INTRODUCTION

Epigram is and was regarded as well down the rankings in the literary hierarchy, and was so regarded by Martial himself: in one of the final pieces of his final book he runs down the literary scale, from epic and tragedy via lyric to satire and elegy, and asks quid minus esse potest?, ‘What can be lower?’; the answer of course is epigram (12.94.9). It is low literature and as such one might expect its linguistic register to be weighted towards the colloquial, as opposed to the literary, end of the spectrum.

Many epigrams, especially those of a satiric or scoptic nature, with which I will be chiefly concerned in this paper, do indeed have evident colloquial characteristics in that they are either framed as dialogues in direct speech, or as one-sided conversations between the author and an addressee (who can be real or fictional, named or not, or simply Martial's public addressed as reader or listener). Hominem pagina nostra sapit ‘my pages smack of mankind’, says Martial (10.4.10), and his poems often describe the situations, interactions and general paraphernalia of contemporary everyday life in vivid and immediate settings. This suggests that the language he uses will be in accord, and will be colloquial in the sense that it is what would have been generally and widely heard in Martial's first-century Latin-speaking world.