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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2010
This paper allows Ovid to shape a reading of Martial, and Martial to shape a reading of Ovid. It proceeds through close readings of some 40 epigrams, and is organized into three large sections respectively addressing receptions in Martial of Ovid's poetry of elegiac love (I), of exile (II), and of myth (III). The final section offers sustained discussion of Martial's early Apophoreta (Book 14) and Liber Spectaculorum. Issues addressed include genre, intertextuality, sexual vocabulary and euphemism, exile as a figure for status anxiety, the metapoetics of book production, ecphrastic movement between art and epigrammatic text, and the aesthetics of myth in the Roman arena.
This paper has had a long performance history, in the course of which many details have been sharpened by the responses of generous audiences on both side of the Atlantic. Early portions were presented at a 2002 conference on Ovid in Trinity College Dublin (organized by Damien Nelis), a 2002 conference on the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris in Manchester (organized by Roy Gibson, Steve Green, and Alison Sharrock), a 2003 conference on Flavian poetry in Groningen (organized by Ruurd Nauta, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Hans Smolenaars), and a 2003 joint meeting in Calgary of the Classical Associations of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian West. During a period of research in 2003–4 made possible by a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society and by a Lockwood Professorship of the Humanities at my own institution, fuller versions were tested at Stanford, the University of British Columbia, Princeton, Virginia (The Stocker Lecture), and in the literature seminar of the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. The last phase in the paper's grand tour came while I was teaching at the UW Rome Center in Spring 2005, thanks to invitations to speak at the Universities of Rome La Sapienza, Rome Tor Vergata, Florence, and Arezzo. I am indebted to Sergio Casali for his generosity in undertaking an Italian translation (‘Il Marziale di Ovidio/l'Ovidio di Marziale’), from which the paper emerged improved at many points by his own literary critical acuity. My thanks to Dan McGlathery for suggesting as long ago as 1991 that I try bringing my Ovidian expectations to a reading of Martial; to Luke Roman for communicating to me a sense of the aesthetic range of the Epigrams; to Kathy Coleman for her kindness in showing me sections of her edition of and commentary on Liber Spectaculorum in advance of publication; and to Catherine Connors, as also to the JRS readers, for valuable advice in the final stages of revision.
* This paper has had a long performance history, in the course of which many details have been sharpened by the responses of generous audiences on both side of the Atlantic. Early portions were presented at a 2002 conference on Ovid in Trinity College Dublin (organized by Damien Nelis), a 2002 conference on the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris in Manchester (organized by Roy Gibson, Steve Green, and Alison Sharrock), a 2003 conference on Flavian poetry in Groningen (organized by Ruurd Nauta, Harm-Jan van Dam, and Hans Smolenaars), and a 2003 joint meeting in Calgary of the Classical Associations of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian West. During a period of research in 2003–4 made possible by a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society and by a Lockwood Professorship of the Humanities at my own institution, fuller versions were tested at Stanford, the University of British Columbia, Princeton, Virginia (The Stocker Lecture), and in the literature seminar of the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. The last phase in the paper's grand tour came while I was teaching at the UW Rome Center in Spring 2005, thanks to invitations to speak at the Universities of Rome La Sapienza, Rome Tor Vergata, Florence, and Arezzo. I am indebted to Sergio Casali for his generosity in undertaking an Italian translation (‘Il Marziale di Ovidio/l'Ovidio di Marziale’), from which the paper emerged improved at many points by his own literary critical acuity. My thanks to Dan McGlathery for suggesting as long ago as 1991 that I try bringing my Ovidian expectations to a reading of Martial; to Luke Roman for communicating to me a sense of the aesthetic range of the Epigrams; to Kathy Coleman for her kindness in showing me sections of her edition of and commentary on Liber Spectaculorum in advance of publication; and to Catherine Connors, as also to the JRS readers, for valuable advice in the final stages of revision.
