The primary obscenity futuo (‘the male part in sexual intercourse with a woman’) is unsurprisingly rare in literary Latin. Apart from a single occurrence in Horace's Satires (1.2.127, in a passage evoking the adultery mime), its usage is limited to the even lower genre of scoptic epigram, as represented by Catullus, Octavian, Martial and the Priapeia, though it frequently occurs in graffiti.Footnote ¹ Adams has shown how it tends to be a neutral and even affectionate term, lacking any sense of aggression, though not of the assertion of conventional virility.Footnote ² Nevertheless, it is used almost exclusively of recreational, extramarital and/or illicit sex. This may be in part a function of the way in which its obscenity and low linguistic register (closely equivalent to its English equivalent ‘fuck’) restrict it to the low genres which tend to deal with such subject matter, but this is a potentially circular argument and, whether chicken or egg came first, the undeniable result is an association of the verb with intercourse which is not primarily or even in any way aimed at procreation. It is striking and anomalous, therefore, when Martial uses futuo, on five occasions, in contexts relating to the production (or avoidance of the production) of children. Of course, on a purely logical and biological level, the connection between futuo (specifically the penetration of the vagina by the penis,Footnote ³ carefully differentiated by Martial in particular from sexual practices involving other orifices and/or members, such as pedicatio, fellatio and cunnilingus) and the engendering of children is an obvious one. Nevertheless, the aforementioned strong associations of the verb with sex aimed at everything but procreation renders its use in this context jarring. This incongruity and clash of registers is, of course, characteristic of Martial's technique, and the obscenity gains an added spice from being applied to respectable marital relations. The jarring quality is an end in itself and accounts for itself. Yet I wish to argue that there is a further dimension to this discordant association of ‘fucking’ and ‘begetting’, based on a bilingual wordplay between futuo and its near-homonym, the Greek verb φυτεύω.Footnote ⁴ By means of this pun, Martial mischievously suggests not only that ‘fucking’ can be mentioned in the context of ‘begetting’, but also that the two are—in accordance with biology but against all decorum—identical.

Martial's extensive use of wordplay, including instances where he bases entire epigrams around them, is well known.Footnote ⁵ His exploitation of the comic potential of puns intersects with his extensive use of Greek words, names, phrases and quotations, to produce a range of bilingual puns, often on names, but also on common nouns.Footnote ⁶ Many of these wordplays are—explicitly or implicitly—‘etymological’, in accordance with the broad and unscientific conception of that term in antiquity.Footnote ⁷ The ‘real’ (i.e. considered valid by modern philology) etymology of futuo is unknown, though Adams suggests it may derive from a stem relating to ‘striking’.Footnote ⁸ It is worth noting, however, that Lewis and Short, in the etymological section of their entry on futuo, include a vague ‘supine stem from root fu-, cf. Gr. φῖτυς, φιτόω, φυτεύω’. Of course, ancient etymology, often branded folk-etymology to distinguish it from the modern, wissenschaftlich kind, demands a far lower standard of proof for its derivations, and the fact that an etymological connection between futuo and φυτεύω suggested itself to Lewis and Short provides, if nothing else, grounds for an a fortiori argument that it could have occurred to a less scientific Roman etymologist, and especially a poetic one such as Martial. Except in the case of names (by far the largest category) and other instances where etymologizing (often ancillary to aetiologizing) is explicitly or at least strongly signalled, the distinction between etymological and non-etymological wordplay is an uncertain and perhaps arbitrary one. The net effect would be very similar whether Martial were (ironically, of course) suggesting a ‘natural’ connection through etymology between futuo and φυτεύω, or were merely playing on the similarity between their meanings, which the similarity between their sounds irrationally suggests.Footnote ⁹ Either way, unlike many of his wordplays, both bi- and monolingual, which are ends in themselves, the play on futuo and φυτεύω serves more complex thematic purposes, or at the very least contributes to the wider comic aim of incongruously collapsing the distinction between recreational and procreative sex. Before exploring how the pun serves these purposes, and looking at five examples of how it does so, it is necessary to establish that the wordplay is detectable and would have been so to Martial's contemporary readers.

There are three potential objections to hearing a play on φυτεύω in any of Martial's uses of futuo. First is the familiarity with the Greek language which it presupposes in his Roman readership, but this is easily answered, even without appeal to external evidence, by the range of Greek words and clearly signalled bilingual puns which Martial expects at least some of his readers (for we need not assume a uniform level of education or apprehension among them) to recognize. Mulligan has recently presented the case eloquently, in support of his argument that a cacemphaton of σκῶρ-πέος (‘shit-dick’, i.e. pedicator) lies behind scorpios at 3.44.8, and in the interests of space I direct sceptics to his discussion.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, to offer one clear example, cited by Grewing, Martial refers to the bird ‘which owes its name to its pink feathers’ (nomenque debet quae rubentibus pinnis, 3.58.14), a technique of etymological wordplay which O'Hara terms ‘suppression’, requiring the reader to translate the Latin rubentes pinnae into Greek φοινικα̃ πτερά to produce the unstated Greek (and Latin) word for flamingo, φοινικόπτερος/phoenicopterus.Footnote ¹¹

This example leads conveniently to the second potential objection, the absence of an overt signal, often termed a marker or signpost, to alert readers to a pun, a feature particularly common in etymologizing wordplays, as with nomen … debet in 3.58.14.Footnote ¹² Martial is undeniably fond of signalling his wordplays, and numerous examples can be found in the studies listed above. Yet the signals are by no means always explicit or even overt, and subtler methods can also be employed. The temptation to see wordplay wherever there is a—perhaps random—coincidence of sound should be resisted, unless there is at least something which prompts the reader (or listener) to detect a pun. Vallat writes of the ‘semiotic activation’ of wordplays, meaning that the hidden sense of a name can be deduced from contextual information we are given about its bearer.Footnote ¹³ Context is of course important, and some emphasis on procreative (as opposed to recreational) sex must be considered a prerequisite for any play on futuo/φυτεύω, even in cases I consider marginal. All five epigrams I shall discuss satisfy this requirement. The three examples where I shall argue that the wordplay is fully developed all make a stronger—albeit still not explicit or even overt—gesture towards the pun, in two cases by juxtaposition with a significant word, in the third by a deliberate ambiguity about the verb's implied object.Footnote ¹⁴

The third objection is that, whereas the first-person singular present indicative active forms futuo and φυτεύω are very close homonyms and can easily pun on each other,Footnote ¹⁵ the forms used in the passages under discussion—such as third-person singular present and perfect indicative, and perfect infinitive—have rather more divergent morphologies: while futuit (present) and φυτεύει are not so jarringly dissimilar, neither futuit (perfect) and πεφύτευκε nor futuisse and πεφυτευκέναι bear sufficient resemblance to each other to suggest a wordplay.Footnote ¹⁶ Three related responses can be made to this objection. First, there is in general a great deal of latitude apparent in Classical wordplay, even in the pseudo-scholarly pursuit of etymologies, and a fortiori much more so in the anarchic world of the pun. One need not accept all Ahl's principles for what does not rule out wordplay, especially since those principles produce some debatable results, but many of them, such as disregard for quantity and aspiration, and the unexpected equivalence of different vowels and consonants, are evident in many more convincing examples.Footnote ¹⁷

Secondly, and more specifically, there are several other examples of bilingual wordplay, where a Latin word evokes a Greek (near-)homonym, even though its conjugation or declension causes them to diverge. Thus the famous beeches of Virgil Eclogue 1.1, which—acoustically but not semantically—correspond to Theocritean holm-oaks despite the different endings fagi and φάγοι, and Catullus' elegant little book (1.1) likewise evokes the fine-spun poetry praised by Callimachus, even though it is lepidum rather than λεπτόν. It might be argued that the small difference between nominal case endings (and not even the more substantial difference between genitive plurals at that) is rather different from the reduplication, change of stem and radically different ending which separate πεφυτευκέναι from futuisse. Yet the important factor seems to be the correspondence between the stems, or even the (rough) sound of the stems. The (general) absence of reduplication in Latin perfects facilitates this, and futuo is particularly susceptible to such plays, since its perfect stem is the same as its present. Thus every form of futuo preserves the stem futu-, and it is that which triggers the association with φυτεύω. Faced with futuisse, the reader need not make the complex conversion to πεφυτευκέναι. Rather the Latin stem evokes the Greek stem, and by the lax laws of wordplay that evocation can be generated by a form which would, by the stricter rules of grammar, look and sound totally different in Greek. Evidence for such a reading (and writing) practice, and also the third and most important response to our third objection, is to be found in (non-punning) instances, humorous or otherwise, of what Adams terms either ‘morphological borrowing’ or ‘code-switching within a word boundary’.Footnote ¹⁸ In these instances, Latin bases are given Greek endings, as with the ‘Homeric’ genitives of Ennius' Mettioeo<que> Fufetioeo or Ovid's uinoeo bonoeo, or Cicero's coinage of the pseudo-Greek verbal adjective facteon from the Latin verb facio.Footnote ¹⁹ Of course, the ‘borrowing’ of the Greek base φυτεύ- and addition of the Latin endings –isse or –i operates in the opposite direction, but the principle is the same and the mental agility required of the Roman reader no greater, perhaps even slightly less.

As I have mentioned, there are some instances where futuo is used in a context that also refers to procreation (or its avoidance), but where the association is only an impressionistic one. In Morreal's terminology, it is a ‘simple pun’, rather than a double entendre, since, in the latter, ‘both of the meanings fit into the sentence to make grammatical sense’ and ‘there is true semantic ambiguity about the sentence as a whole.’Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, it might be felt that the wordplay does not merely fall short of being fully developed in these instances, but lacks enough force to be activated at all. Such judgements tend to be subjective, and even in these cases an added layer of wit may be found in the evocation of φυτεύω. The first is 6.67, in which Caelia's preference for eunuch slaves is shown to have both a sexual and more specifically a contraceptive motivation:Footnote ²¹

The pointed antithesis in the Aufschluss paradoxically separates ‘being fucked’ from its frequent result ‘giving birth’, a separation only made possible by the equally paradoxical eunuchs, potent but sterile.Footnote ²² The paradox would be intensified by a punning evocation of φυτεύω, separating ‘begetting’ from ‘bearing’.Footnote ²³ Yet it is only an evocation, and the passive infinitive of which Caelia is the subject eliminates any ‘semantic ambiguity’, since there can be no suggestion that she wants ‘to be begotten’ rather than ‘to be fucked’. The potential for wordplay remains, perhaps facilitated by the immediately preceding Greek name Pannychus (‘Monsieur All-nighter’), but it is not as developed as in some other epigrams.

A similarly marginal case is 1.84 in which the confirmed bachelor Quirinalis, finding a way to have sons without having a wife, ‘fucks maidservants and fills his house and estate with equestrian home-grown slaves' (futuit ancillas | domumque et agros implet equitibus uernis, 3–4). The use of futuo in the context of fathering sons is loosely evocative of φυτεύω, and the way in which the whole epigram leads up to one climactic pun (pater familiae uerus est Quirinalis, ‘Quirinalis is a true paterfamilias/father of his household slaves’, 5) may render the reader more sensitive to others.Footnote ²⁴ Yet two factors further slacken the already-loose association. The extramarital and recreational nature of the sex renders futuit less jarring, more appropriate and hence less likely to suggest an added layer of meaning. For it need hardly be said that the reader is meant to understand that Quirinalis' ‘real’ and sole motive is sexual gratification, and that it is only the epigrammatist's paradoxical irony which depicts the incidental production of illegitimate children as a deliberate policy. More importantly, as with the passive infinitive futui in 6.67, so here the juxtaposed direct object ancillas more firmly binds futuit to its non-punning sense, since Quirinalis is ‘fucking’ the maids, and ‘begetting’ not them but his ‘equestrian uernae’.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, though an impressionistic association may be produced, the pun does not operate to the extent that futuo and φυτεύω can be treated as (allowing for the differences between the morphology of Greek and Latin verbs) more or less interchangeable equivalents. For this to be the case, the verb must be used intransitively, as it is in the three examples where, I argue, the wordplay is fully developed.

The first such fully developed example of the wordplay on futuo and φυτεύω which I wish to examine is the attack on plagiarism in 10.102:

It can immediately be seen that, unlike in 6.67 and 1.84, futuo is here used intransitively, or, perhaps better, absolutely, so that there is no (explicit) accusative object to reinforce the primary sense that the subject is ‘fucking’ a woman rather than ‘begetting’ a child.Footnote ²⁶ One discouragement from hearing φυτεύω behind futuo is thus removed. Positive encouragement to hear the pun is provided by the juxtaposition of futuit with pater, a positioning which is emphasized by the separation of the predicate and the subject (pater Philinus) from their copulative verb (factus … sit) by means of the almost parenthetic relative clause. As we have already seen, there is humorous incongruity even in the very use of the primary obscenity with relation to procreation, but the bilingual echo of φυτεύω increases it.

As Williams and Neger have shown, this epigram fits into a wider pattern of imagery in Martial (and elsewhere) paralleling literary and sexual activity.Footnote ²⁷ Yet the precise way in which Philinus and Gaditanus are equivalents is not immediately clear. Philinus could be assumed to be raising the children of his wife's adultery (or perhaps multiple adulteries, like Cinna's wife Marulla in 6.39), either out of stolid naïveté or to save face by concealing his cuckoldry. This would constitute a rather imperfect parallel with the plagiarist Gaditanus, who presumably appropriates other men's poems and passes them off as his own quite deliberately, rather than having them foisted upon him unwittingly or unwillingly.Footnote ²⁸ Such a mismatch is by no means impossible, and could be either the result of Martial's indifference to details which are secondary to the main point of comparison, or even part of the joke.Footnote ²⁹

However, the parallel would be more pointed, as well as more precise, if Philinus too were acting deliberately in appropriating other men's children through complaisance towards or even encouragement of their adultery with his wife.Footnote ³⁰ This would correspond particularly well with McGill's passing suggestion that Gaditanus may have relied upon a ghostwriter, rather than plagiarizing in the usual sense of claiming as his own poetry which another had published.Footnote ³¹ Such an interpretation would entail that Philinus' charade of fatherhood is designed to conceal that he is ‘not fucking’, not because his marital, sexual role has been usurped by rivals, but for some other reason which necessitates his employment of surrogate inseminators.Footnote ³² That reason could be that he indulges in a more shameful sexual act (according to Martial's hierarchy of such practices), either with his wife or with men or with other women. As we will see below in the more obvious case of 10.95 and other epigrams cited as parallels, Martial often produces a para prosdokian effect by acquitting his target of ‘fucking’, only to state or imply thereby that he or she is guilty of something worse. Against this reading is, once more, the mismatch with Gaditanus, since it is hard to imagine what the literary equivalent of pedicatio or cunnilingus (specific enough to contrast with poetic fututio) might be or how it would necessitate plagiarism. If, on the other hand, we assume that Gaditanus employs a ghostwriter (or simply plagiarizes) because he lacks literary talent, and is, in that sense, unable to write, then the closest analogy among Philinus' possible motivations would be the inability to ‘fuck’, impotence, a frequent target of Martial's ridicule.Footnote ³³

The closer the parallelism between Philinus and Gaditanus, the closer the correspondence between the actions they respectively do not perform, futuere and scribere. The act of writing partially corresponds to ‘fucking’, inasmuch as the former is the necessary precursor to the production of a poem as the latter is to the production of a child. Yet it corresponds even more closely to the act of ‘begetting’, the creation, eliding all considerations of copulation and gestation, of poem-as-child by poet-as-father, in the Ovidian image which Martial elsewhere adopts and here perverts.Footnote ³⁴ Just as one cannot produce scripta (cf. scripta Catulli, 2.71.3) unless one ‘writes’ (scribit), and cannot be a poeta unless one ‘composes’ (ποιεῖ), so the oxymoron of the ‘father’ (pater) who does not ‘father’ (φυτεύει) is even more absurd than the biological impossibility of the father who does not ‘fuck’ (futuit). Yet instead of privileging one parallelism over the other, it is perhaps preferable to see the essence of the wordplay as expressing the indivisibility of the two (or indeed three) actions. ‘Writing’ is like both ‘fucking’ and ‘begetting’ because, from a particular perspective, the latter pair come to the same thing.

This interconnectedness of ‘fucking’ and begetting, which the wordplay encapsulates so perfectly, is central to the second example, 9.41. Anticipating Monty Python's ‘Every sperm is sacred’ by two millennia, Martial's humorous condemnation of Ponticus’ preference for masturbation over vaginal penetration riffs on Ovid's similar attack on Corinna's abortion, each of which, if practised by the wrong people, threatens not merely the continuation of the human race but, more importantly, that of the Roman people.Footnote ³⁵ To illustrate the importance of ‘fucking’ to the rise of Rome, Martial gives two exempla from her early history and prehistory (9.41.5–6):

The more or less chiastic structure of line 5 is both artful and throws into relief the way in which ‘fucking’ once produced three children, in keeping with the poem's play with the theme of counting.Footnote ³⁶ However, it also throws futuit into direct juxtaposition with generaret, flanking the penthemimeral caesura, a proximity which reinforces their parallelism, or at least the way in which one naturally results in the other. This logical connection, which encapsulates the epigram's pseudo-moralizing, paradoxically obscene message that ‘fucking’ is a moral duty, is reinforced by the now-familiar wordplay.Footnote ³⁷ If ‘fucking’ (futuo) is not only inextricably linked but also homonymous (and hence speciously synonymous) with ‘begetting’ (φυτεύω, of which genero is a particularly close Latin equivalent), then—on the disingenuously ironic surface of the epigram—it has all the moral standing of respectable procreative intercourse and none of the low connotations implied by its low linguistic register. Of course, this is only irony, and ‘fucking’ is only depicted as respectable for the sake of paradox, or at most to throw into relief how much less respectable is Ponticus’ habitual masturbation.

With the third and final example, we return to the issue of children's paternity, and the use of ‘fucking’ or ‘not fucking’ as evidence of ‘begetting’ or ‘not begetting’ (10.95):

The epigram has been treated as part of Martial's adaptation of his invective motifs to fit the topical theme of Domitian's revival of the adultery laws.Footnote ³⁸ Whatever its genesis and aims, its formal economy and witty exploitation of the unstated are characteristically Martialian, and both ends are served by the bilingual wordplay. There are two obvious implications that the epigram encourages its readers to draw. The first, which (in the world of the poem) Galla's husband and lover also wish to be drawn, is that she has had at least one other lover, since her child's father, if it is neither of them, must be someone else. The second, which they presumably do not wish or intend to indicate, but which is the principal joke of the epigram, stated with disingenuous innocence by the epigrammatist, is that, since neither husband nor (even more paradoxically) adulterous lover ‘fucked’ her, they must have been engaging in some even more scandalous sexual practice such as pedicatio or cunnilingus, which they know could not have resulted in pregnancy.

The epigram thus fits into the characteristic Martialian pattern mentioned above, wherein the poet appears to acquit his addressee or subject of a sexual transgression (often, as here, adulterous vaginal penetration, or ‘fucking’), only for that very acquittal to constitute damning evidence of an act considered still more transgressive in the Roman hierarchy of acceptable sexual behaviour. The latter act is often, as here, unstated, further suggesting its unutterable depravity. There are several other examples where it is precisely ‘fucking’ that is not committed. Martial's favourite target, Zoilus, is encouraged to rejoice that he will not be at risk from Domitian's adultery laws, since he ‘doesn't fuck’, with the clear implication that he is a pathic fellator or recipient of pedicatio.Footnote ³⁹ In 12.38, Candidus has nothing to fear from the handsome youth who often clings so close to his wife. When the epigrammatist reassures the husband that the youth ‘doesn't fuck’ (non futuit, 6), this combines with the earlier description of his dandified appearance and depilated body to imply that he, like Zoilus, is an effeminate penetratee (orally and anally) rather than a virile penetrator.Footnote ⁴⁰ Less tacitly, though still obliquely, Martial debunks Chione's claim to sexual purity in 3.87. For, while the rumour that she ‘has never been fucked’ (numquam esse fututam, 1) is true, as far as it goes, his suggestion that it is her mouth rather than her cunnus that she should modestly cover when bathing—because, as is the clear implication, her os impurum is the more shameful orifice—unmasks her as a fellatrix.Footnote ⁴¹ It is just possible that the joke in 10.95 is in fact about the sexual repulsiveness of Galla, such that no one would want to ‘fuck’ or admit to having ‘fucked’ her, as with the unfortunate Saenia, who claimed that bandits ‘fucked’ her, though the bandits denied it.Footnote ⁴² Yet the necessity of understanding the baby as supposititious, the marriage as unconsummated and the lover as a fantasy involves a lack of economy foreign to Martial, so that it is certainly easier and probably funnier to imagine husband and lover doing other things, rather than nothing, to Galla.

In either scenario, the logical and consequential connection between ‘fucking’ and the birth of the baby, though biologically obvious, is rendered humorously incongruous by the use of the primary obscenity, usually associated with recreational and illicit sex, in jarring juxtaposition to the idea of procreation. The humour is further enhanced by the bilingual wordplay. As in 10.102 and 9.41, the form of futuo does not have an explicit direct object. Of course, an implicit te can easily be supplied from the repeated tibi and from the vocative Galla of line 1, so that ‘they say that they didn't fuck you’ is undeniably the primary sense. However, against this stand the emphatic positioning of infantem as the epigram's first word, the fact that infantem is already in the accusative, and that their non-paternity of the baby is the explicit message given by the men's refusal to acknowledge it, with the deduction (puto) about their sexual practices as a gloss by the epigrammatist. There is enough encouragement, then, for the reader on one level to take futuisse as if it were a naturalized perfect infinitive of φυτεύω, and that the husband and adulterer ‘say that they didn't beget it’. Of course, the joke—or part of it—is that Martial and his prurient readers know that this comes to the same thing: the logic of the husband and the lover is that ‘they didn't fuck Galla so they didn't beget the baby’, while for the local gossips the chain of reasoning runs in reverse, ‘they didn't beget the baby so they didn't fuck Galla’. The interrelation of the two acts is emblematized by the wordplay on futuo/φυτεύω, and the fact that neither man performed either act points incontrovertibly at their even greater sexual depravity.

To conclude, the incongruity between the primary obscenity futuo, with its connotations of recreational sex, and the respectable act of begetting children is on several occasions intensified by a bilingual wordplay with the verb's near homonym, φυτεύω. The pun is most effectively deployed where it has no expressed object to disambiguate between ‘fucking’ a woman and ‘begetting’ a child. As with the best wordplays, it is not merely a piece of verbal cleverness but, by embodying both concepts in one sound, it also constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of the simultaneous contrast and identity between ‘fucking’ and ‘begetting’.Footnote ⁴³