Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Martial: The World of the EpigramSven LorenzWilliam Fitzgerald. Martial: The World of the Epigram. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. x + 258 pp.At the beginning of The World of the Epigram, Fitzgerald asks, “How does one read an epigrammatist?” (1). It is the question of how to come to terms with “the paradox of a book that is at the same time a random collection of self-contained units” (4). At the end, Fitzgerald comes to the conclusion that the question “might be answered quite simply by replying that one can’t” (198).The heterogeneity of Martial’s Book of Epigrams makes it hard for us to get a grip on their respective character. Fitzgerald sees this as an apt representation of the world that Martial lives in. Like the Epigrammaton libri, everyday life in the city of Rome comprises numerous little bits and pieces, which may even be contradictory, and yet form a coherent whole: “The paradoxes and tensions of urban experience, as chronicled by Martial, are the worldly counterpart to the juxtapository environment of his books” (5). The concept of “juxtaposition” is crucial to Fitzgerald’s argument. For him, it is one of the main structural principles in Martial’s books.Having come up with a reading of the Epigrammaton libri as a kaleidoscopic representation of urban life myself (Erotik und Panegyrik: Martials epigrammatische Kaiser [Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002], 15–16), I certainly agree with Fitzgerald’s much more complex approach to read the books of epigrams as heterogeneous entities that are determined by “the combination of closeness and separation” (5). This, in turn, is also “a feature of urban environments, and one that decisively affects the urbanite’s experience” (5). It is especially convincing when Fitzgerald compares the reception of Martial’s books with “the paradoxical effect of the newspaper’s random juxtaposition of miscellaneous items” (7). And this reminds us of the fact that the seeming disorder of the books of epigrams may well be carefully planned, unlike the heterogeneity presented on modern newsprint.One of the most complex aspects of Martial’s careful design is the presentation of his poetic persona. The speaker of the epigrams is a contradictory character whose opinions may vary according to different situations. This, of course, is rather fitting for an author of such a diverse collection of poems. Fitzgerald reads the versatility of Martial’s poetic “I” as typical of a sophisticated character: “The succession of short, pointed, and various epigrams... creates the fiction of a man who can successfully negotiate the adversarial and competitive world of the city” (11–12). It is true that Martial’s persona plays a clever game of self-deprecation and the presentation of his own, lowly, genre as the top of the genre hierarchy (cf. David Banta, “Literary Apology and Literary Genre in Martial,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1998, one of the very few relevant titles that are missing from Fitzgerald’s extensive bibliography). And yet, the speaker’s tendency to contradict himself, as well as the various instances when he suffers sexual frustration or when other failures turn him into the butt of his own jokes, make me doubt whether he is really presented as a successful person. I still [End Page 439] prefer to see him as a comic figure that is not much better than the people who are attacked in many of Martial’s so-called “satiric” epigrams. Fitzgerald himself mentions the contradictory nature of the speaker and concedes that “in some respects he exemplifies the very qualities he mocks” (13).A case in point are the numerous allusions to Ovid’s exile poetry, which usually express the notion of distance: in Martial’s case, the distance between him and his powerful contemporaries or, in Books 3 and 12, the physical distance between him and the city of Rome. Fitzgerald is right to point out that “Martial’s condition is more fortunate” than Ovid’s. According to his interpretation (cf. R. A. Pitcher, in Toto notus in orbe: Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation, ed. Farouk Grewing [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998], 61–62), Martial describes “a different kind of distance, one...