Elizabeth L. Long, Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature

Thesis

Martial features women as his subjects in roughly twenty-five percent of his epigrams .I Just as his other epigrams explore a wide range of subjects and themes, these poems differ in the ways that they use women. Some are merely crude jests2; others explore mythological or historical subjects3; still others, such as l 0.35 and 1 0.38, written about Sulpicia the satirist, are encomiastic. In addition, some of the poems about women can be read as programmatic statements about Martial’s and others’ poetry. Martial employs various programmatic devices to explain his epigrams. Although these types of poems occur throughout the Epigrams, they are concentrated in Books 1, 8, 10, and 11 and include both written women such as Martial’s literary mistress Thalia and allusion to the mistresses of previous poets, especially Catullus’ Lesbia. Martial’s awareness of his poetic tradition suggests that he is more than merely a second-rate poer4: he has a conscious programmatic goal of returning the Latin poetic cycle to its starting point, to the neoteric poems of Catullus. In my discussion of how Martial provides a significant contribution to what has become a much-debated topic, i.e., the scripta puella ‘s programmatic role, I will first summarize recent scholarship on the elegists which points towards a programmatic interpretation of women, and then provide my own analysis of specific poems in Martial’s Epigrams which, through a demonstrable relationship of diction and subject matter to Catullan poetry, further support a general programmatic interpretation of the mistress in Latin poetry.

Methodology

My paper was divided into three sections. The first summarized recent research on programmatic women in the Augustan elegists. The second established an essential programmatic connection between Martial and his neoteric predecessor Catullus. The third analyzed specific epigrams with respect to their programmatic treatment of women. A programmatic poem is one in which the poet discusses his literary goals. In identifying poems for analysis, I concentrated on those which both displayed programmatic elements such as diction or allusion to the Augustan elegists and featured women as subjects.

Results

In the Catullan comparison section, I focused on the Passer and Basia poems, in which Martial alludes to two of Catullus’ more famous epigrams (2-3 and 5). Martial’s treatment of these poems strongly suggests that both passer and basia were programmatic terms. Further explorations of the use of obscenity in Catullus and Martial support a programmatic interpretation of the sexual act as a metaphor for poetic creation. In my analysis of Martial’s poems, I especially concentrated on Martial’s elegiac mistress Thalia, who is clearly a “written woman” rather than a real one. The name Thalia itself refers to the comic muse-thus, Thalia is both Martial’s written mistress and his literary muse.

Not all of Martial’s poems about woman are programmatic. Indeed, the realism which critics find so attractive in his works is characteristic of Silver Age literature. Many of Martial’s epigrams, like Catullus,’ are written as reflections of contemporary society in Rome. But the Callimachean poetics which dominate Latin poetry are as present in Martial as they are in his predecessors: Martial demonstrates his awareness of his literary tradition throughout the Epigrams. Thus, the recurring appearance in Martial of women clearly defined within a programmatic context provides valuable support for similar interpretations of mistress as metaphor in the elegists and Catullus.