Hardcover(New Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Writing in the late first century CE—when the epigram was firmly embedded in the social life of the Roman elite—Martial published his poems in a series of books that were widely read and enjoyed. Exploring what it means to read such a collection of epigrams, Fitzgerald examines the paradoxical relationship between the self-enclosed epigram and the book of poems that is more than the sum of its parts. And he goes on to show how Martial, by imagining these books being displayed in shops and shipped across the empire to admiring readers, prophetically behaved like a modern author. Chock-full of epigrams itself—in both Latin and English versions—Fitzgerald’s study will delight classicists, literary scholars, and anyone who appreciates an ingenious witticism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226252537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2007 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
William Fitzgerald is a professor of Latin language and literature at King's College London. He is the author of several books, including Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position and Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination.
.
Read an Excerpt
MARTIAL THE WORLD OF THE EPIGRAM
By William Fitzgerald
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-25253-7
Chapter One MARTIAL AND THE WORLD OF THE EPIGRAM
Martial is a major poet, but the fact that he has had to wait so long for the critical reassessment that is beginning to come his way is not surprising. He writes in a genre that it is not easy to take seriously, and Martial himself is at pains to tell us not to. Though we have become accustomed to discounting protestations of worthlessness by ancient poets, in this case we might think that the author has a point. In fact, points are all he seems to have, as one epigram after another reveals the sting in its tail, nudging us in the ribs, giving us the wink, inviting us to groan or soliciting our reaction in some way or other. Reading Martial is like eating a whole box of bonbons at one sitting, as one critic put it, and a colleague of mine marveled that I could teach a seminar on a poet who wrote the same poem over and over again. I could see her point. How does one read an epigrammatist?
We should be well placed to answer this question in the age of bytes and sound bites, of items, articles, snapshots, highlights, headlines, slogans, and the like; one would expect the epigram form to be congenial to our distracted culture, whose metaphors of attention include browsing, grazing, surfing, and cruising. These aspects of our own world go some of the way to explaining why Martial is a poet for our time, and they also encourage us to look at Martial's chosen form, the book of epigrams, as a particular vision or representation of the world. "World" is a versatile, not to say vague, word, but it serves to orient us toward what it is that makes Martial a unique and important poet. If "world" is the most general term for the form in which an environment makes sense, for the way in which its components relate, then the world of the epigram book is quite distinct from that of other genres. If "world" is what you confront and have to deal with, then the epigrammatist masters his world in a way that is uniquely his own. Again, if the world of a given entity is what surrounds it-that in which it is embedded-then the epigram book creates a very particular relation between inside and outside, between work of art and circulating book. Martial's epigram book is both an object that goes out into the world and a focal point about which a heterogeneous collection of readers and readings assembles itself as a virtual society, its consumption very much part of what it is. Finally, we may speak of the world of the book as the attitude it takes, the focus, selection or frame that disposes us to see things from a certain angle, and here too, Martial's books have something unique to offer.
One way to broach the distinctive world of the epigram book is through the paradoxes that the form implies. Since the epigram is the most closed of forms, the notion of a book of epigrams is paradoxical, as Martial himself acknowledges. Why write a book of epigrams, he asks, if brevity is the chief virtue of the form (8.29); it's easy to write epigrams nicely, but difficult to write a book (7.58); there's good, bad, and indifferent here-a book (of epigrams) can't be made otherwise (1.16). Since you can no more read a book of epigrams than you can eat a whole box of chocolates, Martial suggests that the reader pick and choose, or, as we might postmodernly put it, browse and graze. Whenever the end of a poem coincides with the end of a page, he tells us, you can make a liber into a libellus (10.1); more radically, "We have arrived at the bosses (umbilicos), but you, reader, want to go further ... as though you had not finished what was already finished on page one" (4.89). Why would the book already be finished on page one? Not, as Shackleton Bailey would have it (1993, ad loc.), because the book might just as well not have been written, but because "you can finish the book wherever you want: each work (opus) is unrolled (explicitum) in two lines" (14.2). The epigram being the most closed of forms, almost closure as form, you cannot continue an epigram; you can only start again, which is surely one of the reasons why Martial finds dicing an appropriate figure for writing or reading epigrams.
Another paradox that attends the notion of the book of epigrams has to do with the occasional nature of the epigram. If the epigram is embedded in the day-to-day life of the Roman elite, improvised, perhaps, to lend a veneer of sophistication to a birthday, a wedding, a boat trip or a dinner, or, more broadly, to shed the glow of culture over relations between patron and client, then what happens when epigrams are assembled in a book? Have they been uprooted from the soil from which they draw their life, or have they rather been universalized, raised to a higher power for a different kind of audience, the anonymous lector who is our forbear? One of Martial's most significant puns is on the word libellus, both "petition" and "little book of poems." The pun points to two kinds of reading that his epigrams might elicit, depending on whether the reader is a (potential) patron or an unknown reader. Trailing a context which stubbornly clings to it, the transplanted epigram prevents the book from closing over its contents.
When we consider the associations of the epigram as a genre, we come up against more contradictions. The lapidary compression and closure of the epigram point to inscriptional uses-epitaph, dedication, monumental inscription. In this context, the epigram implies permanence, and Martial has his own unconventional figures for this: an ant preserved in amber, a brand or a tattoo. But, seen from a different angle, the one-dimensional brevity and compressing wit of the epigram give it quite different associations, with the ephemeral, the improvised, and the spoken. The epigram may be a means of commemorating and preserving, but it may equally be an elegant waste of time not intended to outlast its occasion. Again, the very pointedness that lends the epigram its definitive and unmodifiable rightness, its inscriptional permanence, could also be seen as the trick that loses its potency after a single reading, rendering the epigram an object to be consumed and thrown away. Food, like gaming, is an appropriate figure for the perishable aspect of Martial's epigrams, and it features frequently.
A similar dialectic relates the two most common categories of epigram in Martial's books, the scoptic and the panegyric. Mockery and celebration are equally characteristic of the form, for, as Lawrence Manley puts it, "The impulse to immortalize by inscription could just as well become the satiric impulse to fix a neat, indelible image in a last, unanswerable word." The attitude of the epigram to its world is as conflicted as its status is contradictory and these paradoxes of the form serve to complicate the "world" of the book of epigrams. I will return to questions of status and attitude later in this chapter, but first we need to look more closely at the paradox of a book that is at the same time a random collection of self-contained units.
JUXTAPOSITION: THE EPIGRAMMATIC ENVIRONMENT
Martial may suggest that we browse his books (10.1), but it is clear that in some respects they are as constructed as any other books of Latin poetry. Opening sequences with programmatic and dedicatory material are the most obvious evidence of this, but there are also closural poems or sequences; some poems explicitly comment on the preceding, and parts of books may be distinguished from other parts as more or less suitable for, say, female readers. When we focus in more closely, it is the heterogeneity of the material which is most apparent and variatio seems to be the main principle of arrangement. A typical sequence (6.12-18), which I will examine in chapter 4, interweaves three invective squibs (6.12, 6.14, 6.17); two panegyrical epigrams, of which one is high imperial panegyric (6.13), the other a touching consolation (6.18); an epideictic epigram on an extraordinary occurrence (6.15); and a Priapic poem (6.16). However, as we shall see, there is plenty to suggest that Martial is interested in making witty connections between consecutive poems, different though they may be in subject matter, tone, or genre. His penchant for playing on names in consecutive poems is but one piece of evidence for this. It should not be surprising, given that individual epigrams manipulate puns, zeugma, antithesis, and double entendre to put things wittily together, that consecutive epigrams should be related by the same principles. In the course of this book I will produce many examples of this kind of relation and I hope to show that these juxtapositions allow Martial to apply an analytic wit to the structures of his society. For the moment, though, I want to focus more broadly on the environment of Martial's books, where heterogeneous poems confront each other without being explicitly related.
The most useful term we can enlist for the formal principle of a sequence of short but highly closed poems is juxtaposition, a term that suggests both closeness and separation. The combination of closeness and separation is not only characteristic of the epigrammatic sequence, it is also a feature of urban environments, and one that decisively affects the urbanite's experience. In Martial's Rome, orienting oneself was a matter of knowing what was next to what, as the frequency of the word vicinus, particularly in the urban itineraries, attests. But a single neighborhood might bring together a very varied collection of people. When "the whole neighborhood" greets the addressee of 12.59 it includes a weaver, a fuller, a cobbler, an unshaven man, a man with a limp, another with a bleary eye, a fellator, and a cunnilinctor, all of them bearing down on the unfortunate man with a kiss. I will take up this poem, in connection with Martial's Catullus, in chapter 6, where I will argue that Martial urbanizes his urbane predecessor. Martial's city is not the locus of wit and sophistication that it was for Catullus, but rather a place of jostling variety. The city compresses what is heterogeneous into a close proximity, but it can also isolate from each other elements that are spatially close. Martial complains that, though his neighbor Novius lives so close that they can touch each other from their windows, he might be as far away as Terentianus, posted in Egypt, for all that the poet sees or hears of him (1.86). "There is nobody in the whole city so near and yet so far," he remarks (nec urbe tota / quisquam est tam prope tam proculque nobis, 1.86.9-10) In the city, people rub up against each other and at the same time are insulated from each other; they want to see each other more or wish they could avoid each other better; they penetrate each others' secrets or they try to disguise what proximity reveals. These paradoxes and tensions of urban experience, as chronicled by Martial, are the worldly counterpart to the juxtapository environment of his books.
Juxtaposition is what we might call the zero degree of authorship; maintaining an attitude of deadpan, it is always deniable. For a reader to say that x and y are juxtaposed is not necessarily to imply an intention, either about the juxtaposition itself or about what is to be made of it. While we may be sure that Martial sometimes wants consecutive poems to communicate, we often cannot tell whether in a given case we are seeing things; perhaps we are exercising our own wit rather than discovering Martial's, or perhaps the random juggling of a finite number of themes and types of jokes will inevitably produce particular juxtapositions. The poem that follows Martial's complaint about Novius (1.87), for instance, mocks Fescennia for attempting, in vain, to disguise the smell of booze with perfumed pastilles. For Fescennia, there is nothing paradoxical about proximity and no disguising what it reveals. The juxtaposition of these two poems, if we choose to let them confront each other, invites us to link the phenomenon of urban proximity with the proximities thrown up by the work itself. But, more broadly, we might say that the theme "city business prevents friends from being together" and the theme "x tries to keep his/her dirty little secret but in vain" were destined to meet eventually, and here a random throw of the dice brings it about. Interpretive uncertainty of this kind is intrinsic to the world of Martial's books and part of the experience of finding our way around them; it is, in other words, intrinsic to a juxtapository environment. So the aspect of the individual epigram that catalogues, defines, and fixes, making the epigram a self-interpreting form, contrasts with the deadpan of the epigram book's juxtapositions, in which the reader's decision to relate is not authorized, and the nature of the connection may be an optical illusion or an operation of chance.
The interpretive uncertainty of Martial's juxtapositions is particularly interesting for us, given that it is a large part of contemporary urban experience that we must choose whether to notice (or accustom ourselves not to notice) the juxtapositions that the urban environment casts in our face. Extremes of wealth and poverty, durability and disposability, meaning and meaninglessness, continually confront us with the question of what, if anything, we are going to make of their juxtaposition. We may fail to notice; we may notice but choose to ignore; we may smile wryly; or we may seek an underlying structural rationale. This is very much the range of options with which we are presented in Martial's books. Juxtaposition is a significant urban feature of Martial's urban poetry, presenting the reader with an environment whose very interpretability is open to question and to choice.
In a more literary form, juxtaposition features in our own daily lives through the newspaper, that exemplary modern aesthetic form. One of its most astute historians speaks of the paradoxical effect of the newspaper's random juxtaposition of miscellaneous items, which "simultaneously confronted and studiously ignored each other." This might be an apt description of the impression given by Martial's books. If newspapers, as Richard Terdiman argues, are "the first culturally influential anti-organicist mode of discursive construction," then Martial's books of epigrams are part of the prehistory of this antiorganicist mode. Terdiman might have added that in the spirit of this antiorganicist form we celebrate the piquant juxtaposition as an objet trouvé of modern life: newspapers and magazines publish examples found by their readers, and there is a whole genre of photography that consists in recording ironic, poignant, or comic juxtapositions (billboards and the life that surrounds them are one of its most common forms); we pride ourselves on the wit that notices. I will be arguing that juxtaposition plays a central role in Martial's aesthetic, and that here we find in Martial a kindred spirit. But this is not the only aspect of Martial's "world" that has relevance for our own, and I will be pointing to such connections from time to time throughout this book.
PERSONA, WIT, AND WORLD
Terdiman's observations on the newspaper refer to nineteenth-century Paris, which gave us that distinctive type of modern urbanity, the flâneur (stroller). Flânerie is an activity closely related to the newspaper, which has been described by Vanessa Schwartz as "a printed digest of the flâneur's roving eye." She observes that "the flâneur is not so much a person as flânerie is a positionality of power-one through which the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time." If the modern newspaper reflects a certain kind of urban persona (the flâneur) then we might by analogy ask what is the persona of Martial's epigram book, for the juxtapository epigrammatic sequence has a subjective and an objective side: it is both an environment in which the reader must orient himself and at the same time the characteristic form in which the book's persona engages with his world. To speak of an epigrammatic persona might seem paradoxical since, on the face of it, the epigram would appear to be a poetic genre that can dispense with persona; the concision, closure, and definitiveness of the form give it an impersonal air, and the tendency of the humorous epigram toward the quip lends it the anonymity of the joke. So, what kind of person writes a book of epigrams? Martial himself appeals to Catullus as his model, and in doing so places himself in the tradition of Latin first-person trivial poetry, in which persona plays an important role. Writing books of first-person epigrams, Martial inevitably plays with persona. Of course, this persona is far removed from that of the urbane, aristocratic Catullus, standing at the center of his circle of literary sophisticates. Martial's is a much bigger world, and his position in it is more precarious: as a professional epigrammatist his persona must be tinged with the character of the client Greekling. At the broadest level of the persona of the form, we might say that if world is what confronts you, what you must deal with and master, then the epigrammatist grasps and manages his world as a series of encounters or opportunities (dicing again). In the epigrammatic sequence the world has been broken down to be rendered manageable, and this is the attitude projected by the form itself, the equivalent of the flâneur's roving eye for the newspaper.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MARTIAL by William Fitzgerald Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
1 Martial and the World of the Epigram
Excursus Epigram at Rome
2 Strategies of the Spectacle
3 What is a Book of Epigrams? (Martial's Book 1)
4 Juxtaposition: The Attraction of Opposites
5 The Society of the Book
6 Banalization and Redemption: Martial's Catullus and Ovid; Burmeister's Martial
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index