by Martial
Translations and notes copyright © 1972 by James Michie
Preface copyright © 1972 by Peter Howell
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Shadi Bartsch
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Martial.
[Epigrammata. English & Latin. Selections]
Epigrams / Martial; selected and translated by James Michie.—2002 Modern
Library pbk. ed. / introduction by Shadi Bartsch.
p. cm.—(The Modern Library classics)
Includes index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80313-9
1. Epigrams, Latin—Translations into English. I. Michie, James. II. Title.
III. Series.
PA6502 .M45 2002
878′.0102—dc21
2002022343
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
MARTIAL
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born in the town of Bilbilis in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis around 40 A.D. Little is known about his early life except that his parents gave him an excellent literary education and he was very fond of the countryside of his childhood, a subject he visited frequently throughout his writings.
At the age of twenty-four, Martial left Spain for Rome in order to continue his education. Although from a fairly modest background, his family was not entirely without connections in the capital, and he found himself immediately supported by the poet Lucan and the philosopher Seneca, fellow Spaniards who immediately introduced him into the society of wealthy patrons in the circle of the political leader Gaius Calpernius Piso. The court of the emperor Nero, though plagued with political intrigue and violence, was nonetheless welcoming to writers, whose presence fed the emperor’s misconception of himself as a poet presiding over a circle of fellow artists. Lucan, Seneca, and the playwright Petronius all held sway over Nero, especially early in his principate, and Nero, before his descent into tyranny, considered them among his closest friends and advisors. Martial’s fortunes suffered when, a year after his arrival, the plot led by Piso to assassinate the emperor was discovered and the conspirators, including Lucan and Seneca, were killed. Despite the loss of his earliest and most influential supporters, Martial had already gained at least minor notoriety and had established the patronage of a variety of wealthy Romans, exchanging privately circulated occasional verses, poems composed for events such as dinner parties or festivals, in return for gifts and social advancement.
The early years of Martial’s career were difficult ones and he endured constant financial hardship, complaining bitterly throughout his later epigrams of the stinginess of his patrons. Despite his poverty he was well acquainted with the Roman aristocracy, and he counted among his friends the most important writers of his time, including Pliny, Frontinus, Juvenal, and Quintilian.
By 80 A.D. his reputation was well enough established that he was asked to write—possibly by the new emperor, Titus, himself—the first of his extant works, a series of epigrams celebrating the games dedicated by Titus to the opening of the newly constructed Colosseum, a minor and incomplete collection now known as the Liber Spectaculorum. Martial produced two other minor works within the following five years, the Xenia and the Apophoreta (now conventionally referred to as Books XIII and XIV of his Epigrams), both of which are collections of short sayings intended to accompany gifts given to parting houseguests.
It was in 86 A.D. that Martial produced the first of the works for which he was to be remembered, his twelve books of collected epigrams. Although the art form had its roots in ancient Greek funerary inscriptions, the epigrams written by Martial were more directly influenced by later Hellenistic poets who treated more commonplace subjects. Martial followed their example by applying the form to everything he observed, criticizing and praising all aspects of Rome in a technique that he perfected: he would begin with an elegantly composed description and follow it with a witty and unexpected conclusion, the so-called sting in the tail. Although his epigrams were not as refined in their subject matter as those of his predecessors, his impeccable style and wit make them the greatest examples of the form ever composed. In his corpus of nearly twelve hundred epigrams, Martial treats every conceivable subject in Roman life, and, as a collection, they are absolutely invaluable as a source of information on the lifestyle of aristocratic Roman society. At the height of his career, Martial’s epigrams were read throughout the Roman empire, and each new book was eagerly awaited by a wide audience.
He continued to publish regularly for the next decade and won the favor of the most important men in Rome, including the emperor Domitian, whom he flattered unabashedly, for which he was favored with several distinctions, including an honorary military tribunate that conferred upon him equestrian status. Although Martial himself was quick to point out that he earned greater social than financial rewards, it was at this time that he received a modest house within Rome and a small villa in the country just north of Rome.
In 96 A.D. Domitian, as a result of dictatorial policy and tyrannical rule, was assassinated, and Martial found that his constant flattery of the reviled emperor put an awkward strain on his position under the new emperor, Nerva. Additionally, Martial’s growing weariness of the superficiality of Roman life and a homesickness for Spain led him, in 100 A.D., to leave Rome on a voyage funded by his friend Pliny. He retired to an estate in Bilbilis that had been donated by a local patron and there published his last book of epigrams, a collection that, despite his joy at returning home, betrayed a sense of longing for the urban life he had left behind at the capital. Martial never returned to Rome and his death can be dated no later than 104 A.D.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A Note on Using this eBook
INTRODUCTION by Shadi Bartsch
Dedication
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
PREFACE by Peter Howell
EPIGRAMS - ENGLISH
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
BOOK EIGHT
BOOK NINE
BOOK TEN
BOOK ELEVEN
BOOK TWELVE
EPIGRAMS - LATIN
LIBER I
LIBER II
LIBER III
LIBER IV
LIBER V
LIBER VI
LIBER VII
LIBER VIII
LIBER IX
LIBER X
LIBER XI
LIBER XII
NOTES
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
A Note on Using this eBook
In this eBook edition of Epigrams, you can switch between the English translation and the original Latin text. Throughout the eBook you will see hyperlinks embedded in the numerals before each poem that allow you to click back and forth between the two versions while still holding your place.
INTRODUCTION
Shadi Bartsch
When Marcus Valerius Martialis imagined an ordinary Roman picking up a volume of his Epigrams, the response our poet anticipated from his reader was anything but ordinary: “He blushes, turns pale, reels, yawns, curses.” It is fortunate for Martial that this was all to the good—“That’s what I’m after. Bravo, verses!” (VI 60.3–4, in James Michie�
��s translation), since readers throughout the centuries have been all too ready to respond with outrage as well as a chortle to these sometimes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising verses. Martial’s Epigrams have been praised for their “slice of life” quality as well as condemned for their misogyny, obscenity, and flattery, the last mostly directed at those equipped to help the poet along with a well-timed handout or two, or at the decidedly unstable Emperor Domitian.
Readerly appraisals of this oeuvre, which have fluctuated through the centuries, reached a nadir of disapproval in the nineteenth century, when invocations of nausea can be found several times as a reaction to Martial’s books. The best-known example would have to be Lord Macaulay’s famous comments:
I have now gone through the first seven books of Martial, and have learned about 360 of the best lines. His merit seems to me to lie, not in wit, but in the rapid succession of vivid images. I wish he were less nauseous.… Besides his indecency, his servility and mendicancy disgust me.1
Yet one wonders if such a response would have troubled Martial, whose own moments of fawning over potential patrons are matched by a keen eye that targets, and lambastes, this trait in others, and who seems well aware of hypocrisy as a founding principle of human nature. Even we readers are to be charged with it: the more proper among us will blush and put our Martial down—in company—yet, absent a viewer, we pick it up again (XI 16.9–10). Indeed, part of the amusement this poetic persona generates is precisely due to his insouciance about what we—or his original readers—might think of his ethics. True, he admits, he cadges for dinner invitations—but so do the very patrons he cadges from:
I angle for your dinner invitations (oh, the shame
Of doing it, but I do it!). You fish elsewhere. We’re the same.
(II 18.1–2, trans. Michie)
And as he mocks others for fawning on the wealthy elderly, he includes a few lines on his own practice of buttering up a tottering rich man or two:
Three times a month you change your will
And hopefully, with each codicil,
I send you cakes flavoured with honey
Of Hybla. Now that I’ve no money,
Have pity! Stop will-tinkering,
Charinus, or else do the thing.…
(V 39.1–5, trans. Michie)
Nor was our poet ever particularly concerned with the opinions of learned critics anyhow, as he points out in Epigram X 59.5–6:
I don’t need a reader who plays the gourmet;
I want one who fills his belly on bread.2
Whatever the critical communis opinio, Martial was confident of his literary survival: his other notable prediction was for the longevity of this same verse, this farrago in which “the vices are criticized but individuals spared” (X 33.10; many of Martial’s poetic addressees are fictitious). That Martial would by his writing escape Lethe’s stream and survive his own death is the claim of Epigram X 2, and here too the poet seems to anticipate his own fortunes correctly—despite the prediction of his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who was far less sanguine about Martial’s future. In a rather patronizing obituary letter (Epistle III 21), the senator, an influential figure in the new regime of the emperor Trajan, notes the passing away of the old epigrammatist with some regret:
I hear that Valerius Marital has passed away, and it makes me sad. He was a talented fellow, smart, sharp; there was much wit and bite in his writing, and no less candor. I had presented him with some traveling-money when he left Rome; I gave this out of friendship, but also in return for the little poem he composed about me.… He bestowed on me the very most he could, and he would have bestowed more, had he been able. Still, what more is there to give than glory and praise and eternity? It’s true that what he wrote will not be eternal, at least I don’t think so; still, he wrote them as if they would be.
Pliny, then, doubted that there would be a good return on his investment, but he was wrong. Indeed, despite Pliny’s prediction and Macaulay’s queasiness, critical volumes on Martial and new renditions of his poetry have seen something of a renaissance in the past half-century. J. P. Sullivan’s several volumes, as well as a number of edited collections and specific attention by talented contemporary poets such as Peter Porter, Peter Whigham, Richard O’Connell, and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, have brought Martial back to the public and scholarly eye, while the work of another poet-translator—James Michie’s 1972 translation of selected epigrams—goes into its second edition with this publication.
Why this recent turnabout in the epigrammatist’s fortunes? Certainly Martial’s material is as witty, dirty, small-scale, and satiric, as obsessed with sexuality, venality, greed, and gastronomy, as it ever was; nor do his admittedly nasty descriptions of women and their sexual equipment become any prettier with age (many of the most graphic are not in this selection). Nor has his poet persona been blunted by the passage of years, though it is true that English and American literary culture is less moralizing now than it was in the nineteenth century. The man is still consumed with wheedling better handouts from his patrons; enjoying a quick clinch with a pinkcheeked sweet young thing, male or female; mocking other people who try to trade in flattery for money; telling amusing stories about the public baths—especially since they grant him opportunities to comment on the physiology and endowment of the bathers; and in general making fun of his fellow Romans and their numerous foibles.
Martial’s Roman sexuality clashes, of course, with attitudes toward sexuality in the modern West as well as in the nineteenth century. Some things, however, have changed in the past several hundred years, and even since the first edition of Michie’s translation in 1972. One shift in attitudes toward such poetry, at least in the academy, has arisen from a loosening of the restrictive force of generic boundaries within scholarship: one side effect of literary theories such as structuralism, deconstruction, and new historicism has been a greater attention to formerly neglected texts and a greater sensitivity to what such “lowbrow” genres can tell us directly or indirectly about a culture. To write on Martial now—even on his content rather than the textual tradition of his manuscripts—is legitimate scholarship. Another change has been the development of a different scholarly understanding of the role of aggression and sexuality in Roman poetry, a culture in which the axis of sexual difference lay not so much along the distinction of male from female as along the distinction of “phallic,” penetrative sexuality from “passive,” penetrated forms of sexual activity—whether men or women were the exemplars of the latter. When Martial’s hyperaggressively masculine persona in the Epigrams participates in attacks on passive homosexuals, ugly or pushy women, cuckolded men, and henpecked husbands, the poet’s persona is “voicing and then exaggerating the hostilities of the figure perceived as normal, the middle-aged male citizen” (Richlin, 66), rather than taking a stance outside the accepted public norms of the male elite. This may be an alien voice to us, but we have come to realize that our own sexual norms and boundaries may be just as arbitrary as the Romans’ seem to us.
The existence of Catullus’s scabrous Ode 16 also reminds us of this Roman poet’s famous dictum that the poetic persona, the figure who emerges from the author’s verse, is and must be kept distinct from that author. Catullus, who was one of Martial’s literary predecessors in the art of epigram and of sexual invective, notoriously drove his point home by framing it with graphic and violent threats to sexually assault readers who made any such mistake—thus simultaneously affirming and undermining what he has to say about passing judgment on the author based on his verse. But even if this joke is part of the point o
f his witty poem, the sentiment is echoed seriously by later writers of verse such as the Younger Pliny, and modern readers should take it seriously as well: the persona of the epigrammatic poet does not afford us a reliable mirror of the author.
Amid all these changes, Martial’s poetry itself, of course, has remained the same, as has this poet’s special forte—the ability to turn a line with such precision that an epigram’s conclusion leaves us smiling with delight at such pithy wit. Martial was praised for this skill in his own day; what Pliny attributed to Martial—ingenium, talent—consisted by his own definition of sal and fel, salt and bile, or less literally wit and bite, and these were the very qualities Martial himself saw as characteristic of good epigrammatic writing (Epigram VII 25). They represented his ability not only to pen truly cutting verse but also to manipulate so well the element of aprosdoketon—the surprise ending, the unexpected point. In his writing, this skill is bolstered by wordplay, double entendres, variations in meter (mostly elegiac couplets, but also hendecasyllabics and scazons), greater metrical liberties than his predecessors took, a wealth of vivid imagery, and, of course, the liveliness of a form that is often brief and frequently turns from one addressee to another.
There are several ways to get across these effects in English, although no way to get across all of them and remain at all faithful to the original Latin. James Michie’s translations nicely negotiate between the Scylla of literal renditions and the Charybdis of too free a hand; his inclusion of end rhymes, his careful ear for the wordplay and puns that characterize the original Latin, and his often brilliant renditions of the epigrammatic points or paradoxes with which Martial liked to end his lines render these translations as bright and witty as the originals. A good example occurs early in the collection, as Martial reflects on the advantage of marrying a woman in poor health—and with money to will away (Epigram I 10):
Gemellus wants to marry Maronilla: