) on
 the
Winter day she died. She'll play beside you
   gossiping about me in child's language.
Weigh lightly on her small bones, gentle earth,
   as she, when living, lightly trod on you.
(Trs. Peter Whigham)

Unfortunately obituaries and epitaphs are not always good places to seek out personal feelings. Behind this moving poem there is a whole tradition of sepulchral epigram,³ on which Martial must impose his individual touches. Similar epigrammatic traditions lie behind most of his work and only the Romantic yearning for poetic inspiration, pure and undefiled, and, be it added, quite impossible to attain, calls such skilful, and often felicitous, productions into question.

What then if it were objected that this elegy for Erotion is part of a diptych, the second part of which deliberately challenges us to reread and re-evaluate the original poem? It is certainly more elaborate:

Puella senibus dulcior mihi cycnis,
agna Galaesi mollior Phalantini,
cui nec lapillos praeferas Erythraeos,
nec modo politum pecudis Indicae dentem
nivesque primas liliumque non tactum;
quae crine vicit Baetici gregis vellus
Rhenique nodos aureamque nitelam;
fragravit ore, quod rosarium Paesti,
quod Atticarum prima mella cerarum,
quod sucinorum rapta de manu glaeba;
cui conparatus indecens erat pavo,
inamabilis sciurus et frequens phoenix:
adhuc recenti tepet Erotion busto,
quam pessimorum lex amara fatorum
sexta peregit hieme, nec tamen tota,
nostros amores gaudiumque lususque—
et esse tristem me meus vetat Paetus,
pectusque pulsans pariter et comam vellens:
'Deflere non te vernulae pudet mortem?
Ego coniugem' inquit 'extuli, et tamen vivo,
notam, superbam, nobilem, locupletem.'
Quid esse nostro fortius potest Paeto?
Ducentiens accepit, et tamen vivit.
(5.37)

My girl, sweeter voiced than slim-necked
  swans,
fine against skin as Phalanthian fleece,
smoother than blue-veined shell-hollow,
fished from Lucrinian pools, for her, forget
ivory new-gleaming, first snow, purest lily.
Brighter her hair than golden wool,
than knotted tresses of Rhine nymphs.
Her breath the scent of summer rose, young
honey fresh from Attic comb, amber
snatched from palm, still warm. By her
the peacock is a bawd, the squirrel
malicious, phoenix commonplace.
Warm she lies on a smouldering bier,
Erotion, not quite six years old.
Fate's bitter law snatched her from me.
My love, my joy, delight gone all away.
And my friend Paetus won't permit my tears.
Beating his breast, tearing his hair, bellowing,
'Have you no shame to mourn a common
  slave?
I've lost a wife,' he says, 'and yet I live,
a woman well-known, well-born, well-
  endowed.'
You deserve a medal, Paetus, for she left
you twenty million, yet you live bereft.
(Trs. Helen Deutsch)

Here Martial, while rejecting his interlocutor's conservative posture on the status of even darling young slaves, has aroused at least some doubts in the reader: is this a subtle palinode? For although Paetus is crass and tasteless in his criticism, he successfully subverts the long exaggerated compliments with which the poem opens and makes us read Erotion's epitaph as a clever mixture of traditional motifs with the playful, sentimental imagery of the little girl stepping bravely past Cerberus and lisping Martial's name.

Yet given Martial's poetic techniques of cycles and ironic subversion, the two Erotion poems do have to be taken sylleptically. Self-contained though they are in one respect, they were intended to be read in conjunction, like the other cycles, or like Ovid's Cypassis diptych. Critics who have argued that each has a different aim and therefore different rules miss the larger intentions, for each book has its own aims and rules also.⁴ The two poems interact to develop an ambiguity, which, if latent, is still pervasive in Martial's work. It may be used jocularly, as in the Quintus-Thais diptych (3.8 and 11), but it can also tinge apparently sincere poems. This quality ultimately enables the poet, in political palinodes such as 10.72, which is a recantation of his flattery of the late emperor, to insinuate doubts in the constant reader's mind about whether Martial is ever serious about anything, even his relationships with his patrons. A constant problem for any writer who adopts irony and wit as a major poetic mode.

It is no long step from these lapidary intimations of mortality and life's evanescence to Martial's protreptic poems on the need to enjoy life while one can, to grow old gracefully, to accept one's place in the scheme of things, to cherish friendship, and to feel no fear of death when it must come. The underlying philosophy is a typical Roman version of Epicureanism, expressed best in his most famous and most translated poem 'On the Happy Life'. The version presented here is the earliest and perhaps the best:⁵

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:
res non parta labore, sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis;
lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici;
convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;
non tristis torus, et tamen pudicus;
somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras:
quod sis, esse velis nihilque malis;
summum nec metuas diem nec optes.
(10.47)

Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these I find:
The riches left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind:
The equal friend, no grudge, no strife,
No charge of rule, no governance,
Without disease the healthful life,
The household of continuance,
The mean diet, no delicate fare,
True wisdom joined with simpleness,
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress,
The faithful wife without debate,
Such sleeps as may beguile the night,
Content thyself with thine estate,
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
(Trs. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey)

Why the enormous popularity of this epigram? Part of the answer lies in the surface simplicity of the pregnant language in which Martial describes the simple life. But if the sentiments are scrutinised closely, there is more contained in them than the brief exposition of a Roman philosophical ideal, even though its emotive complexity is untainted by the ironic comments that conclude Horace's picture of the quiet life in the country (Epode 2).⁶

There are, in fact, certain nuances easily overlooked by the modern reader or the translator. At first sight, the poem is simply a manifesto of a cultivated Epicurean conformist: contentment with the easily available pleasures of the flesh: food, drink and sex, all in moderation; the avoidance of political and civic activities …; the pleasures of friendship; and, finally, the unfearing acceptance of death. But there is a specifically Roman, indeed equestrian, tincture to this receipt for happiness in its emphasis on inherited property (not necessarily from one's own family); a strong central government and a stable social hierarchy from which friends of one's own class were to be chosen; and a protected environment in which physical strength is not required for any slavish exertions, since household servants will take care of one's modest wants.

Even Martial's choice of the word torus (bed), a common metonymy for married life, does not exclude the possibility of more transient unions or young slave lovers. (Translators invariably opt for the more respectable interpretation.) Certainly Epicurus had held … that he could not conceive of the Good, if he were to eliminate the pleasures of the belly and sex. He and his followers, including Lucretius, were, on the other hand, adamant against such violent passions as romantic love, jealousy, anger, emotional blindness, ambition and avarice, all of which upset the philosopher's spiritual equilibrium.…

In short, this depiction of the happy life has a tempered control that ensured its popularity, but it would be difficult to argue from it that Martial deepens our sense of the human condition in the way Virgil or Dante does. This is not to deny him a consistent moral philosophy given a pithy and cultivated expression, but there are undertones of doubt and layers of qualifications that make one reject claims that in these areas of human concern he says anything strikingly new or profound. These are not areas where ambiguity and irony are appropriate vehicles of a radical new vision.

2. Form, structure and metre

Martial's mastery of form and language has also been proposed as the undeniable hallmark of his best work. The forceful compression of his aphorisms; the controlled passion of his humorous invectives; his metrical variety and inventiveness; the innovative range of his poetic vocabulary; the originality and sensuousness of his imagery; and the multiplicity and ingenuity of his wit, have all, at one time or another, attracted admirers.

A brief survey of the grounds for some of these favourable judgements might conveniently begin with the formal aspects of Martial's oeuvre, primarily his ordonnance and his epigrammatic techniques.⁷

The beginning of a book was of considerable importance. Martial almost invariably opens with some variant of the conventional gesture of dedication. Four of them (II, VIII, IX and XII) have a long or short prose preface addressed to a named individual, the theme of which was often continued in a verse epigram. The dedicatee then generally became the subject or addressee of the early epigrams.

Book I and the Xenia and Apophoreta are exceptions; the general reader, or the world at large, is the recipient of the apologia. Martial was not yet ready by 86 to offer a book to Domitian directly, so in 1.4 the author speaks of the volume falling into the emperor's hands by chance. The second edition of Book X, for obvious reasons, is without a dedicatory address, which suggests that the first edition was directed to Domitian. Book XI was sent to Parthenius, obviously still influential, as he was chamberlain to the new emperor Nerva, whose advancement to the purple he had helped contrive. The lost anthology from Books X and XI was for Nerva. Although Book XII—or part of it—was sent to Rome with a long prefatory letter to Terentius Priscus, two of the poems (12.8; 12.11) point to special collections sent to Trajan and Parthenius.

Martial has several ways of opening his books, apart from addressing a friend, and this allows him to strike different notes. Following his model Catullus (Cui dono lepidum novum libellum? 1.1), Martial likes to address or refer to his book either in mock-modest tones (II, III, V, VI, X, XI, XII, XIII) or, less commonly, with open self-congratulation (I, IX, VIII). He may use more than one poem for the purpose: there are four such in Book III. In this way the poet can project onto the vain little book the pride, ambition and the need for protection that are really the author's in order to solicit, in a sophisticated way, the patronage he desires. Ovid liked to distance the author from the work in the same way.

The defence of poetic obscenity (e.g. 11.2) is a variant of this. Such openings were part of his critical strategy for the re-evaluation of the epigrammatic genre. More striking is the political approach. Like Horace in the third book of the Odes, Martial will place a substantial block of three or more adulatory poems to Titus, Domitian or Nerva at or near the beginning of a volume (cf. Spec., IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, XI and XII).

For the ending of a book, Martial appears to care rather less. Books V, VI, IX and XII close abruptly with epigrams that could have been at home anywhere in the earlier parts of these collections. Book XII, however, closes with a compliment to the powerful Instantius Rufus, just as Books VII and VIII concluded with deferential allusions to Domitian. These provide a ringing, if spurious, finality. The most favoured close is quietly self-reflective, addressing the general, or a particular, reader or even the book itself. The books were, after all, usually open-ended collections, to be added to as circumstances dictated; hence the disregard for rounding off the number of epigrams in most books.

Books X and XI offer a much better sense of an ending. The elaborate poem 10.104 serves as an indirect valedictory to an old Bilbilitan friend Flavus, who is returning to Spain. It incorporates an announcement of Martial's own intention of going back to Bilbilis. The imminent departure of the ship that the book is boarding creates a dramatic finale.

Within this framework, the main structuring device is the use of epigrammatic cycles, a traditional method of composition, utilised most effectively perhaps by Catullus. Examples of these cycles have been given already, and here one need only stress that they are rarely mechanical; their aim may be to deepen our perceptions of the subject, as with the poet's return to Spain (10.13; 20; 37; 38; 96; 103; 104), or, more frequently, to subvert our initial responses, as in the case of Erotion.

This unifying principle is supplemented by two other honoured principles of arrangement: variatio and juxtaposition. Martial carefully—and often surprisingly-—breaks the possible monotony of even the praises of the emperor by inserting lighter or more humorous material (cf. the preface to Book VIII). But the principle of variatio is carried imaginatively further than this. The lengths of the poems are varied, the metres mixed and the subjects change from serious to funny. The preponderance of satiric or moralising epigrams will be leavened by literary, epideictic or overtly autobiographical epigrams. But while this modus operandi suits the main corpus of a book, the significant juxtaposition can be used not only for the heavy blocks of imperial flattery and compliments to friends and patrons, but also for satirical dialogue between epigrams (e.g. the Quintus-Lais epigrams of 3.8 and 3.11). By separating such antiphonal epigrams Martial can inject elements of both surprise and recognition.

Such relatively simple structural devices make the books something more than ad hoc or ad hominem miscellanies. Book XI is a fair example of Martial's success.⁸ This book is given a theme, that of liberty, which is presented on two levels, linked in the opening seven poems. First there is the political freedom which the new regime of Nerva inaugurates, and which fits also with the acceptable licence of the Satumalia and, by implication, the obscene epigrams reflecting that freedom. Both are to be enjoyed under Nerva (et licet et sub te praeside, Nerva, libet, 11.2.5); only the immorality, the hypocrisy and the unacceptable licence taken by matrons such as Paula, and supposedly encouraged by the hypocritical Domitian, are no longer possible (cf. 11.7.5). The theme of Satumalian and literary licence is repeated in a series of epigrams on the subject (11.15; 16; 17). Its connection with the palace is reiterated in a self-justificatory epigram addressed to the divine Augustus (11.20), quoting an obscene epigram allegedly written by that emperor against Mark Antony's wife Fulvia.

With the interrelation of political and literary freedom established, the poet is emboldened to make greater use than before of poetic obscenity. He may have had a larger repository of this kind of thing, since social and political factors dictated his selection of epigrams for Books VIII-X. Structurally this material is presented in clusters (e.g. 21-3; 25-30; 60-4; 70-5), which are small enough not to become tedious. The less obscene satiric pieces are juxtaposed and varied in the same way (e.g. 31-5; 37-9; 54-6; 82-4; 92-4). The pairing of complementary and contrasting epigrams may be seen in 48 and 50 and 90-1. The most obvious cycle in the book revolves round Zoilus (11.12; 30; 37; 54; 85; 92). Addressees occur and recur, examples being Flaccus, who is given, as usual, some of the more sexually explicit material (11.27; 100).

The desirable presence of architectural symmetry, verbal and conceptual echoes and recurrent themes must, in poetic volumes, be counterpointed by novelty, variety and surprise, even shock. In Book XI, with 108 poems, Martial's formal and material variety is consequently wide. Longer poems (those over fourteen lines) and distichs are scattered judiciously through the work. The subject-matter ranges from the political to the autobiographical; the satirical topics are interspersed with amatory and eulogistic verses, some epitaphs, an invitation to dinner, a soterion (11.36) and a poem in praise of Baiae, celebrating the poet's friendship with Julius Martialis (11.80).

Book XI reveals the technical devices for structuring poetic miscellanies to their best advantage, but some comments on the other books may be in order. Book I was characterised by its immense variety, once Martial had made his defence of epigram in the prefatory epistle. It is not until 1.22 that the themes, such as the hare and the lion, recur and the cyclic structuring is set to work. Significantly, as a sort of advertisement for himself, the long poem on Bilbilis (1.49) is made the centre of the book—it is, in fact, the fiftieth epigram, if the quatrain appended to the preface is included.

Book VIII is coloured by the fact that it is dedicated to Domitian. It is devoid of the spicier sexual elements that Martial had proclaimed almost essential to the genre. Most of the epigrams reflect imperial policies and achievements or larger current issues (not least patronage for poets, 8.55). Verses on private life vary the potential monotony.

The harmonious and varied arrangement of the present Book X may be due to Martial's careful re-editing. After a low-key opening there is a striking conclusion. The centre is occupied by 10.47 and 10.48. The first, Martial's most famous poem, on the happy life, is followed, indeed illustrated, by an elaborate dinner invitation to a simple meal for his best, or most distinguished, friends Flaccus, Stella and Cerialis.

For all Martial's efforts, however, the critic has to admit that the structure of each of the books is, in various ways, imperfect, at least by comparison with Horace's Odes or Propertius' Monobiblos. Martial had to use the poems available to him for each collection; he had to select from the libelli sent to special friends and patrons. The individual focus and practical constraints of such compositions might militate against the general theme and structure of a particular book, yet they could not be readily or—profitably—jettisoned.

It is of course to the individual poems that the reader must turn to judge Martial's technical mastery of the genre. This is not the place to enter into the details of Martial's command of the rhetorical devices available to him: anaphora, antithesis, anadiplosis or reduplicatio (which he uses even more than Ovid with whom he shares a predilection for the obsolescent epanadiplosis), accumulatio, synathroesmus, amplificatio, chiasmus, emphasis, epiphora, epanalepsis or geminatio, redditio, perspicuitas, hyperbole, rhyme, the priamel—the list could be extended indefinitely.⁹

Some features of his poetic craft, or his rhetorical tactics, stand out. There is, for instance, the noticeable fondness for dramatic openings with deictic pronouns and adjectives, often in rhetorical questions: Crispulus iste quis est… ? Hic quem videtis … The aim again is vividness, to conjure up a scene before the reader's eyes. Equally effective is to demand the reader's attention, asking him or her to look, admire, observe, hear or accept. Peremptory imperatives of the 'Look, stranger, look!' kind or the equivalent interrogative forms are common: aspice, aspicis? audi, lege or accipe, sume (of gifts, particularly in the Xenia and Apophoreta). Sometimes Martial will present a question to begin a dialogue, a common and effective device in Greek epigram, which was popularised in Roman poetry by Catullus. It takes the form: 'Do you ask me (quaeris) why/what/where/how … ?¹⁰ A neat illustration of this (and of such figures as anadiplosis, chiasmus, anaphora, duplicatio and alliteration) is 1.57:

Qualem, Flacce, velim quaeris nolimve
  puellam?
  Nolo nimis facilem difficilemque nimis.
Illu d quod medium est atque inter utrumque
   probamus:
   nec volo quod cruciat, nec volo quod satiat.

My taste in women, Flaccus? Give me one
Neither too slow nor yet too quick to bed.
For me, the middle sort: I've not the will
To be Love's Martyr—nor his Glutton either.
(Trs. Peter Whigham)

To revert for a moment to 'realism', since that is an aspect of Martial's art often praised, and indeed put forward as a defence of his ethical neutrality as a 'mere observer'—Martial the nineteenth-century novelist, as it were. This too may be seen as a rhetorical mode, … where the author prides himself on the originality of his discussion). This is the ability to conjure up before the audience's very eyes events and people, scenes and objects (sub oculis subiectio), and arouse in that audience the appropriate, seemingly shared, emotions. (Quintilian in the succeeding section contrasts this sharply with the distancing effect of humour.)

Martial achieves this most commonly through his imagery, as we shall see later, but it should be observed here that his 'realism', which he shares with some ancient as well as modern novelists, is very often a 'denigration of the real' (to use Mary McCarthy's telling phrase).¹¹ Such realism goes hand in hand with the zest for particularity and specificity already observed.

Beyond this larger interest, critical admiration has focused also on the closure of the poems, specifically on the witty or otherwise impressive endings. A more balanced view of the structure of the individual epigrams is to be desired, since most discussion of it seems dominated, if unconsciously, by Lessing's famous remarks on the epigram.¹²

According to Lessing, the best sort of epigram, the true epigram, has a bipartite structure. In the first part a situation is set up, commonly in an objective or apparently neutral way, but one which arouses expectations. This is the Erwartung, the anticipation or 'set-Up'.¹³ The second, often shorter, more subjective part, then provides an Aufschluss, an explanation or personal, often witty, comment as a conclusion.

Lessing offered a genetic explanation of the epigram's development. The Erwartung was originally supplied by the building, grave, monument or object on which the epigram was inscribed as comment or explanation; later the comment or explanation becomes the Aufschluss, with the writer providing now a preliminary verbal Erwartung.

The epigram, in its later artistic development, freed now from its physical anchorage, had to fulfil by itself the two originally divided functions. It had to supply an imaginary object, as it were, and also the comment upon it. Its origins, which were rooted in the limited space for genuine inscriptions, still dictated economy and brevity, which in turn encouraged pointedness and then wit. Other short poetic pieces claiming to be epigrams consisted only of the Erwartung or the Aufschluss. These would not be true epigrams, but rather anecdotes or descriptions in the one case and maxims or statements in the other.

This analysis, or rather this persuasive definition, certainly does fit many epigrams, not only Martial's, but the whole tradition of which Martial became the paradigm. Certainly it fits most of Martial's satiric epigrams, particularly those which depend on the 'surprise endings'… ¹⁴ Here the Aufschluss is often separately signalised in various ways and by various formal devices, such as a change in the person of the verb; by posing a direct or indirect question, the answer to which is the Aufschluss; by the use of an attention-grabbing address to a reader or to the subject of the epigram; or even by the poet himself coming forward to deliver his own opinion or some time-honoured verdict.

The problem is that Lessing's restrictive theory, quite apart from its underlying presuppositions of curiosity aroused and then satisfied, does not fit a large number of epigrams in the Greek Anthology and even in Martial's own corpus. Obvious counter-examples are the ecphrastic or expository epigrams, whose closures, however satisfying, would not qualify as Aufschlusse. And the theory does not fit even all satiric epigrams, since in vituperationes, which are often a long accumulation of insultingly hyperbolic descriptions, the last unit may be the strongest, but it may not be qualitatively different from those preceding it (cf. e.g. 3.93). The closure may even be a separate joke or pun, which satisfactorily summarises, rather than explains, the description preceding it, as in the well-known epigram on Martial's tiny estate (11.18).

In such instances Lessing's Erwartung seems more important than the Aufschluss; it was for such reasons that Herder preferred the terms Darstellung and Befriedigung (roughly 'presentation' and 'release'). According to this 'romantic' theory, the latter was at the service of the former, providing just a point of view on the presentation, and not vice versa, as Lessing implied.

This view restores a unity to the poetic process; it pays more attention to the whole structure of the epigram, its openings, its rhetorical and thematic development, as well as its often striking closure. The completion, when strongly determined by the preceding structure, may then be reinforced by special closural devices characteristic of epigrams, such as 'point', puns, sententiae and even images.

Such a broader analysis confirms the perception of Martial's artistic diversity and counters the common notion that Martial only excels at paradoxical and witty epigrams, satirical in theme and rhetorical in treatment, with the main emphasis placed on the surprise ending. Once the restrictive view of the ideal epigram as bipartite in structure is abandoned as a tool of evaluation, an examination of what Martial actually does to structure his epigrams and to provide a satisfactory sense of an ending becomes more complex.

For the satiric epigrams it is true that. Lessing's notion of Aufschluss is useful, once the social sources and psychological springs of Martial's pointed humour, surprise endings and puns are comprehended. In such epigrams the structure needs only to lead up logically, or at least rhetorically, to the surprise ending. Martial, however, does not always conclude an epigram with a paradox or a joke, even though this was regarded as his forte by later generations. To end an epigram on a gentler note frequent use is made of a sententia, the concise expression of what one hopes is a general truth or a just observation.¹⁵

Martial has contributed more than his share in inventing or adapting such sententiae. Obvious examples (mostly Epicurean in sentiment) are: vivere bis vita est posse priore frui (to be able to enjoy one's past life is like living twice, 10.23.8); non est vivere, sed valere vita (life's not just living, but feeling well, 6.70.15); sera nimis vita est crastina, vive hodie (life tomorrow comes too late, live today, 1.15.12); aestate pueri si valent, satis discunt (if boys stay well in summer, they're learning enough, 10.62.12); cineri gloria sera venit (glory comes too late to dead men, 1.25.8); non bene servo servitur amico (it's no use being a slave to a friend who's a slave himself, 2.32.7).¹⁶

Parallel to the coining of newly minted sententiae is the borrowing of an apt quotation from another poet, a proverb or popular saying, or even a Greek word or phrase. Recognition of the familiar here gives the reader the sense of a satisfactory ending. The technique is adopted by Horace and Petronius and such epigrammatists as Lucillius.¹⁷ Martial, for example, adapts an otherwise unknown Ovidian quotation, after first quoting it (one assumes) correctly:

'Ride si sapis, o puella, ride'
Paelignus, puto, dixerat poeta …
Plora, si sapis, o puella, plora.
(2.41.1-2, 23)

'Laugh, if you're wise, young lady, laugh!'
The Paelignian poet, I think, said that …
Cry, if you're wise, young lady, cry.

Elsewhere he uses a familiar Greek saying … to express his annoyance at having to fulfil his drunken promises.

A favoured form of ending for Martial, as for some Greek epigrammatists, is the dialectical resolution of paradoxes, supposed contradictions or contrasts or temporal changes (before-and-after, earlier-but-now). This might bring out the similarity between two different professions:

Oplomachus nunc es, fueras opthalmicus ante.
 Fecisti medicus quod facis oplomachus.
(8.74)

You're a swordsman now; before you were an
 oculist.
Your sword does now what your scalpel did
 before.

This is a neat example because the semi-chiastic anaphora and the assonance reinforce the point.¹⁸

Another form of an ending favoured by both the Greek epigrammatists and Martial is the reconciliation of two opposites or contrasting extremes by a compromise or a middle way.…¹⁹ The most famous example occurs at 10.47.13:

summum nec metuas diem nec optes.
Ne wish for Death ne fear his Might
(Trs. Henry Howard)

Ending a poem with two stark alternatives, often in the form of commands, was an established epigram technique, to be found in Catullus (69ff.) and the Priapea (1.7f.), as well as in earlier Greek epigrammatists.

Martial's use of it may be seen in 1.103.12 (cf. 1.91; 7.54.8; 8.54.3f.). Here he is castigating a victim for living parsimoniously after receiving a large legacy; the poet resolves the paradox with this line:

Aut vive aut decies, Scaevola, redde deis.
Either enjoy life or give the gods back their
  million.

A parallel to this technique is to end an epigram with two opposing, even apparently contradictory, statements, which may involve a play upon two different meanings or connotations of a word. A straightforward example is:

Digna tuo cur sis indignaque nomine dicam.
 Frigida es et nigra es: non es et es Chione.
(3.34)

Why you deserve and don't deserve your
 name,
I'll tell you. You're frigid and you're black.
You are and you aren't Snow White.²⁰

Sometimes the story of an event, generally presented objectively, is just capped with a witty or subjective comment,²¹ which may be credited to someone other than the poet, as in 1.13 where Arria Paeta's courageous declaration replaces the author's expected praise for her bravery (cf. 1.42). In 10.64.6 a quotation from some obscene verses by Lucan substitutes for a defence of such writing by the epigrammatist himself.

Martial's metrical expertise, like his doctrina and technical skills, would not have been lost on his audience. The ordonnance of his first book, deploying variatio and the juxtaposition of verse forms to snare the reader's attention would set the pattern of his later collections.²²

His elegiac epigrams follow the contemporary pattern of four to ten lines found also in the Garlands of Meleager and Philip. Interspersed are some fairly long hendecasyllabic poems and lengthy verses in other metres, including the elaborate ecphrasis on the environs of Bilbilis, which is modelled on Horace's second epode on the joys of country life, and written in an unusual combination of iambic trimeters and dimeters, as though to draw attention to itself.

Martial developed his own techniques for handling these metres, since his choice of verse forms was constrained to some degree by the epigram tradition. His distaste for the experimental metres of certain Hellenistic poets emerges in his defensiveness over the use of hexameters for epigram (6.65) and his vigorous protest against the critic who complains that he does not use such recherche forms as galliambics (2.86). He limits himself largely to the elegiac couplet in aggregates of one to five distichs, to hendacasyllables, following Catullus, and, less frequently, to scazons. There is a scattering of other metres, eleven in all.

More significant are his divergences from his predecessors and from the established Augustan standards. In his elegiacs Martial abandons the standard Ovidian rule, to which Propertius gradually conformed, that the pentameter should generally end in a disyllable; he makes frequent use of three, four or five syllable words, and even six syllable words (e.g. inimicitiae, 5.20.2).²³ Martial may have been developing a trend found in Ovid's later work or returning to the elegiac practice of Catullus. Ovid's mature work had established the disyllabic pentameter ending as the norm, but this diminishes the use of emphatic words at the close of the couplet. Martial often constructs his line in the Catullan pattern of

sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

Martial's endings therefore seem stronger than those Augustan practice favoured, particularly in his striking, if infrequent, use of monosyllabic words, and in his use of elision in the second half of the pentameter and spondees in the first. The unfettered practice of his Greek models may have played a part in this.

His hexameter endings generally follow the two dominant forms in ending with a disyllabic or trisyllabic word preceded by a disyllable, trisyllable or quadrisyllable. These endings account for most of his hexameter lines, but, like the Augustans, he occasionally saw the value of ending the verse with a strong polysyllabic name or adjective, eliminating the word division altogether. Examples are amphitheatro, Caeciliane, Marcelliano, Pirithoumque, bardocucullo. These are generally preceded by a dactylic fourth foot, as are his sparingly used double spondaic endings (e.g. pendentia Mausolea). A key to the hexameter, however, is the handling of caesura to break up the line. Here Martial follows the forms established by Ovid and avoids the experimentation of some of his contemporaries.

The commonest metrical form used after elegiacs, and interspersed carefully with them, is the phalaecean hendecasyllable. Martial is more rigid (or more stylised) than his model Catullus in disallowing the substitution of a spondee for a dactyl in the second foot; he invariably uses a spondee in the first foot instead of a trochee or iambus. This last struck the contemporary ear as harsh, to judge from the elder Pliny's comments (NH praef. 1), and moderns may miss the Catullan flexibility.²⁴ Similarly the lines are tighter in the later poet, who uses only one elision in every ten lines on average, as opposed to Catullus' one in every two. Martial is careful also to avoid the coincidence of word with foot, except for special effects such as in

Campus, porticus, umbra, Virgo, thermae
(5.20.9).

Usually he plays on the opposition of word accent and verse accent and manages to introduce a variety of caesuras, although again for special effects he will allow a short succession of identically placed caesuras as in 1.109.1-4:

Issa est passere nequior Catulli,
Issa est purior osculo columbae,
Issa est blandior omnibus puellis,
Issa est carior Indicis lapillis.

Here the metrical repetition neatly reinforces the accumulatio and anaphora.

The next commonest metre in the epigrams is the scazon or choliambus. Martial follows the general Greek and Roman practice of allowing a spondee in the first or third foot or even in both, although never in the fifth, where Greek practice allowed it. Dactyls are common in the third and fifth. Anapaests are allowed only in the first foot, as in Babrius, but tribrachs are very common in the second, third and fourth feet, with two examples in the first foot. The caesura is almost invariably the penthemimeral caesura, mocked by Aristophanes as Euripides' metrical trademark, the hepthemimeral being generally limited to cases where a word ending occurs.

As regards less common metres, an uncomplicated and elegant iambic trimeter is used twice by itself (6.12; 11.77) and four more times in combination with the iambic dimeter (1.49; 3.14; 9.77; 11.59), a combination borrowed from Horace's first ten epodes. The dimeter is also used once in combination with a choriamb (1.61).

Continuous hexameters are used on four occasions by Martial: 2.73 and 7.98 are just single lines, and of the two remaining 1.53 is satiric and highly baroque in its style (e.g. v.5: urbica Lingonicus Tyrianthina bardocucullus and note fur es' v.12). For using the metre at all, as in 6.64, also satiric but running to thirty-two lines, Martial felt impelled to defend himself (6.65).

One solitary example of two lines of sotadic verse completes the tally (3.29). As in the only other surviving contemporary example (Petr. Sat. 23.3), the ditrochaeus is allowed only in the third and not the first and second foot. The choice of metre here seems dictated by the subject, the effeminate and frequently satirised freedman Zoilus.

3. Language and imagery

Martial's structural and technical virtuosity is paralleled by his linguistic resourcefulness, not only in terms of sheer vocabulary (4,582 words), but also in his striking innovations in poetic diction. He draws as freely as any epic writer on the inherited materials of the Roman literary tradition, prose and verse, as well as on contemporary writing both Greek and Latin, but his flexible form allows him liberties debarred to the practitioners of more elevated genres. Hence his free use of colloquialisms, vulgarisms, archaic quotation, foreign linguistic elements, such as Spanish place names, imported nouns such as covinnus and his not infrequent play on Greek expressions and proper names (e.g. Earinus, Palinurus and Hippodamus).

His ability to stretch and expand the language might impress us more if we could be sure how far the hapax legomena, the unique words in his corpus, are his own coinages and how far they are simply rare words which would be known, if not familiar, to his contemporary readers.²⁵ Certainly no other author of this period, except perhaps the elder Pliny, provides so many examples.

It is in this context, the context of a deliberate attempt to extend the boundaries of poetic discourse in Latin, that we must set his obscene language, where Martial goes to the limit among Latin writers of epigram, as we know it, in embracing the crudest non-euphemistic obscenities. Catullus runs him close, but a list of the words freely used in Martial's epigrams indicates that he uses more basic obscenities than his mentor.

Opinions about this aspect of Martial's language will differ widely. It is not a question that can be resolved in this study. For some it has been further evidence of Martial's immorality and unsuitability for acceptance as a classic; for others it will be grounds for claiming him as a supreme exponent of 'literary realism', or at least a pioneer in stretching the limits of acceptable art, while drawing on unconscious sources of wit and humour. As with satire as a whole, so with obscenity: a critical unease enters the debate. Perhaps for the English reader the key to understanding Martial is a just appreciation of Swift, just as the Spanish reader should look to Quevedo and the French to Rabelais.

Among the various ways Martial has of procuring a satisfactory closure to a poem, the presentation of an image or word-picture to convey the emotional import or value judgement should not be overlooked.²⁶ Obvious examples drawn from nature, everyday life, traditional occupations and food include

In steriles nolunt campos iuga ferre iuvenci:
pingue solum lassat, sed iuvat ipse labor.
(1.107.7-8)

Oxen balk at bearing the yoke in unfertile

  fields:
rich soil is tiring, but the labour is a joy in
  itself.

(Here an allusion to writing poetry without adequate patronage.) A more extended series of images is found in this epigram:

Dulcia cum tantum scribas epigrammata
 semper
 et cerussata candidiora cute,
nullaque mica salis nec amari fellis in illis
 gutta sit, o demens, vis tamen illa legi!
Nec cibus ipse iuvat morsu fraudatus aceti,
 nec grata est facies, cui gelasinus abest.
Infanti melimela dato fatuasque mariscas:
 nam mihi, quae novit pungere, Chia sapit.
(7.25)

You always write only cloying epigrams, brighter than whiteleaded skin, with no grain of salt nor a drop of bitter gall in them, and yet you want them read! But even food is no joy, robbed of the bite of vinegar, and a face is dull without a dimple. Give kids honey apples and boring fat figs: the Chian kind is to my taste—they're tart.

Such examples, however, may serve as introduction to a broader consideration of Martial's imagery and metaphor as a whole. It was this aspect of Martial's poetry that so seduced the otherwise hostile Macaulay, who was doubtless aware that for Aristotle the mastery of metaphor was the pre-eminent token of the true poet…

It was to be expected that images, analogies and metaphors drawn from mythology would be kept to a minimum.²⁷ Only in connection with the imperial cult are the comparisons drawn from myth truly functional, and here Martial is the heir to a tradition of imperial flattery that goes back to Augustan times. Otherwise his mythological allusions are merely variations for common ideas and expressions, often about poetic inspiration, aiming only to stimulate stock responses in his audience and where metrically convenient. This rejection of myth as serious artistic material is deliberate and is part of his marginalisation, so to speak, of epic, lyric and tragedy. Not for Martial the exploitation of the powerful latent symbolism of Greco-Roman mythology as visible in the writings of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca and even Statius. Mythic allusions may be invoked humorously: to bolster a down-to-earth demand for marital sodomy (11.104), to express a critical position through arguments in the mouth of the Muse (8.3), or to liken a hundred ways of serving squash to the grisly banquet of Thyestes (11.31), but these instances simply reinforce the principle.

Martial's imagery draws instead on familiar, sometimes everyday sources, ranging from the refined to the most sordid, hence his reputation for 'realism', discussed earlier.

The polarities between which his lively imagination moves are extreme. As was noticed in the conclusion of chapter 5, there is a preponderant emphasis on sensual, sometimes exotic, imagery, invoking acute tactile and olfactory associations, as may be seen in this evocative description of Diadumenus' kisses:

Quod spirat tenera malum mordente puella,
  quod de Corycio quae venit aura croco;
vinea quod primis floret cum cana racemis,
   gramina quod redolent, quae modo carpsit
  ovis;
quod myrtus, quod messor Arabs, quod sucina
  trita,
   pallidus Eoo ture quod ignis olet;
glaeba quod aestivo leviter cum spargitur
  imbre,
   quod madidas nardo passa corona comas:
hoc tua, saeve puer Diadumene, basia fragrant.
   Quid si tota dares illa sine invidia?
(3.65)

They smell of an apple bitten by a tender lass; of the scent of Corycian saffron; of a vine blossoming with the first bunches of white grapes; of fragrant sheep-cropped grass; of the myrtle and the Arabian harvester; of chafed amber; of the redolent pale flame from eastern incense; of the earth after a light sprinkle of summer rain; of a garland on tresses dripping with spikenard: all these fragrances. Diadumenus, cruel boy, are in your kisses. What would they smell of, if you gave them without stint or disdain.

The same insistent evocations recur in a poem on the same topic of a boy's kisses, written almost a decade later. This was singled out by A. E. Housman for especial praise: 'In all Martial there are no verses of more choice and elegant refinement' (Housman CP 3.1167):

Lassa quod hestemi spirant opobalsama dracti,
   ultima quod curvo quae cadit aura croco;
poma quod hibema maturescentia capsa,
   arbore quod vema luxuriosus ager;
de Palatinis dominae quod Serica prelis,
   sucina virginea quod regelata manu;
amphora quod nigri, sed longe, fracta Falemi,
   quod qui Sicanias detinet hortus apes;
quod Cosmi redolent alabastra focique
  deorum,
   quod modo divitibus lapsa corona comis:
singula quid dicam? non sunt satis; omnia
  misce:

   hoc fragrant pueri basia mane mei.
Scire cupis nomen? si propter basia, dicam.
   Iurasti: nimium scire, Sabine, cupis.
(11.8)

The breath of balm from last night's vial
  pressed;
   The effluence that falling saffron brings;
The scent of apples ripening in a chest;
   Or the rich foliage of a field in Spring;
Imperial silken robes from Palatine;
   Or amber, warming in a virgin's hand;
The far-off smell of spilt Falemian wine;
   A bee-loud garden in Sicilian land;
Odour, which spice and altar-incense send;
   Or wreath of flowerets from a rich brow
  drawn;
Why speak of these? Words fail. Their perfect
 blend
  Resemble my boy's kiss at early dawn.

You ask his name? Only to kiss him? Well!
You swear as much? Sabinus, I won't tell!
(Trs. Anthony Reid)

In stark contrast to these two poems addressed to young boys is the Swiftian description of an old prostitute Thais, who has already been the butt of shorter but similar aspersions—on her bad morals and fittingly bad teeth (4.84; 5.43). The impact of the lines conveying the images of sexual and physical corruption is reinforced by alliteration and other devices and culminates in a rank paradox:

Tam male Thais olet quam non fullonis avari
   testa vetus media sed modo fracta via,
non ab amore recens hircus, non ora leonis,
   non detracta cani transtiberina cutis,
pullus abortivo nec cum putrescit in ovo,
   amphora corrupto nec vitiata garo.
Virus ut hoc alio fallax permutet odore,
   deposita quotiens balnea veste petit,
psilothro viret aut acida latet oblita creta
   aut tegitur pingui terque quaterque faba.
Cum bene se tutam per fraudes mille putavit.
  omnia cum fecit, Thaida Thais olet.
(6.93)

Worse than a fuller's tub doth Thais stink,
Broke in the streets and leaking through each
  chink;
Or lion's belch; or lustful, recking goats;
Or skin of dog that, dead, o' the bankside
  floats;
Or half-hatched chicken from broke rotten
  eggs;
Or tainted jars of stinking mackerel dregs.
This vile rank smell, with perfumes to
  disguise,
Whene'er she naked bathes, she doth devise.
She's with pomatum smudg'd or paint good
  store;
Or oil of bean flour varnished o'er and o'er.
A thousand ways she tries to make all well.
In vain. For still she doth of Thais smell.²⁸
(Trs. Egerton MS 2982)

Yet another contrast may be seen in a biting lampoon on Vacerra on moving day, where a more heartless picture, this time of degraded poverty, is created by a minute but descriptively coloured mosaic of sordid household utensils:

Vidi, Vacerra, sarcinas tuas, vidi …
Ibat tripes grabatus et bipes mensa,
et cum lucema comeoque cratere
matella curto rupta latere meiebat;
foco virenti suberat amphorae cervix;
fuisse gerres aut inutiles maenas
odor inpudicus urcei fatebatur,
qualis marinae vix sit aura piscinae.
Nec quadra deerat casei Tolosatis,
quadrima nigri nec corona pulei
calvaeque restes alioque cepisque,
nec plena turpi matris olla resina,
Summemmianae qua pilantur uxores …
(12.32.2, 11-22)

Vacerra, you and yours are now away …
A three-legg'd bed was first to greet the morn,
Then an oil-lamp, a mixing-bowl of horn,
Beside a table, with two legs gone missing;
A cracked old chamber-pot, that came out
  pissing;
Under a brazier, green with verdigris,
A wry-necked flagon lay dejectedly;
Then there were pilchards, salt-fish too, I
 think,
A jug betrayed them by the filthy stink,
A powerful smell that even recked beyond
The brackish water in a fishy pond.
What else? Cheese from Toulouse its presence
 told,
A blackened wreath of flea-bane, four years
  old,
And onion-ropes—but only ropes were left—
And garlic-strings—of garlic all bereft;
A pot of resin, from your mother's lair,
That Jezebels use to strip themselves of hair.
(Trs. Olive Pitt-Kethley)

In this last poem the connection of age and squalor is once again thrown into relief. This might suggest that the correlation of the delicate imagery of perishable flowers and fleeting perfumes with beautiful young boys and of grosser analogies and similes (persistent stinks and so on) with older ruttish women is not simply sexual, but also a matter of contrasting the evanescence of youth with death and decay. The first is seen in the poem to Encolpus, who has vowed to sacrifice his hair to further his master's career: Martial prays:

   Quam primum longas, Phoebe, recide
  comas
dum nulla teneri sordent lanugine voltus
   damque decent fusae lactea colla iubae.
(1.31.4-7)

Cut his long locks, Apollo, as soon as may be, while his tender face is soiled by no down and while his flowing mane looks well on his milky neck.

Other examples are 4.7 and 10.42, where facial down and growing old are again connected, and 10.90, where a beard is connected with death (cf. 11.22.7-8, etc.). Elsewhere, ugly images of disease (atra or sceleratia lues) are conjured up in connection with death, as in the description of Festus' suicide (1.78) and young Demetrius' early demise (1.101.6); cf. 11.91 on Canace (horrida vultus abstulit et in tenero sedit in ore lues). The metaphorical connection of female sexuality and the infirmities of old age is most poignant in the short elegy on the ageing poet Mevius (11.46).

Descriptions like this surely hold up a very splintered mirror in which to reflect life. There is a preoccupation with the particularity of things, a sharpness of eye (and nose) for the charming or disgusting details appropriate to Martial's different aims. The images become even more forceful when coupled with his frequently blunt (or realistic) language in sexual matters and his willingness to use vulgar, down-to-earth expressions, as in his descriptions of the perverted Nanneius (11.61) and the decadent Zoilus (3.82).

In the poems just cited the emphasis on the senses of sight and particularly touch and smell in the generation of the imagery stands out, but auditory images are skilfully evoked in the description of the poet's noisy neighbourhood (12.57) and the luxurious estates of various friends (cf. e.g. 4.64).

As might be expected, granted Martial's other preoccupations, the whole transactional nexus of giving and receiving presents, money, dinner, patronage provides a powerful source of imagery, replete with hyperbole or meiosis, as in the description of his tiny farm (11.18) or the insignificant cup presented him by Paulus (8.33) or the strange dinners he has been invited to (1.43; 11.31; 12.48).

His imagistic character sketches (vituperationes) of those who have supposedly offended or damaged him are especially ingenious. Examples are the attacks on the brutal barber Antiochus (11.84); on the unknowns who foisted libellous verses on him (10.5) or presumed to castigate his publications (6.64); and on a rude dinner guest (7.20). Equally elaborate are the descriptions of the client's life (cf. e.g. 5.22).

Of particular help in the creation of Martial's contextual images was the metaphorical richness of Latin. The everyday roots of words could be exposed and manipulated by a writer with a feeling for such possibilities, particularly in word play. This was highly effective in sexual and related obscene areas, where the euphemisms and dead metaphors have their literal origins in the animal, vegetable and fruit kingdoms,²⁹ or in such basic human activities, aggressive and agricultural, as eating, cooking, beating, fighting, killing, cutting; digging, ploughing, sowing and grinding, to name just the most obvious. Of course most of this linguistic expertise and interest is at the service of larger issues, not least his persistent attempts to degrade female sexuality and to damn the gross style of living enjoyed by such freedmen as Zoilus.

4. Wit and humour

Finally the large question remains: Martial's wit and humour, the foundations of his high prestige in earlier centuries in Europe. His reputation then as one of the greatest Latin classics is enshrined in, for example, the verdict of Sir John Harington (1560-1612), perhaps the best of the English epigrammatists after Ben Jonson. Harington wrote in the Metamorphoses of Ajax: 'It is certain that of all poems, the Epigram is the plesawntest, and of all that writes Epigrams Martial is counted the wittiest.'

It is sometimes difficult for the post-Romantic sensibility to share Harington's enthusiasm for this aspect of Martial's genius.³⁰ But then Harington was writing when mannerism was the dominant style of European poetry, English metaphysical poetry being, in its idiosyncratic way, a vigorous branch of it.

There are other obstacles also. Martial's aggressive sexual humour, particularly in its selection of satiric targets, is hardly compatible with modern conventions—or indeed with some ancient conventions. Physical defects present just one instance.³¹ Much of Martial's other joke material is nowadays offensive, particularly that concerning women, slaves, passive homoeroticism, prostitution and coital perversions. On the other hand, the stinginess of patrons, the social aberrancy of freedmen in a status-conscious milieu, while not repugnant to the modern reader in the same way, seem obsolete subjects for lively laughter.

Caesar Strabo, protagonist in the dialogue, is made to say in Cicero's De oratore (2.54.217) that a man with some wit can make a joke about anything except joking itself (ego vero … omni de refacetius puto posse ab homine non inurbano quam de ipsis facetiis disputari). Quintilian found himself baffled by the whole phenomenon of laughter, particularly as it could be stimulated by folly and even tickling: unde autem concilietur risus et quibus ex locis peti soleat, difficillimum dicere (Inst. 6.3.35; cf. 6.3.7).

Such cautions have to be borne in mind in attempting a sketch of the techniques Martial employs for arousing in his readers certain amused reactions. The effort, however, may yield not only further insights into Martial's poetic craftsmanship and rhetorical skills, but also perhaps into the nature of Roman wit and humour in general.³²

Some general aspects of joking and witticisms may be disregarded as being of overly broad application to the present limited purposes. Obviously Martial takes advantage of the fact that even a mildly humorous story gains by being presented in verse, just as any joke gains in the telling by a skilled raconteur. The more artistic and sharp the verse (or the manner of telling) is, the greater the gain in our pleasure. The deployment of poetic and rhetorical devices superimpose a glitter on even mediocre material. Truisms and proverbs gain in the same way, when they are expressed in rhyme, or incorporate alliteration, assonance and brevity, although the neat expression of these also counted as 'wit' for theorists such as Harington and Baltasar Gracian.

Any long disquisition on the nature of humour itself and the multifariousness of its terminology³³ would be out of place here, but one may start with what is now a commonplace, but one highly relevant to many of Martial's satiric epigrams, that much humour is rooted in verbal aggression, which masks its hostility and defuses any explosive retaliation by invoking amusement or admiration in the audience. Martial takes great pains to stress the jocular light-heartedness of his work and his desire not to offend individuals.³⁴ But Quintilian points out, anticipating Freud, a derisu non procul est risus (Inst. 6.3.7) and Aristotle had already stated [to skomna loidorema ti estin] (EN 4.14.1128a). The socially explosive topics that Martial selects for the exercise of his satiric talents also tell a different story.³⁵

It is another truism that most conscious humour, and almost all wit, relies on the element of surprise or unpredictability in different forms and to a greater or lesser degree. Just as language works by narrowing almost instantaneously the range of semantic and syntactic possibilities of each successive unit in a verbal sequence such as a sentence, so experience and the laws of reasoning both prepare us conceptually for a large, but still limited, range of progressions and endings to a story or conclusions to an argument. When this process is frustrated by linguistic ellipse, for example, or the logic is derailed, the result is incomprehensibility, nonsense or, with the appropriate circumstances, paradoxes, jokes, riddles or witticisms. Metaphor and analogy depend on a similar process: the implicit or explicit likeness presented can be appropriate, startling, puzzling, incongruous, disgusting, humorous, absurd, incomprehensible or, in poetic contexts, aesthetically impressive or frigid.

Why surprise … is so fundamental in the generation of laughter was explained by Aristotle in his discussion of metaphor and wit … (Rhet. 1412a). Being struck by the opposite of what one thought or expected, with or without the exclamation 'Of course! What a fool I was!' is the effect also of riddles, verbal coinages and other word play. Freud makes much of this element in jokes also, when he speaks of the pleasure derived from 'seeing' hidden similarities and differences.³⁶

Before examining the phenomenon in its technical manifestations, one must allude briefly to Martial's readiness to go beyond surprise to achieve shock by the blatant use of obscenity,³⁷ often in conjunction with more innocuous rhetorical formulas. These obscene jokes are invariably 'tendentious' or aggressive, but they achieve their object of amusing the reader by their very flouting of social conventions. They allow the release, often under the merest pretext of wit, of forbidden emotions and repressed impulses. Of course the cleverer they are, the more uninhibited by shame our amusement becomes.³⁸

In what follows, a somewhat heuristic classification of Martial's humorous techniques is adopted.³⁹ The divisions, although not entirely arbitrary, are not water-tight, since allocating a joke to one or another may be open to interpretation and even disagreement, particularly as Martial often employs two or more techniques at once to produce the humorous reaction. The classifications proposed are:

1. Jokes based on an empirical observation which confounds commonsense expectations, generating paradoxes and incongruities
2. okes based on informal syllogistic reasoning which may end in conclusions which are seemingly valid, but are, on reflection, absurd, paradoxical or shocking, often because a superficial appearance of sense hides nonsense or illicit inferences
3. Humour based on various kinds of word play, such as puns
4. Humour based on analogical metaphor or simile or symbolic instances
5. Humour dependent on various types of rhetorical schemata and tonalities, such as parody, hyperbole, rhyme, anaphora or irony

1. Surprise is most obviously the ingredient in the jokes and riddles that hinge on the [para prosdokian].⁴⁰ An elaborated paradox may be seen in the satiric epigram on Bassa (1.90), who seemed a Lucretia because she shunned the company of men, but who was actually a lesbian adulterer. Other human paradoxes are the individuals who claim to be poets but who do not write a line of verse or write only what is unreadable (cf. 3.9). A compliment to Domitian on his moral legislation ends in these lines (6.2.5-6):

   Nec spado iam nec moechus erit te praeside
     quisquam:
      at prius—o mores—et spado moechus erat.

   In your reign there will be no more eunuchs or adulterers: before—the immorality of it!—even a eunuch was an adulterer.

   The strange contrast (cf. 1.30; 39) between the behaviour prompted by riches and that due to poverty is another fertile theme, often with sexual overtones (cf. 6.50; 9.88; 11.87). Comparisons between the poetic craft and the vulgar arts of the zither-player or charioteer with their inequitable pay differentials provoke a sour smile (3.4). Similarly the money spent on race horses is contrasted with more appropriate and charitable uses (5.25; 10.9). A neatly balanced set of antitheses purport to describe a paradoxical emotional state (5.83):

   Insequeris, fugio; fugis, insequor, haec mihi
     mens est;
      velle tuum nolo, Dindyme, nolle volo.

   The upsetting of the reader's normal anticipations may be achieved without perverting logical argument. It can be done merely by the production of fresh evidence. The innkeeper's traditional habit of profitably watering wine is found reversed in Ravenna, where they cheat by simply serving it neat (cf. 1.56; 3.57; 9.98). There are similar reversals of expectation when the conduct of women who profess high ideals exemplifies the opposite (1.62; 5.17). Another example is the unexpected judgement on a dandy: non bene olet qui semper bene olet (He who always smells nice doesn't smell nice). The Romans, according to Cicero, believed that one should smell of nothing at all.

   Obviously hypocrisy and pretence in general offer the requisite conditions for such surprise endings. The Erwartung or 'build-up' may then consist of a more or less elaborate description of the hypocrite's overt behaviour or public professions: this is then deflated without argument by the sudden revelation of the truth, but the Aufschluss purports to be empirical, not subjective. Martial's satiric observation and this mode of humour are highly compatible; hence the numerous examples of vice comically stripped of its disguises,⁴¹ as in the epigram on Bassa (1.90). Martial can manage these effects on a small or large scale. If brevity be the soul of wit, the following is an excellent illustration.

   Pauper videri Cinna vult—et est pauper!
   Cinna wants to appear poor—in fact, he is!

   More elaborate examples are in the short cycle of epigrams on a cenipeta (2.11; 14; 27): the deep mourning, the frenzied activity and the extreme sycophancy of Selius are prompted merely by his desire to be invited to dinner.

2. Somewhat more convoluted than these are the numerous jokes that depend on logical (or invalid) deductions of the types expounded in Aristotle's Sophistici Elenchi and perfectly familiar to Roman orators. They are humorous because the conclusion is more or less surprising or even shocking. So, for example, in 4.21 Segius says there are no gods; if there were gods, Segius would not be prosperous; in fact, he does prosper, so there are no gods and his existence proves it. An unholy, but logical conclusion. Gallus, in another example, is now convicted of long-standing incest with his stepmother: she continues to live with him after Gallus' father is dead (4.16). Lycoris has buried all her friends: I wish my wife were a friend of hers (4.24). Again a scandalously logical argument. More commonly such jokes involve reductio ad absurdum, anti-climax or bathos or what might be described as 'overkill'.⁴² An epigram in which the climax goes beyond what would be anticipated is 4.43 on Coracinus, where Martial denies he called him a cinaedus, he said rather he was a cunnilingus. Even more elaborate are the attacks on Vetustilla and Zoilus (3.93; 82). In the first the old hag is shown to be so sexually insatiable that she'd need a torch up her (intrare in istumsola fax potest cunnum, 3.93.27). In the second, Zoilus' intolerably antisocial ostentation has to be tolerated because the traditional revenge of irrumatio is excluded. Why? Fellat. So he would enjoy it. Compare the apparently paradoxical logic in the sadist's refusal to beat the consenting masochist. In these epigrams hidden premisses are invoked.

   The derailment of logic which is initially concealed by an apparently artless, almost reasonable, form of expression provides the opportunity for a variety of jokes.⁴³ The amusement is provoked when 'hidden nonsense is revealed as manifest nonsense', as in Wittgenstein's proposal for the dissolution of philosophical puzzles. Often the jokes are produced by setting up a logical chain of expectations which is dramatically uncoupled at its last link by an anticlimax or an incongruity, often in the form of a category mistake or a hyperbolic (and often obscene⁴⁴) climax. A simple example is 10.8:

   Nubere Paula cupit nobis, ego ducere Paulam
     nolo: anus est. Vellem, si magis esset
    anus.

   Paula wants to marry the poet, but he is unwilling to accept the offer, since she's an old woman. He would, however, do so—if she were older. The reader had expected—if she were younger. The subtext is that Paula is undesirable but rich; although Martial would not mind waiting a short time for his inheritance, Paula has too many years left in her. And, unlike the hideous Maronilla pursued by Gemellus, she doesn't have an ominous cough (1.10).

   A more elaborate twist may be seen in 1.99, where a generous poor man becomes unexpectedly miserly after receiving several large legacies (cf. 1.103). Martial then uses the reductio ad absurdum for his imprecation:

   Optamus tibi millies, Calene.
   Hoc si contigerit, fame peribis.

   We pray you'll inherit a hundred million, Calenus: then you'll die of starvation.

   Similar to these deformations of syllogistic reasoning is the misuse of analogical argument. For example, 10.102 depends on a tendentious analogy:

   Qua factus ratione sit requiris,
   qui numquam futuit, pater Philinus?
   Gaditanus, Avite, dicat istud,
   qui scribit nihil et tamen poeta est.

   You ask how Philinus can be father, when he's never fucked? Let the man from Cadiz explain that, Avitus: he writes nothing and yet he's a poet.

   To claim to be a poet without proof may be pretentious, but it is in the realm of the conceivable; Philinus' paternity, however, is quite impossible and the analogy simultaneously discredits Gaditanus' claims.

   A similar epigram (1.72) about a would-be poet who hopes plagiarism will get him the title follows the analogies of denture wearers and white lead on dark skin to conclude:

   Hac et tu ratione qua poeta es,
   calvus cum fueris, eris comatus.

   By the same reasoning that makes even you a poet, when you become bald, you'll be hairy.

   A similar false analogy provides the point in 6.17:

   Cinnam, Cinname, te iubes vocari.
   Non est hic, rogo, Cinna, barbarismus?
   Tu si Furius ante dictus esses,
   fur ista ratione dicereris.

   You demand you be called Cinna, Cinnamus. I ask you, isn't this a social error? If your name has previously been Robson, by that logic you'd be called Rob.

   Cinna and Furius are both respectable names: fur is not.⁴⁵

   Under the heading of twisted logic may be classified also the non sequitur, most often found in the snappy retort, Tu quoque. Martial, for instance, is accused of writing bad verses; his response is, you don't write any at all (1.110); his epigrams are too long; a mere distich, however, from Cosconius would be too long (2.77; cf. 6.65); his dress is shabby; well, at least it's paid for (2.58). In forensic terms, this is distracting the jury from the issue.

   Logic is defied in 4.69: the rumours that Papylus' fine wine is lethal are rejected—and so is Papylus' invitation to have a drink. Here a premiss is accepted, but the appropriate conclusion is denied.

3. Particularly pervasive in Martial's oeuvre are the various forms of word play.⁴⁶ The most obvious is the simple pun (calembour or Kalauer) in the lexicographical sense of the use of one word or phrase to convey two different senses in the same context or the use of a homophone (or near homophone) with different meanings. Quite apart from our lack of 'inwardness with the living voice', punning has ceased to be a fashionable form of joking in comparatively recent times, if we except the work of James Joyce. It was not always so; James Boswell declared: 'A good pun may be admitted among the small excellencies of lively conversation.' Writers as different as Shakespeare and Thomas Hood made no apology for them. For the modern reader, however, to treat an accidental or external relationship, verbal or aural, as having conceptual significance is merely a poor joke.

   Nevertheless philosophers and critics from Plato (particularly in the Cratylus), Aristotle (Rhet. 1400b), Lucretius and Varro to Freud and Derrida have regarded puns as valuable ways to ferret out 'truths' about the physical and psychological world in general and about literary texts in particular. It is against this intellectual background that the Greco-Roman fascination with homophones, homonyms and etymologies (true or false) must be set. Even Homer and heraclitus were aware of the linguistic possibilities in puns. The belief that words relate closely to things, indeed reflect their very essence, rather than being arbitrary symbols for them, was deep-rooted in ancient thinking. Varro certainly believed that there is verum in the verbum and his work is full of false speculative etymologies (lucus a non lucendo, miles from milia and the like). Names and nouns could illuminate the nature of things or reflect actual characteristics hidden in them.⁴⁷

   This is not to say that Martial is interested in such theories, but simply that the poet and his audience would attribute far greater significance to puns and word play in general than we would, and so they would be far more acceptable as a form of humour. One obvious type of punning is playing on the different significance of similar sounding words or parts of words. This often provides the point of a poem. Sometimes the play is bilingual, as in 5.35, the case of the impostor Eucleides and the treacherous key, which reveals that he is a slave—nequior clavis puns on [kleis], Greek for key, although Martial must have known that the name derives from [euklees] (famous). Snow-White … is jeered at for her dark complexion and sexual frigidity (3.34), the latter being then contrasted with the fieriness of Phlogis (derived from … 'fire'). A very artificial pun, combined with a defective anagram, provides a complex play on Paulinus/Palinurus, alluding to Aeneas' drowned helmsman and Paulinus' desire to micturate twice from a moving boat, incorrectly etymologising the name from [paliu] and [ourein] instead of [ouros], 'watcher'.

   Real names could also be used for bantering word play, as in the case of Domitian's favourite Earinus (9.13). Since [earinos] is the adjective for 'spring', which in Latin is verna (which also fortuitously, but here conveniently, means 'home-bred slave'), Martial can joke on the possibilities of other Greek seasonal names for such a slave, Oporinos (autumnal), Chimerinos (wintery), Therinos (summery).

   Simpler plays are possible with Matemus by implying that he is effeminate (1.96); Panaretus does not have all the virtues as the meaning of his Greek name might imply—he drinks too much (6.89). Hermogenes is a real son of Hermes, god of thieves—he snitches napkins (12.29). No wonder one Phileros is, as the literal meaning of his Greek name implies, fond of love—he's buried seven rich wives on his property (10.43). Another Phileros has got through the besotted Galla's dowry (2.34).

   So even when not directly punning, Martial tries for allusive humour in chosen fictitious names that will fit, sometimes by contrast, the point of the epigram.⁴⁸ Historical connotations attached to a name may similarly reinforce, directly or indirectly, the thrust of the humour or satire. The literary technique is most obviously seen in Petronius, in Shakespeare or in Charles Dickens: we know what will be happening in Dotheboys Hall or what behaviour to expect from Toby Belch or Mr Gradgrind. So the name Lesbia, with its Catullan reminiscences and its overtones of … (to fellate), is appropriate for one who practices fellation (2.50), is an exhibitionist (1.32), sexually aggressive (6.23) and an old hag (10.39) who has to pay for sex (11.62). The historical connotations of Lais and Thais, the names of the great Greek courtesans, operate in the same symbolic way, as do such historical names as Sardanapallus or such mythical names as Hylas, Hyacinthus and Phoebus. Typical slave names also invite conceptual or literary word play (cf. Mistyllos/Taratalla, 1.50).

   Beyond plays on names, Martial looks to a wide variety of common words whose possible ambiguity in the right contexts encourages sexual innuendo or double entendres (Aristotle's and Quintilian's emphasis). A good example, whose subtlety is less likely to offend a modern sense of humour, is 4.39, which is presented almost in the form of a riddle, a not uncommon technique of Martial's to build suspense before a climax:

   Argenti genus omne comparasti,
   et solus veteres Myronos artes,
   solus Praxitelus manum Scopaeque,
   solus Phidiaci toreuma caeli,
   solus Mentoreos habes labores.
   Nec desunt tibi vera Gratiana,
   nec quae Callaico linuntur auro,
   nec mensis anaglypta de paternis.
   argentum tamen inter omne miror
   quare non habeas, Charine, purum.

   You've collected all kinds of silver and only you have antique artworks by Myron, only you have the handiwork of Praxiteles and Scopas, only you have the curved reliefs of Phidias, only you the artistic pains of Mentor. And you don't lack genuine works by Gratius or Galician gold inlays or encrusted plate from ancestral tables. Yet among all this variety, Charinus, I'm surprised you don't have any clean silver.

   Here Martial is feigning surprise that a rich connoisseur of wrought silver objets d 'art and tableware has no argentum purum in his collection. The surface meaning of 'unadorned' yields the hidden suggestion that Charinus' propensity for oral sex leaves none of it untainted (purus; for this implication, cf. 3.75.5; 6.50.6; 6.66.5; 11.61.14; 14.70.2).

   Similar double entendres are generated by soror/frater, male or female siblings or lovers (2.4); ficus (figs or haemorrhoids, 1.65; 7.71); dare (of innocent gifts or sexual favours, 2.49; 56; 7.30); irrumare (of consensual oral sex or insulting humiliation as in 2.83; 4.17). Martial is particularly fond of ambiguous possessives. Poems I write are yours if you buy them or recite them so badly that I disclaim them (1.29; 1.38; 2.20); false teeth, false hair and such things are yours (implying natural), if you purchase them (5.43; 6.12; cf. 9.37; 12.23; 14.56). But unvarnished and often frigid puns are found in such epigrams as 1.79 (different usages of agere); and sometimes the joke hinges only on the supposedly correct use or form of words (e.g. 2.3 debere; 1.65 ficus/ficos).

   Somewhat more appealing are the pointed homophones (Fronto's paronomasia) found in such epigrams as 1.98 (podagra/cheragra). Although a whole epigram may be built around a favourite ambiguous word such as purus, sometimes a pun is used simply to terminate, more or less satisfactorily, an otherwise humorous poem. An example of this may be seen in Martial's fictive description of a tiny farm given him by Lupus, which, he claims, is no bigger than a window-box (11.18). The poem now generates a series of amusing meioses and comparisons (cf. IV below): it could be covered by a cricket's wing; it could be ravaged by an ant in a single day; a cucumber couldn't grow straight in it; a caterpillar would famish and a gnat would starve to death in it; a mushroom or a violet couldn't open in it; a mouse would be like the Calydonian Boar if it ravaged it; its harvest would scarcely fill a snail shell or make a nest for a swallow; its vintage fits into a nutshell; and a half-size Priapus, even without his sickle and phallus, would be too large for it. Obviously the joke could continue, but a crowning hyperbole (or meiosis) would be hard to find, so Martial resorts to a pun: Lupus should have given him a prandium instead of a praedium, a lunch instead of a ranch, a spree instead of a spread.

   Under word play may be subsumed such jokes as that in 10.69, where an incorrect and unexpected usage of a verb leads to the point:

   Custodes das, Polla, viro, non accipis ipsa.
   Hoc est uxorem ducere, Polla, virum.

   The substitution of ducere for nubere implies that Polla 'wears the trousers' in the household, providing the point of the misogynistic joke. The idiom can be reversed to mock a macho homosexual (1.24).

4. Martial's imagery has already been discussed, so the humorous metaphors, similes and symbolic instances that occur in the satiric epigrams need no more than a glance. These are well illustrated by the epigrams of witty and sustained invective against Vetustilla (3.93), Zoilus (3.82), the anonymous forger of his verses (10.5), Hedylus' cloak (9.57), Lydia (11.21) and Nanneius (11.61), and also by the ingenious string of belittling comparisons Martial uses to describe the pettiness of the gifts given him, a subject which invariably elicits his most pointed sallies. Worth recalling again are the epigrams on a gift of a tiny cup (8.33) and on the ridiculous size of his little farm (11.18). The hyperbole of the imagery in such epigrams is put to deadly effect in the abuse aimed at the loose cunnus of the hapless Lydia (11.21) or the vile smell of Thais (7.93).

   The imagery of Phaethon's fiery doom prompts several 'twists'. A bad poet should choose such a mythological subject—then appropriately burn his verses (5.53). An encaustic painting of Phaethon constitutes double jeopardy (4.47). A coarser visual image is conjured up by Philaenis' physical appearance (2.33): she is bald, red and one-eyed: the innuendo is easily grasped.

   The kinetic images and imaginary instances used to describe Hermogenes' thieving propensities are particularly amusing: he is pictured as a deer sucking up frozen snakes and a rainbow catching the falling raindrops; if he can't steal a napkin, he'll steal a table-cloth, the awnings of the amphitheatre, the sails of a ship and the linen robes of Isis' priest (12.28).

5. Finally, there are the jokes or subsidiary aids to joking that depend essentially on 'the rediscovery of the familiar', in Freud's terminology.⁴⁹ Here the techniques used are metrical rhythms, repetition of words or phrases, modifications of familiar saws, allusion to quotations, historical or topical references, and such rhythmic devices and tropes as alliteration, rhyme, assonance, anaphora, enumeratio, accumulatio and others. The most ingenious example in English of the playful use of alliteration is Poulter's rhymes beginning

An Austrian Army awfully arrayed
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade …

Martial's tour deforce here is 5.24, in which each line begins with the name of the gladiator Hermes; this is underscored by further alliteration within the lines. The repetition of a telling phrase or question is effectively deployed in 7.10, where the rhetorical Ole, quid ad te? recurs four times; it is then reprised by four variations on hoc ad te pertinet, Ole in a crescendo of insults until the dismissive climax is reached. Similar to this are 1.77 (… Charinus et tamen pallet) and 11.47 (ne futuat).

A clever and untranslatable mixture of punning, assonance, rhyme, alliteration and anaphora together is offered in 12.39:

Odi te, quia bellus es, Sabelle.
Res est putida bellus et Sabellus.
Bellum denique malo quam Sabellum.
Tabescas utinam, Sabelle belle.

Parody, which above all relies on the comfortable feeling of recognition and familiarity, is an infrequent humorous device in Martial. The most successful example (2.41) is based on perverting an untraceable or adapted line of Ovid's, Ride si sapis, o puella, ride,⁵⁰ by a series of amusingly sarcastic images into the advice, Plora, si sapis, o puella, plora.

The setting of proverbial saws in humorous or incongruous contexts provides a similar type of amusement, as in 1.27, 1.45. In 11.90 the citation of Lucilius' famous epitaph on Metrophanes and a line ending of Ennius serves as a sardonic rebuke to the admirers of archaic poetry.

5. 'Willing to wound': Martial's poetic ambivalence

It would be unfair to Martial's achievement to leave his work on a technical note, although it was that wide-ranging technical expertise that inspired so many poets and critics in the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century to heights of emulation and adulation. Looking at his humour and wit in larger terms, the modern reader is disappointed by its datedness or appalled by its cruelty or obscenity, although the covert appeal of the 'black humour' in dead baby jokes, Lincoln jokes and indeed smoking-room stories in all their variety should make us suspicious of the latter reaction.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Martial's genius took that particular turn towards the line of wit and the satiric epigram. Now that we have some insight into the psychological workings of wit and humour, some speculations on the essence of Martial's art and the nature of his protean oeuvre may be ventured.

An interesting clue to his poetry is to be found in the younger Pliny's assessment of his character in the letter reporting his death (3.21). There Pliny, speaking both of his personality and his writings, as it were, refers to the combination in his verses of wit, malice and also the desire to please (sal, fel and candor). Nothing could better describe the impression left by a reading of the epigrams, the impression that is of a profound ambivalence that seems to spring from a divided spirit. William Empson once remarked that 'the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry' and this suggests an interesting perspective from which to scrutinise Martial's writings-—it will also partly account for the highly diverse reactions to them among critics and amateurs alike. Such a diagnosis of Martial as a poet of profound ambiguity may be confirmed by glancing briefly at the mixed feelings he shows towards his principal subjects: the imperial political structure; patronage; private life; and, not least, sexuality. Irony and wit are tempting, almost inevitable, modes for reflecting ambivalent feelings. Humour and ridicule help defuse the consequent anxieties. And, it is no coincidence that Martial shows a particular sensitivity to the hypocrisy he detects in others.

Martial makes no bones about his dependence on the goodwill and generosity of patrons, but he is equally forthright about the flaws in the whole system and in individual benefactors. He professes his loyalty to the principate and its present incumbent, whoever he may be, but there is an undercurrent of complaints about the workings of the system as it affects poets such as himself, and he is quick to react to the overthrow of Domitian and his replacement by the new rulers, Nerva and Trajan. He clings to his hierarchical vision of Roman society, yet he accepts gratefully the favours of powerful imperial freedmen, even while rejecting the challenges presented by the cultural and economic evolution of the rest of the class to which they belong. He expresses intermittently through his epigrams a keen nostalgia for Spain and his home town, yet in his later years he evinces disquiet about his prospects on return and, in Book XII, bitter disillusion about his homecoming. His Epicurean ideals of the quiet life and contentment with little are undercut by his itemisation of how much that little entails and his patent desire for recognition, personal respect and the tangible, even expensive, proofs of that respect.

His attitudes towards women in general and in particular are especially ambivalent. He can simultaneously resent rich women as a class, while expressing admiration and gratitude to individual female patrons. He can denigrate their sexuality, while praising the virtue and restraint of certain historical and contemporary paragons, yet he would require in the ideal wife a scarcely attainable combination of outward respectability and private lasciviousness. The latter quality in the inhabitants of the demi-monde is at times derided and at times praised, even rewarded.

The same ambiguity will be found to pervade his homoerotic verses when the scarifying physical imagery used to depict mature female sexuality is abandoned for the fragrant language of the epigrams dedicated to young male slaves. Ecstatic praise for their fresh youthful bodies, however, is constantly soured by complaints of their waywardness and reluctance to reciprocate his affection. Critical of the abuse of power by other slave owners, he is not reluctant to exercise it in his own case against recalcitrance. His emphasis on purely physical charms is then belied by his keenly expressed desire for spontaneous affection from such favourites as Diadumenus, Dindymus, Telesphorus and Lygdus (cf. 5.83; 11.26; 12.71; 11.73). The poignant epigram in the final book (12.46) seemed to Joseph Addison and others to be a notable and pithy summation of the ambiguity to be found in human relationships:

Difficilis facilis, iucundus acerbus es idem:
   nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.

In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,
Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow;
Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about
 thee,

There is no living with thee, or without thee.
(Trs. Joseph Addison)

The persona presented then is of a poet who feels that he has been 'stung' by life: he reacts by 'stings'. 'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike' in Pope's words, he has to sharpen the weapons of wit and sarcasm as his only conceivable means of response to the world's duplicity and hypocrisy, in which he fears he sees his own reflected.…

Notes

¹ References for most of these judgments and the documentation for the swings in his reputation are given below in chapter 7.

² Mason (1988) 29, but see also the response by Sullivan (1989) 303.

³ For a collection of examples, consult Lattimore (1942); Veyne (1964) 48; Tolkiehn (1967) 113. Other moving epitaphs by Martial for young people, men of distinction as well as slaves, are: 1.116 (for a friend's daughter); 6.28 (for Melior's slave boy); 7.96 (for a young slave of Bassus); 11.13 (for the mime Paris); 10.53 (for the charioteer Scorpus); 6.76 (for the praetorian Fuscus); 7.40 (on Etruscus' father); 10.70 (on Rabirius' parents); and 11.69 (on a dog).

⁴ For this whole discussion, see Kenney (1964) 77, who defends the supposedly jarring collocation of the two poems against earlier objections by Lloyd (1953) 39.

⁵ For a larger, but by no means complete, selection of English versions, see Sullivan (1986) 112; it was also popular in other literatures. Only the epigrams on Arria Paeta (1.13), of which Mrs Thrale made a collection of translations, and on Leander (Spec. 25), popular in the siglo de oro, cf. Moya del Baino (1967), run it close.

⁶ There is, however, a debt to Horace here, and it is not the only one, since the identification of the happy man with the rural farmer is pervasive in Augustan literature (cf. e.g., Tibullus 1.1). It was a theme that enjoyed great popularity also in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then Martial's compact statement would be much elaborated and even Christianised; see R0stvig (1974) 291.

⁷ A good recent study of Martial's structural conventions is Siedschlag (1977), which provides copious parallels to Martial's precedents in Greco-Roman epigram and elegy. Barwick (1932) 63 and (1947) 1 are still useful. Berends (1932) offers a general, overly schematic, discussion of the structuring of all twelve books.

⁸ Here I follow the excellent analysis by Kay (1985) 5.

⁹ The most comprehensive discussion of the influence of contemporary rhetoric on Martial is Barwick (1959) 3. On Martial's rhetorical techniques by comparison with his Greek models, see Pertsch (1911) 56. For the meanings of the rhetorical terms, see Dixon (1971) s.v., and for Martial's handling of these effects (and much more) Joepgen (1967) passim. Anadiplosis, verbal repetition, is used in one of his most famous epigrams (1.32): Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare: hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te. Accumulatio is neatly used in the description of the happy life (10.47), and an amusing example of it, coupled with gross hyperbole, is Martial's description of his tiny farm (11.18). For synathroesmus, see Citroni (1975) ad 1.10.2; and for the priamel in Latin literature, exemplified in the opening epigram on the Colosseum in the Liber de spectaculis, see Race (1982).

¹⁰Miraris (do you wonder?) is similarly employed; see Weinreich (1926) 55. For examples of quaeris, see 2.38; 5.56; 6.67; 7.34; 8.12; 10.22; 11.19; 12.17; for miraris, see e.g. 5.73; 6.11; 7.18; 12.51. For all these various openings see Siedschlag (1977) 9.

¹¹ I have discussed this elsewhere in connection with Petronius, see Sullivan (1968) 104. For the less tendentious realism and enargeia of the Greek novelists, see Bartsch (1988) 8. For Martial's 'realism' and his fascination with concrete description, see Salemme (1976) 9. Similar is the characterisation of his work by Mehnert (1970) 19 'als Dokument der sozialen Verhaltnisse'. Bohn (1860) in his preface speaks of 'his pictures of the manners and customs of Rome at that most interesting period, the commencement of the Christian era'.

¹² See, most conveniently, Lessing (1956) 7.425. For the genesis and significance of Lessing's views, which went well beyond those of J. C. Scaliger (1561) III cap. 126, who merely argued that 'pointedness' (argutia) was the soul of epigram rather than brevity; see ch. 7, p. 297; also Barwick (1959) 3 and Hutton (1935) 55. Objections to Lessing's views were offered early by Herder (1888) 337, who preferred the epigrams of the Greek Anthology to those for which Martial provided the paradigm. For later objections see Reitzenstein (1893) 103; Barwick (1959) 10; Citroni (1969) 219.

¹³ To borrow a useful term from Smith (1968) 198. Other terms than Lessing's have been used such as propositio-conclusio; expositio-conclusio; narratio-acumen; antecedens-consequens; see Citroni (1969) 218 n.6. Smith describes the epigram portentously 'as a thematic sequence which reaches a point of maximal instability and then turns to the business of completing itself (p. 199).

¹⁴ As pointed out by Kay (1985) 7; Gerlach (1911) 5 had noticed the appropriateness of the analysis for Martial's 'surprise endings'.

¹⁵ Barwick (1959) 104 sees this as one of the most important effects on Martial of the rhetorical style exemplified by the younger Seneca.

¹⁶ Convenient collections can be found in Ker (1979) xii, West (1912), and de Sousa Pimentel (1991) 117.

¹⁷ Hor. Sat. 1.2.120f.; Petr. Sat. 132.15; AP 9.572 (Lucillius); AP 12.1; 197 (Strato).

¹⁸ Other examples are 1.11; 94; 4.34; 84; 7.75; 9.2; 8.20; 10.68; 11.35; 42; 12.97. Reductio ad absurdum is also an attractive closure (cf. 6.17), as is hyperbole, the introduction of a humorous exception or an unrelated factor; for other examples of these techniques, cf. Spec. 21; 3.12; 4.39; 8.35; 11.66; 12.54. The quod non (sed) construction achieves its effect by rejecting one explanation for another more amusing or satisfying one. Simple examples can be found in Liber de spectaculis: e.g. 6; 16; 17. Other, sometimes more elaborate, examples are 1.95; 2.11; 2.15; 6.48; 8.31; 9.62; 11.77; 12.89. See Siedschlag (1977) 29, 75 for detailed analysis.

¹⁹ The … mean had been a Greek ethical principle since one of the Seven Sages came up with the concept of … (nothing in excess), after which Aristotle made it a fundamental part of his concept of virtue. Other examples in Martial are 2.36; 9.32; 11.100. Alternatively such contrast of two opposing aspects may be used to praise both or condemn one (e.g. 9.70). Sometimes present and past, mythological or real situations are simply juxtaposed as at 1.6.

²⁰ See also 8.20; 2.76; analogous jokes are found in 3.88; 90; 6.12.

²¹ Instances are: Spec. 13; 14; 3.19; 4.18; 32; 6.15; 11.82. See also Laurens (1965) 323.

²² For Martial's verse forms and metrical practice in general see Birt in Friedlaender (1886) 30, who proclaims it masterly, Giarratano (1908) and Holzberg (1988) 34; on the elegiacs, Platnauer (1948) 12; on the hendecasyllables, Ferguson (1970) 173; on the choliambics, Pelckmann (1908) s.v. Some metrically unusual practices to be found in his later books indicate that his inventive zest had not diminished. In Book XI the predominance of elegiacs (86 poems out of 108) is varied by sixteen hendecasyllabic epigrams (15%) and by four choliambic epigrams (4%). This corresponds roughly to the frequency in other books, except that two of the less common verse forms, iambic trimeters and a metre borrowed from Horace, are found in it (11.77; 11.59). Of the recognised 1,556 epigrams of Martial, 1,235 are elegiac distichs (79%), 238 are hendecasyllables (15%) and 77 are choliambics (5%); hexameters of a very individual sort are used four times (1.53; 6.64; 2.73; 7.93); straight iambic senarii twice (6.12; 11.77); iambic senarius with iambic dimeter four times, a metre used in Horace's first ten epodes (1.49; 3.14; 9.77; 11.49); choliamb with dimeter once (1.61) and there is one example of sotadics (3.29). For a detailed statistical discussion of Martial's chosen metres and comparison with the usages of Catullus, Horace, the Appendix Vergiliana and the Priapea, see Moreno (1987) 267.

²³ For adverse comment on Ovidian usage, see Axelson (1958) 124, who cites in support Harrison (1943) 98. For further details, see Wilkinson (1948) 68.

²⁴ For the differences between Martial's and Catullus' practices in hendecasyllables, see Ferguson (1963) 3 and (1970) 173. Martial follows Catullus in one or two favoured arrangements of the hendecasyllabic line, such as noun and adjective placed at the beginning and end of the line (e.g. argutis epigrammaton libellis, 1.1.3) and balancing two related words in these positions (praeconem facias vel architectum, 5.56.11). Chiasmus is similarly frequent (e.g. velox ingenio, decore felix, 6.28.7; or uxor pessima pessimus maritus, 8.35.2). He differs from Catullus in avoiding endings of the brevis lux, tacet nox type, preferring a monosyllable before an unelided monosyllabic ending. although he uses few enough of these, none of them being strong or significant words, but rather weak monosyllables, such as pronouns and parts of the verbs sum, fio or volo. See Paukstadt (1876) 29.

²⁵ A good example of this problem may be found in 11.77: Vacerra sits around all day in public lavatories, not because he is dying to shit (cacaturit), but because he is dying to dine (cenaturit). The first desiderative form is authenticated only once elsewhere in Latin (CIL IV Suppl. 5242), but the second is most probably Martial's invention to produce an alliterative pun. Other examples from Book XI are inevolutus (unrolled), dractum (small flask), botrus (bunch of grapes) and carnarius (fond of flesh); see Kay (1985) ad loc.; also Huisentveld (1949) for his use of colloquial and vulgar expressions; for hapax usages, Fortuny Previ (1981-2) III; for Martial's use of Greek vocabulary, see Adamik (1975) 71; Fortuny Previ (1986) 73; on Spanish loan words, Dolq (1953) 27.

²⁶ See Barwick (1959) 43; Carrington (1972) 261. Other examples of such endings are: 7.42; 9.88; 99; 10.45; 59; 100; 11.100; 12.36. Their frequency increases in later books. Coincidentally some metrically unusual features are to be seen in his later books (IX-XII), e.g. the hexameter endings dic aliquando (104.6), hircus habet cor (11.84.17) and apud me (11.35.11; 52.1; 83.1; 12.17.9), which stand out because of their very rarity.

Both again point to increasing rather than diminishing poetic experimentation, and perhaps a rejection of conventional constraints and formal expectations, as with the increase in the number of obscene poems found in Book XI.

²⁷ A noticeable exception is in the political use made of Hercules (esp. 9.101; 64; 65), which accounts for an undue proportion of the references to Greek localities; see map 4, p. 177. For mythological themes in Martial, see Corsaro (1973) 171; Szelest (1974) 297.

²⁸ For similar denigratory uses of olfactory or tactile imagery against women, cf. 3.93, where images of rock predominate; 4.4, where smell is again evoked. Analogous but more expansive examples in Swift are 'The Lady's Dressing Room' (1730); 'A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed' (1731); and 'Strephon and Chloe' (1731).

²⁹ Note, for example, the play Martial makes with 'fig' (ficus) in its various senses (1.65; 4.52; 7.72; 12.32); see Adams (1982) 138, who may be consulted for further illustrations of the linguistic areas Martial draws upon for his metaphors and images. See also Adamik (1981) 303, who counts three hundred or so similes in the oeuvre, a high proportion by comparison with other Latin poets. They often occur in clusters through the technique of enumeratio.

³⁰ See below (p. 278) for a general discussion of this enthusiasm.

³¹ For example, although Aristotle says in Book II of the Poetics …, Plutarch would set limits on what physical defects were proper subjects for jokes (Quaest. conviv. 2.633b). Baldness was an acceptable butt; halitosis and blindness were not. Martial, like medieval and Renaissance humorists such as Thomas More, blithely ignores these limitations. Such humour, however, goes back to Homer's description of the gods' laughing at the limping of Hephaestus (Ii. 18.411, 417).

³² A valuable recent study of the political and ideological use of wit is Plass (1988). For earlier general discussions of Martial's humour, see W6lfflin (1887); McCartney (1919) 343; Gaertner (1956); Joepgen (1967); Kuppe (1967); Szelest (1981) 293; Burnikel (1980); Plass (1985) 187; and Malnati (1984).

³³ The best ancient discussions, to my mind, are the Tractatus Coislinianus and Arist. Rhet. 3.10.141lb-1413a (cf. EN 10.6.1176b; Rhet. 1.2.1371b; 2.3.1380b; 3.11.141lb). For a survey of Greek and Roman speculation on the subject, see Grant (1924). Some modern works by such authors as Freud (1960), Legman (1968) and Dundes (1987) have proved enlightening. The slippery complexity of the terms used in discussing humour is as patent in Greek and Latin as it is in English.

Moreover, the vocabulary for different aspects of the laughable changes with the passage of time and doubtless with changes in sensibility and aesthetic perceptions. One must settle for the recognition of 'family resemblances'. 'Wit', for example, has undergone considerable semantic change in the transition from Elizabethan to modern times. In most of Sir Richard Blackmore's A Satire against Wit (1699), the term is synonymous with obscenity and blasphemy; elsewhere in his writings he describes it as 'intellectual enameling' or 'a rich embroidery of flowers and figures'. Contrast this with Pope's definition, 'True Wit is Nature to Advantage dress'd: What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd.' For changes in the concept in English, see Watson (1987) s.v.

³⁴ For a discussion of Martial's mock-modest stance see ch. 2 above. Even Pliny comments on Martial's desire to be friendly (candor). Aristotle's view that amusement and relaxation are necessary parts of life (EN 4.88.1128b) is not at odds with the thesis that humour is frequently hostile.… Again this is not the place to examine the various motives for deliberate humour: to increase one's sense of self-esteem, as Hobbes thought; to strike at one's enemies, deflate hierarchy, subvert authority or register social protest; to relax tension or conceal embarrassment; to amuse friends or company, or, paradoxically, sheer Schadenfreude.

³⁵ An analysis of the interconnection of Martial's social and erotic material, such as the decay of patronage, the disruptive excesses of the freedman class, the financial power and sexual corruption of women and the transgression at large of traditional boundaries is attempted in Sullivan (1987) 177.

³⁶ Allied to this, in certain other classes of joke, is 'recognition', the rediscovery of what is familiar rather than the discovery of what is new; here Freud (1960) 120 grudgingly gives credit to Aristotle for his theory that the pleasure of recognition is the basis for the enjoyment of art.…

³⁷ There must be little question by now that Martial uses more obscene words and allusions than any other known Roman poet; see again Adams (1982) 1-8 for a discussion of the general topic and passim for Martial's specific usages. The subject is only sketchily discussed by ancient theorists of rhetoric, since the orator is to be discouraged from … obscenitas and … scurrilitas, because of his need for a dignified persona. Aristotle had been very strict in discouraging a gentleman … from vulgarity … Cf. Quint. Inst. 6.3.29: dicacitas etiam scurrilis et scaenica huic personae alienissima est… obscenitas vero non a verbis tantum sed etiam a significatione; cf. Cic. Fam. 2.1.5.

³⁸ See Freud (1960) 100. I pass over here Freud's view that a main unconscious motivation for telling 'dirty jokes' is exhibitionism or the desire to expose oneself.

³⁹ More elaborate classifications are of course possible. I would single out for their ingenuity the classifications of Gracian in his Agudeza y Ingenio and, for brevity, Szelest (1981) 293. The categories adopted by Hofmann (1956-7) 433 are somewhat unfocused.

⁴⁰ Many of the epigrams describe lusus naturae and other strange events or appearances in nature. But few of these … are humorous or even interesting; in fact, they are often rather grim. The boy bitten by a snake hiding in the maw of a bronze statuary of a bear is a case in point. For further examples and some Greek precursors, see Szelest (1976) 251. Hairsbreadth escapes and startling deaths are also popular topics and often prompt a neat aphorism such as in medio Tibure Sardinia est (4.60.6).

⁴¹ Malnati (1984) sees hypocrisy as the mainspring of Martial's humour. Examples of social hypocrisy are given in ch. 4 above, p. 159. Instances of sexual hypocrisy are especially numerous.

⁴² Quintilian takes note of the last two of these (Inst. 9.2.22-3); they exemplify sustentatio or [paradoxon], depending on whether one looks at the Erwartung or the Aufschluss.

⁴³ It is a characteristic of Irish bulls ('If this letter offends you, please return it unopened'), of certain types of ethnic humour and, in the ancient world, of Abderite jokes as reported in the ancient collection Philogelos; cf. Baldwin (1983) 21. Plass (1988) 190 draws attention to Quintilian's remark: … eadem quae si inprudentibus excidant stulta sunt, si simulamus venusta creduntur (Inst. 6.3.23). The particular derailment of logic which consists in seizing on the wrong element in a complex proposition was singled out by William Hazlitt as an effective form of wit, which he described as 'diverting the chain of your adversary's argument abruptly and adroitly into another channel'. He instances 'the sarcastic reply of Porson, who hearing someone observe that "certain modern poets would be read and admired when Homer and Virgil were forgotten", made answer—"And not till then!"' (See Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lecture I (London 1819; repr. 1910) 17.) A more familiar instance is Robert Benchley's retort to a lady who pointed out to him that alcohol is a slow poison: 'Who's in a hurry?'

⁴⁴ As Plass (1988) 195 notes, citing 4.43; 50. Cf. also 2.73; 3.74; 4.84; 9.27; 12.79 for similar endings.

⁴⁵ This epigram is imitated more effectively by Johannes Burmeister in his Martialis Renatus (Luneburg 1618), to produce an anti-Papist joke turning on Pontifex faex.

⁴⁶ The standard discussion is Joepgen (1967); see also Siedschlag (1977) 86. On puns the most comprehensive recent study is Redfern (1984), although this concentrates on French literature for examples. The importance of word play in general in Martial may be gauged from the frequency of its occurrence; cf. 1.20; 30; 41; 45; 47; 50; 65; 79; 81; 98; 100; 2.3; 7; 43; 67; 3.25; 34; 42; 67; 3.78; 4.9; 52; 5.26; 6.6; 17; 7.41; 57; 71; 8.16; 19; 22; 9.72; 95; 12.39. It is interesting that Martial uses this form of jocularity less and less as he grows older.

⁴⁷ See Snyder (1980) on the importance of word elements for Lucretius (e.g. the ignis in lignis); Ahl (1985) discusses their literary implications in Latin poetry, even suggesting that Roman poets might overlook the difference between diphthongs, long and short vowels, and aspirated and unaspirated words (p. 56); cf. 2.39.4.

⁴⁸ See further Giegengack (1969) 22.

⁴⁹ See Freud (1960) 120. On Martial's alliteration, see Adamik (1975b) 69; on ancient parody, Cebe (1966).

⁵⁰ Discussed earlier. The closest analogies are AA 3.281ff., 3.513.

Abbreviations

… AP Anthologia Palatina …

CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, ed. T. Mommsen et al., (Berlin 1863-) …

Housman CP The Collected Papers of A. E. Housman, edd. J. Diggle and F. R. D. Goodyear (Cambridge 1972)

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