Ilaria Marchesi’s captivating monograph investigates Martial’s cultural definition of ‘woman’ by combining material and symbolic aspects of the language. In the Epigrams, women are charged as ‘semiotic objects’ (11); they produce meaning through their (expected) social and cultural function and through their bodies and engagement with material objects. M.’s aim is to show that women are, in fact, resisting and confusing semiotic objects, insofar as they convey contradictory and changeable meanings. Martial’s women thus reflect structural and semantic contradictions of Roman society. The book is divided into two parts: in the first half, M. takes a more theoretical and comparative approach to explore Martial’s treatment of women as material and bodily inscribed signs; the second half proceeds from the text of individual epigrams to provide the readers with a typology of deviant behaviours that Martial attributes to women as carriers of semantic connotations.
Ch. 1 starts by drawing on Mercury’s definition of women in Aeneid 4 as varium et mutabile (‘a fickle and changeful thing’, Aen. 4.569), which exemplifies that volatility is central to the performance of a Roman woman’s social role. As ‘vehicles for the transfer of property from one generation to the next’ (22), Roman women were expected to carry the legacy of their family of origin, as well as adjust to and perpetuate the line of their new family. After contextualising paternity and transmission values through a survey of early imperial authors (mostly Pliny and Tacitus), the chapter focuses on selected examples from Martial’s Epigrams, including Calpurnia (Mart. 6.38). Martial’s female figures embody an intrinsic paradox in Romans’ construction of women as signs of their men, since they oscillate between their symbolic status as the bearers of the imprint of their father and that of their husband.
In ch. 2, M. mostly focuses on Book 11 of the Epigrams, where Martial engages with women’s bodily identity, establishing them as social subjects capable of signifying with their bodies (‘perfect signs’, 61). Among other examples, the chapter examines Epigram 11.99, where Martial advises Lesbia on how to ‘correct’ her excessive corporeality: while addressing concrete bodily features, Martial’s use of the verb emendare refers to the grammatical level. In so doing, Martial adopts the tool of grammatical censorship, thus merging the physical with the semantic and poetic roles with socio-political duties. Building upon Froma Zeitlin’s work (Playing the Other, Chicago 1995), ch. 3 examines women as ‘the Other’, namely, as objects of representation of the male author, and of hegemonic and male-oriented practices. The chapter focuses on two categories of women: women who appear subservient or docile signifiers of their male counterparts, and women who resist, dominate or control the signs socially imposed onto them. While being seemingly domesticated to the values and roles of Roman society, the former category is still charged with a subversive and resisting potential. The latter group features women such as Bassa, the prototype of female homoeroticism (Mart. 1.90) and Naevia, who dominates attitudes and behaviours of her male counterpart, Rufus. By playing shifting and contradictory roles, women not only convey social instability but also reshape the grammar of social relations and identities.
The following three chapters examine individual instances within Martial’s epigrammatic corpus, where women transgress semiotic structures of Roman society in three ways: resisting self-erasure (ch. 4), dominating the semiotic field (ch. 5) and reshaping cultural and social structures through semiotic appropriation (ch. 6). In the resisting category, we find the remarkable example of Labulla (Epigram 4.9). As M. claims, Labulla opposes both her marital identity by leaving her husband for another man and her status as Sotas’ daughter by becoming asotos (‘incurable’, both physically and morally). In the second category, Paula (Epigrams 8.12, 9.10, 11.7) shows her social superiority to her husband, Priscus, through her wealthier status; that makes her dominant at the semantic level, too. The verb nubere normally indicates a woman marrying a man but is attributed to the male component of the couple; in the expression femina virque, the word order also suggests the woman’s control (Epigram 8.12). The third category concerns female figures who can alter and control the words, characteristics and signs that define them. For instance, Philaenis (7.67; 7.70) and Fabulla (8.79) perform masculine sexual acts; Gellia, Galla, Maronilla and Naevia repurpose their tokens, like crying and mourning, manipulating the meanings of their actions.
The conclusion shifts the focus to Pliny’s Panegyricus, demonstrating how it displays some anxieties about having women as vehicles of imperial succession. The epilogue introduces further trajectories of enquiry, including patronage and inheritance, as well as food and clothing, and how those challenge the consistency of material and symbolic structures of Roman society.
Even in such a well-written and well-argued monograph as this, a few things could have been done differently: for instance, it might have been beneficial to clarify key definitions (e.g. ‘semiotic object/s’) at the very start to facilitate a diverse readership, not necessarily familiar with semiotic jargon; and, relatedly, to engage with and explain relevant theories in the main body of the text, instead of relegating that discussion to the footnotes (e.g. 22 n. 2) or leaving it to the reader to identify theoretical and methodological underpinnings. Finally, a deeper discussion of Martial’s socio-political and legal context — which is touched upon but remains underdeveloped — might have strengthened M.’s arguments regarding Martial’s role as censor, and how that problematically reframes Roman social and cultural structures.
These minor observations do not do much harm to M.’s compelling and original study, which contributes significantly to our understanding of Martial’s poetry.
