The prime setting for Martial's Epigrams is Rome, and the life of the city is his main subject. Traditionally, Martial has been mined as a source for aspects of daily urban life: the presumption is that his realist orientation and focus on low-life scenarios bring us closer to the sordid everyday realities of urban existence omitted in other authors. Current scholarship, however, is increasingly impatient of the use of poets as transparent windows onto quotidian reality,Footnote ¹ and tends to stress their literary motives for constructing realist scenes in a certain form. While it would be reductive to insist that Roman literature does not provide insight, in a complex way, into Roman life, more recent work rightly observes that realist writers, who offer up images of Roman social life — Martial, Pliny the Younger, Juvenal — are also likely to be creating a reality that sets up central aspects of their self-representation.Footnote ² Accepting their picture of Rome as a descriptive impression of their surroundings is tantamount to perpetuating a rhetorical emphasis that is inevitably contestable and interested.

The current trend is accordingly to reverse the determining force of urban reality over literary representation, and to make the writer into the creator of his own city: hence the dual metaphor of reading the city as text, and, in a related twist, writing the city into text.Footnote ³ Pushed too far, this approach could potentially become reductive in its own way. The best recent work equally incorporates an awareness of the ways in which the city and its patterns of social behaviour condition literary creativity. In Martial's case, it has begun to be appreciated how profoundly the urban milieu of epigram's composition and reception permeates its aesthetics.Footnote ⁴ While recent studies examine the broader relation between the urban environment and Martial's epigrammatic genre, I wish to combine this path of inquiry with an interpretation specifically devoted to Martial's references to urban topography, and the ways in which his poetic interest in maps, itineraries, and literary cityscapes coincides with a renewed focus on urban space and structures under the Flavians.Footnote ⁵ It does not seem accidental that a form of poetry featuring a new density and explicitness of topographical reference emerges in a period of frenetic building. Martial flourished for the most part under Domitian, the greatest builder and restorer of the Roman cityscape since Augustus. The great fires of a.d. 64 and 80, the propagandistic requirements of the Flavian dynasty, and the need to control and surpass the memory of Nero all afforded grand possibilities for building and restoration. Martial engages directly with these contemporary developments.

Even as the Flavian remaking of the early imperial city defines the frame of reference for epigram's urban poetics, Martial shapes different literary ‘Romes’ according to his diverse aims as a writer: a city of cosmopolitan spectacles, consumer items, and imported foods; a palimpsestic Rome overlaid with memories of poetic predecessors’ depictions of the city; a Rome packed with literature and books; a Rome dominated and elevated by the divine presence of the emperor. Common to these epigrammatic depictions of Rome is a central underlying feature: the sheer pervasiveness of the city as setting and inspiration of poetry. Martial's Epigrams offer richer and more varied depictions of the city's innumerable places, objects, and structures than any previous work in the Roman poetic tradition. Modern readers of Martial risk failing to appreciate the brilliant extremity of this stance, if, under the influence of the modernist paradigm of literature and art, they take for granted the association of literary activity and urban centres. In the ancient setting, Martial's aggressively urban poetics presents a paradoxical aspect: a poet requires otium, a space apart from the city's uproar,Footnote ⁶ yet the epigrammatist produces a mode of poetry premised on speed, impromptu wit, and the jagged, surprising texture of urban life.Footnote ⁷

I THE FLAVIAN COSMOPOLIS

Martial's representation of the urban environment coheres with the materialist perspective that organizes his representations of sex, writing, patronage, and finance. Martial's choice of genre plays a significant role in determining density of topographical reference: topographical explicitness can be interpreted as a literary strategy in line with the broader aim of establishing the originality of epigram within the poetic tradition. As always, however, we need to appreciate both the ways in which literary genre forms an image of society, and the ways in which historical conditions inform the creation of genres. Martial constructed a form of poetry premised on vivid urban description amid the monumental cityscape of early imperial Rome, and specifically, during a period when the physical structures of Rome constituted a major focus of the new dynasty in power. Martial's urban poetics can be contextualized both in the broader perspective of Rome's development into an imperial capital and cosmopolis,Footnote ⁸ and in terms of a nearer focus on the specific interests of Vespasian and his successors in establishing the city's stability, physical integrity, and public amenity.Footnote ⁹

A dramatically shifting proportion of monumentality and material splendour characterizes Rome's urban development over the longue durée. Whereas Rome's physical infrastructure in the middle Republican period remained notoriously underdeveloped in proportion to its status as political centre of an emerging and then predominant Mediterranean power,Footnote ¹⁰ imperial Rome's magnificence as cultural capital eventually outstripped its political importance. Rome was no longer necessarily the centre of imperial decision-making starting in the third century a.d., but there were already signs in the second century that the city was beginning to be conceived as a showpiece or emblem of empire that Woolf aptly compares with twentieth-century New York's status as ‘totemic vestibule to America’ displaying for visitors its ‘unrivalled magnificence and squalor’.Footnote ¹¹ In this context, the visitor plays a key role in defining the city. The purple passages often cited as testimony to the grandeur that was imperial Rome are typically penned by, or focalized through, visitors to the city, including emperors who no longer have Rome as their chief residence.Footnote ¹² The Flavians still consider Rome the political centre, and yet the city's status as marvel to be appreciated by foreign visitors begins to come into real prominence in this period, not least through the agency of Martial's poetry. As a Spaniard who comes to Rome to make a literary career, he is in a perfect position to appreciate, and subsequently define in poetic terms, what might be termed the exteriorization of Rome's image, the face it turns toward the empire it rules and toward the visitors it seeks to astonish with the manifestations of its supremacy. At the same time, Martial the outsider succeeds in defining himself as an insider, who knows intimately the sordid, back-stage workings of the city as well as its back alleys, and becomes a prime exporter of Rome's authentic squalorFootnote ¹³ to provincial readers.

The nearer perspective of the Flavian building programme is equally important for understanding Martial's poetics of urban space. The keystone of Flavian propaganda was the recovery of the city after Nero's depredations and private luxuria: indeed, there is no more complete, eloquent and explicit articulation of this ideological orientation than the three opening epigrams of Martial's Liber Spectaculorum celebrating the dedication of the Flavian Amphitheatre by Titus in a.d. 80.Footnote ¹⁴ Urban space, under Nero, had become highly contested, not least due to the indignation of members of the élite whose residences had given way to the emperor's vast palatial complex. It is not clear, however, that Nero truly harboured the selfish ambition to convert large portions of Rome into his private dwelling.Footnote ¹⁵ Scholars have increasingly emphasized his probable intention of creating, within the broader complex of the Golden House, spaces of public amenity — an intention that is coherent with his other building projects.Footnote ¹⁶ It may well be the case that the Flavians needed to reinvent Nero as a hoarder of urban space precisely in order to counterbalance the memory of his building programme's populist orientation.Footnote ¹⁷ The difficulties of the city, however, went beyond Nero's real or presumptive architectural tyranny. The city was still in ruins from the fire of a.d. 64,Footnote ¹⁸ and, in 69, was the site of civil conflict. Presenting the city as a place of peace, stability, restored structural integrity, and of imperial munificence for the whole populace was a priority.Footnote ¹⁹

Given the city's recent role as battlefield for civil war, the Peace celebrated by Vespasian's Templum PacisFootnote ²⁰ may be seen as simultaneously imperial and urban. Accounts of the turbulent year a.d. 69 recall the invasion of the city's civic core by civil violence. According to Plutarch, Galba, hearing a rumour that Otho was murdered, went forth from the Palatine toward the Capitoline in order to sacrifice to Jupiter, but then learned, while passing through the Forum, that Otho, still alive, controlled the Praetorians. Soldiers advanced through the Basilica Aemilia as crowds of bystanders gathered at various vantage points throughout the Forum. Soldiers approached Galba with drawn swords; he fell from his litter and was killed near the Lacus Curtius (Galba 27–8). It is disturbing enough that Galba was murdered at this hallowed spot in the middle of the Forum — a perverted sacrifice recalling the stories of sacrifice that serve as aetiologies for the place and its cult.Footnote ²¹ Piso, Galba's designated successor, was also cut down, wounded and attempting to escape, outside the Temple of Vesta. Both of their heads were delivered to Otho.

Tacitus, who offers a similar account, adds that Titus Vinius was slain on the same occasion in front of the Temple of Deified Julius. He further comments: ‘neither the sight of the Capitol nor the sanctity of the temples which towered above them, nor the thought of emperors past and to come, could deter them from committing a crime which any successor to the imperial power must punish’ (Histories 1.40).Footnote ²² Later, the grim itinerary is retraced when Vitellius is brought to his unpleasant end. He is forced to watch his own statues being toppled, and to ‘look again and again on the rostra or the place where Galba had been killed’; at last he is driven to the Gemonian steps, where Flavius Sabinus’ body had lain, and then is killed himself. Urban topography, in these texts, has become inextricable from a history of recent violence, which, as Tacitus’ comments imply, both defiles our sense of the sanctity of the past, and redefines the associations of these places for the future.Footnote ²³ Martial's contemporaries inhabited a city haunted by memories of violence and defilement. The remaking of that city thus takes on a special importance and significance.Footnote ²⁴

Vespasian also displayed an interest in the more practical, administrative aspects of the city: he carried out the first systematic census of the city of Rome since Augustus. The results of this census are hypothesized to have been stored in an archive located in a side hall in the Temple of Peace complex. There is credible evidence that this building held a Vespasianic predecessor of the Severan Marble Plan, which was erected on a wall of the south-east hall of the Temple of Peace, currently the exterior wall of SS. Cosma e Damiano.Footnote ²⁵ Map-making was as much a symbolic as a practical enterprise at Rome: impractically large, wall-sized maps in particular expressed a mastery of space and a visual articulation of control over city (urbs) and world (orbis).Footnote ²⁶ Assuming that Vespasian created such a map, the significance of his Temple of Peace is further enriched: the map displayed and embodied the stability conferred on a city recently ravaged by war and fire, but now restored in its physical integrity under the Pax Flavia; at the same time, a splendid collection of imported art objects housed in the Temple of Peace reinforced the site's association with cosmopolitan hegemony and prestige. Footnote ²⁷

II EPIGRAMMATIC WORLDS

Martial's earliest poetry, published under Titus and Domitian, Vespasian's successors and the inheritors of his programme of urban restoration, displays a persistent concern with urban topography and the relation between city and broader imperial world. A key dimension of this programme is frank advertisement of the emperor as builder on a massive scale. The defining structure of the age, and the most ambitious expression of the resources and liberality of the regime — to which all three members of the dynasty contributed in succession — was the Colosseum, as it later came to be called, or the Caesarean Amphitheatre, as it was called by Martial.Footnote ²⁸ The opening epigram of Martial's Liber Spectaculorum confirms the Flavian Amphitheatre's instant canonization as architectural masterpiece on a world-wide scale.

Rome's amphitheatre not only earns a place among the world's wonders (Spect. 1.1–6), it supplants and absorbs them: ‘fame will tell of one work in place of all’. The second poem maintains the focus on Rome, but shifts the perspective in order to track a temporal change from Neronian to Flavian, and an accompanying transformation of urban space. Having established the Amphitheatre's ecumenical prestige, Martial now addresses more local concerns of city topography.

It is remarkable that in these earliest of Martial's epigrams, a very precise map is already being drawn for the benefit of his readers.Footnote ²⁹ The map tells an ideologically charged history of the Principate as viewed through the history of buildings: the Baths of Titus replaced the Neronian ager (field); the Amphitheatre lies over Nero's stagna (artificial lake); and, perhaps most striking for its historical layeredness, the Claudianum has been restored by Vespasian after being destroyed and covered over by a portion of Nero's palace.Footnote ³⁰ Nor is the Colossus as place-marker innocent: the colossal statue of Nero was said to have been reworked under Vespasian to represent the features of the Sun god.Footnote ³¹ Martial's topographical references condense an entire history of building and its ideological resonance, culminating in a powerful articulation of the Flavian programme for the city: ‘reddita Roma sibi est’ (‘Rome has been restored to herself’).

City and world converge in the amphitheatre. The last poem in the opening sequence confirms this emphasis: there is no race of people so barbarous and removed from the civilized world as to be unrepresented in Caesar's city (‘in urbe tua’) as spectator at the games. The ethnically diverse populace recalls Ovid's multi-ethnic crowd of elegiac puellae,Footnote ³² yet Martial replaces Ovid's antinomian Amor-saturated Roma with an ideologically normative Flavian city.

The first poem in the sequence represented the city's newest wonder to the world; the second traced the history of the recovery of the city under the Flavians; and now the third combines the perspective of City and World by representing the diverse peoples of the world united within the frame of Caesar's world-city and cosmopolitan amphitheatre.

The Colosseum, the world-city of Rome, and Martial's epigrammatic Liber Spectaculorum all, in different ways, compress multitudes.Footnote ³³ The effects of metonymic selection, condensation, and representative embodiment of the vaster whole observed in the Roman cosmopolis and Colosseum can be found at work in Martial's book itself, which encapsulates and circulates through the Empire the arena's cosmic spectacles. A comparably microcosmic dynamic characterizes Martial's other two early collections. The Xenia and Apophoreta, Martial's collections on food-items and gift-objects published in a.d. 83/84 and 84/85 respectively, bear ideological resemblance to the Liber Spectaculorum to a degree that has not been fully appreciated. All three collections are premised on a unifying occasional pretext that distinguishes them from the later numbered collections:Footnote ³⁴ a dinner party, Saturnalian gift-giving, the emperor's spectacles. In each collection, a pervasive metaliterary principle assumes the interchangeability of munera (= gifts, whether that means hospitality gifts (xenia), Saturnalian gifts, or the amphitheatrical munera of the emperor) and poems.

Rome as centre of consumption defines the fundamental structure of these poetic representations. Martial makes Rome's status as the site of extravagant expenditure explicit in the opening poems of the Liber Spectaculorum: the arena harnesses the diverse resources of the world to create a spectacle for urban audiences. He performs a highly comparable operation in the Xenia and Apophoreta: while food-items and gift-objects are designated by geographical provenance, the parties at which they are distributed take place in the Empire's capital city.Footnote ³⁵ The very design of these early books and the nature of their objects effectively funnel imports into Rome, here figured as all-absorbing consumer city.Footnote ³⁶ What the Liber Spectaculorum establishes in its opening declaration of the Colosseum's cosmopolitan prestige and ethnically diverse spectatorship, the Xenia and Apophoreta achieve through the derivation of their objects and the dynamic of consumption informing their literary fictions.

The Xenia, as Stroup has observed, includes a particularly high frequency of epigrams where geographical provenance is stressed — approximately half of the epigrams in the book.Footnote ³⁷ The percentage in the Apophoreta is lower, but still striking. Martial represents provenance in materially explicit ways: e.g., a cheese (‘caseus lumensis’) is marked with the ‘trademark’ indicating its place of origin (13.30). A plurality of other instances (e.g., 13.19, 13.107, 14.51) suggest that denominazione d’origine controllata was very much part of the idiom of the urban consumer in ancient Rome. Poets also have geographical origins: more than once the land of origin of Martial's major predecessor Catullus receives mention in the Apophoreta (e.g. 14.152). As a Spanish epigrammatist, Martial occupies a distinctive niche, and markets himself accordingly. Spanish steel, dancing girls, and other items of Iberian provenance are included in the gift-cache, anticipating Martial's later more explicit celebration of his homeland's unusual place-names, natural resources, and exports. The imported Spanish author is subsequently distributed back to the provinces as a world-famous poetry book, including, presumably, to Martial's own Spain. In reading the Apophoreta, the regions of the Empire receive back their own typical products converted into textual form.Footnote ³⁸

The ideological coherence of the three early books is beginning to emerge. Each occasion-grounded poetry book represents a cosmopolitan accumulation of diversely derived items on a massive scale. Martial's cosmopolitan dinner menu surpasses the bounds of any plausible single dinner. The immense accumulation of gift-objects in the Apophoreta similarly approaches encyclopaedic proportions that exceed a single occasion of gift-exchange. It is interesting to note that Martial's lists of food, consumer items, and objets d’art match the lists and catalogues in the Elder Pliny's Naturalis Historia. The encyclopaedic mode represents, among other things, the accommodation of literary form to the economic trends and distribution networks of the early Empire. Martial's early works are, in a certain sense, miniature encyclopaedias, and participate in comparable cultural discourses of materialist itemization and connoisseurship. The encyclopaedic inclusiveness of the Xenia and Apophoreta, despite their minimalist mode and genre, expresses an imperial and even cosmic scope.Footnote ³⁹

The city of Rome in each case is the locus of such cosmopolitan display. Beyond overt indications of Rome's topography and social institutions, the sheer mass of objects in Martial's catalogues suggests a city. We tend to think of a city as buildings and their inhabitants, yet Martial reminds us that we should also include the multitude of things that contribute to the city as its smallest and most easily moveable constituents. These humble objects in some cases recall their place in the city.Footnote ⁴⁰ One specific urban space potentially evoked in the Apophoreta is the art museum, of which Flavian Rome contained some signal examples.Footnote ⁴¹ Martial, in the sequence on art objects in the Apophoreta (14.170–82), has created his own textual museum that invites comparison with the museum spaces of the Flavian city. Of crucial relevance is Pliny the Elder's articulation of the propaganda value of the museum: Footnote ⁴² ‘atque ex omnibus quae rettuli clarissima quaeque in urbe iam sunt dicata a Vespasiano principe in templo Pacis aliisque eius operibus, violentia Neronis in urbem convecta et in sellariis domus aureae disposita’ (‘and out of all those which I mentioned, the most celebrated ones, which had been brought to the city by the rapacity of Nero and set out in the sitting rooms of the Domus Aurea, have now been dedicated in the city by princeps Vespasian in the Temple of Peace and his other monuments’, 34.84). Martial, by presenting works of art in a collection of gifts for the delectation of his literary public, among which may be found replicas of some of the more famous pieces restored to public view by Vespasian, makes an implicit statement in his Apophoreta that parallels his open declaration of Flavian ideology in the Liber Spectaculorum. Martial, like Pliny, both acknowledges, and recreates in literary form, the Flavian restoration of private Neronian luxuries to a broader public.Footnote ⁴³

Martial is beginning to trace the outlines of his epigrammatic Rome. The epigrammatist's object-catalogues already contain hints of the buildings and cityscapes to which his objects belong, while his descriptions of the Colosseum provide an early example of his close attention to urban topography. And as in the case of the generalized urban poetics of Martial's numbered books, the three early collections employ material specificity and immediacy of presence as central features of their urban descriptive mode.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Liber Spectaculorum reduces history, myth, geography, even literature to the present moment of spectacle, while the Xenia and Apophoreta replace literature in the grand sense with a series of gift-objects and food-items. Epigram's rhetoric of materialist immediacy involves confrontation with the prestige of mythological doctrina (erudition) in the poetic tradition, and, more broadly, with the authority of the past in Roman culture. Epigram, like the performances of the arena, condenses, encapsulates, reduces to the flat plane of the present moment. The epigrammatic genre's privileging of immediacy, moreover, merges with aspects of the self-justification of the Flavian regime. While evidently recalling the example of earlier emperors, the Flavians could not insist too dogmatically on reverence for the past: their regime was founded on the severing of the system of the Principate from the Julio-Claudian dynasty.Footnote ⁴⁵ Epigram's rapidity and contemporaneity (cf. 1.1.5–6)Footnote ⁴⁶ are capable of capturing in a series of ‘snapshots’Footnote ⁴⁷ the Flavian city both as it currently stands and as it comes into being.Footnote ⁴⁸

The metaphor of the epigrammatic ‘snapshot’, however, can be misleading in some respects. For a poet who ostensibly prioritizes material reality over the vagaries of literary fiction, Martial strongly insists on reminding his readers of the textuality of his represented world. What is distinctive about Martial's epigrammatic mimesis is the crisp simultaneity of realism and illusion,Footnote ⁴⁹ a relentlessly materialist perspective combined with acute metapoetic awareness. On closer inspection, his object catalogues betray signs of sophisticated ordering, thematic interconnection, and literary allusion. As scholars have begun to appreciate, Martial's depictions of urban reality are laden with references to and ambitious rewriting of his poetic predecessors. The following section will examine how Martial positions his epigrammatic Rome in relation to the literary cities of the Augustan poets. Of particular importance in this negotiation is Martial's self-positioning vis-à-vis Ovid, the key figure of comparison as poet of the imperial city.

III LITERARY CITIES: THE AUGUSTAN BACKGROUND

The Augustan authors wrote when the Principate was being founded, imperial literature was being created, and the city was assuming its imperial grandeur. The Flavians represent the next major impetus in urban building after Augustus, with emphases designed specifically to recall Augustan benefaction to the city.Footnote ⁵⁰ As McNelis observes, the ‘Flavians exploited the meaning of Augustus in order to strengthen their claims that they had eradicated civil war and brought peace and order to Rome’.Footnote ⁵¹ Martial thus not surprisingly looks back to the writers who celebrated the city's transformation under the founder of Rome's first dynastic line. The Augustans witnessed the most concentrated and transformative phase of urban building in Rome's history. Augustus’ restored city of Rome consequently informs literary production of the period to a remarkable degree. Yet precisely because of the vast scope of the Princeps’ urban building, Augustan writers endeavoured all the more intently to distill the ethical import of the new city. It required subtle strategies of selection and emphasis to sustain, simultaneously, the revival of traditionalist virtues, and the Hellenizing splendour of Augustus’ restored Rome. While Augustus was rebuilding the city in marble, contemporary writers embedded reference to this physical restructuring within broader depictions of the moral and religious rejuvenation of Rome and with constant reference to its pre-monumental past.Footnote ⁵²

The strong ideological filter at work in Augustan literary representations of the city creates an opportunity for Martial. A central claim of Martial's Epigrams is to encompass the totality of Rome: every type of person and object, from imperial palace to Subura street-life, stands juxtaposed in the epigrammatist's programmatically unfiltered city.Footnote ⁵³ Such a claim, of course, is partially misleading. The Augustan literary city was not always so selectively represented, and Martial's Flavian city not so free of ideological filtering, as the opposition might initially suggest. Martial's project of rewriting the imperial city was anticipated, moreover, in certain crucial respects by the late Augustan intervention of Ovid, who flouts with ironic insouciance the conventional priority accorded primitive Rome. By a deliberate act of misprision, he offers fulsome praise of the amenity and cultus (sophistication/refinement) of Augustan Rome,Footnote ⁵⁴ and delights in the emerging urban forest of columns as a lover's playground. Early Rome, he avers, was a nasty, boorish place, devoid of modern refinement of taste in both buildings and personal adornment. In the Ovidian paradigm, the density of the urban fabric and the multiple opportunities it provides for chance meetings have been disembedded from the moral import they were designed to bear. The lover becomes a figure that exults in the city's labyrinth, the inheritor of a city that he turns to his own uses.

Or so a highly plausible literary critical story goes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Another perspective, more reluctant to read Ovid's relegation in a.d. 8 retrospectively into his earlier poetry as proof of subversive intent, might with equal justice emphasize points of convergence between Ovid's elegiac city and the Augustan building programme.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Ovidian celebration of urban cultus that, in some readings, appears as a subversive rejection of the early and mid-Augustan valorisation of Rome's virtuous past, might also be read as the logical adjustment of literary representation of the city to the different situation of Augustus’ later reign. It is significant that Ovid begins to take advantage of the immense unrealized potential of a poetics of the city in a period when the monumentalization of Rome as imperial capital, along with other aspects of imperial culture, were becoming better established and more familiar.Footnote ⁵⁷ Central Augustan monuments such as the Ara Pacis (dedicated 9 b.c.) and the Forum of Augustus (2 b.c.) were only completed after most of the main cohort of Augustan poets were dead or inactive. Ovid's later works — notably the Fasti and Tristia — constitute his most detailed, explicit explorations of the Princeps’ transformation of and dominant presence within the city fabric.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is thus not surprising that Martial looks to Ovid as a major exemplar of topographical poetry. Ovid's Fasti provides Martial with the blueprint for the ecphrastic description of imperial monuments, his Ars Amatoria exemplifies the topographical catalogue and roving itineraries of the flâneur, while the exile poetry pioneers the imperial map-poem and travelling book.Footnote ⁵⁹ Finally, it was Ovid who first gave definitive expression to Rome's status as world-city in connection with the world-wide circulation of his own poetry.Footnote ⁶⁰

We can begin to appreciate the depth of Ovid's importance for Martial as poet of the city in all its material aspects: explicit description of books, explicit description of sex, explicit description of buildings and cityscape. Yet even as Ovid celebrates aurea Roma of the present day, he eschews a radically materialistic position: cultus, he insists, is the key — not marble, masonry, and gold. Nor should we be surprised if, as in book-representation, so also in urban topography and sex, Martial pushes the Ovidian model to extremity, at once debasing and splintering into epigram-sized fragments the more streamlined city of porticos and heterosexual courtship-games of the Ars Amatoria. Epigrammatic eros is diversified, fragmented, made to represent the truly vast, defiling untidiness and perversity of Rome. The one-track mind of the Ovidian praeceptor (‘teacher’) revolved around seduction played out in its innumerable variations with benign cynicism. Martial's erotic Rome has harsher edges and more unsettling surprises.Footnote ⁶¹ The denizens of Martial's Rome, moreover, are less uniform in their pursuits, and in most cases, lack the elegant, aestheticized negligence of the gentleman-lover: the city becomes the site of relentless captatio (‘hunting’), not only of inheritances, but of grosser, smaller things (e.g. dinners, sportulae).

2.14, a satiric epigram on Selius’ desperate pursuit of a dinner invitation, is a prime example.

Martial's most famous map-poem, through the allusive fabric of its metonymic toponyms (Europa, Io, Achilles, Jason, Aeolia), is packed with metachartographic references to geography, travel, epic journeys, and map-making.Footnote ⁶² Immediately striking is the remarkable energy of the poem's central protagonist, the unflagging Selius, who, like Achilles and Paulinus, is running a relentless race of his own, and whose lust for a dinner invitation conveniently, for Martial's purposes, drives him to a densely packed series of urban locations. Repetition, cyclicality, and exhaustion are themselves thematic: ‘iterumque iterumque iterumque’ (‘again and again and again’, 13).Footnote ⁶³ The city is represented as saturated both with monumental building and with the relentless drives and behaviours of its inhabitants. Martial's poetics of urban saturation goes beyond the highly selected slices of cityscape we get in Augustan poetry. His city is a jumble of buildings, periods, overlapping and competing functions. Imperial porticos and dodgy private baths are juxtaposed in the urban parataxis of Selius’ journey and Martial's poem. Selius’ urgent need sends the poem into places (e.g. dank and drafty balnea Footnote ⁶⁴) Ovid's lover might not have deigned to go. If, in Augustan writers, the struggle to define the value-associations of the emerging imperial city is especially prominent, Martial plays on the axiological dissonance of the diverse segments of cityscape in relation to the social uses made of them. The Campus Martius was, broadly conceived, a place for public otium (leisure), yet, for the humourless Selius, strolling in public places is serious business. Footnote ⁶⁵ The splendid artworks Selius rushes past mean little to him, although they may offer ironic commentary on his quest.

Selius’ route both recalls and travesties the sleek ambulations of the Ovidian flâneur. Pompey's portico enjoyed frequent and conspicuous mention in Roman erotic and elegiac poetry, and was awarded primacy of place in Ovid's catalogues.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Temple of Isis, often featured in love poetry, and mentioned more than once by Ovid, enters Martial's catalogue with overtly Ovidian phrasing.Footnote ⁶⁷ The frantic Selius, however, hardly cuts the same figure as the otiose lover, and his pedestrian conquest of the city does not suggest an alternative élite ethos.Footnote ⁶⁸ Selius, moreover, resembles Ovid's lover in passing through structures that just happen to coincide with major works and restorations of the reigning emperor.Footnote ⁶⁹ Martial's epigram thus reproduces the underlying dynamic of the Ars: the figure traversing the city does so in the name of pursuits that notionally clash with the ideological emphases of the emperor whose structures he traverses. Selius’ single-minded pursuit of a dinner cannot but contrast with the grandeur of the imperial benefactions that surround him, and with the austere traditionalism of Domitian's views on social mores. Crucially, however, Martial's satiric perspective mercilessly isolates Selius and stigmatizes him: he does not represent an alternative life-path that others are encouraged to admire and emulate. Domitian's ideological position remains unchallenged, insofar as the potentially subversive uses made of his city by its inhabitants are fragmented and isolated as so many individual vices and shameful obsessions. Martial succeeds in offering a richer diversity of modes of urban behaviour than his Augustan predecessors, even as he dissolves their potential for ideological subversion by making their practitioners into pariahs and objects of disgust.

As this section has begun to sketch out, there are strong precedents for Martial's poetics of the city in the Roman tradition. Martial, however, distinguishes himself by the degree of topographical explicitness, his relentless materialist vision, the fragmentation and axiological instability of his urban world, and the sheer accumulation of urban scenes, objects, monuments, persons. Selius, whose immense yet sordid desires drive him across a broad section of the Campus Martius, and then back again to his starting-point, is an apt symbol of the exhaustive drive of Martial's totalizing urban poetics. Martial is the inheritor and subversive renovator of the Augustan poetics of the city: the epigrammatist delves into grittier corners of the city and maps out more explicit itineraries within it than his predecessors, who were similarly concerned to create modes of poetry adequate to a newly monument-dense Rome. Of course, in making this argument, I am largely following the positive spin that privileges Martial's originality and that derives from his own literary self-positioning. One could equally pursue an inverse argument, namely that Martial, in taking up literary themes organized around a tension between implicit and explicit, streamlined and fragmented, generic and realist, in the well-established areas of city, sex, and books is merely hunting out the last scraps of originality within the tradition of Roman poetry deriving from the Augustans. This assessment might make him an eminently Flavian writer in yet another way.

Martial would not be the only case, of course, of an early imperial writer for whom satiety and overworking of the literary terrain become ennabling tropes. The repetition and exhaustion that reflect so poorly on Selius can be recuperated as innovative elements in Martial's epigrammatic urbanism. The epigrammatist ransacks the city for novel perspectives and themes, makes an epic journey out of a sordid itinerary, and injects energy, wit, and surprise into Selius’ grimly circular path. Martial writes in a city that is already filled with literary memories. His answer to this challenge is essentially: ‘more’. Martial's topographical references are more numerous, more explicit, less neatly confined within building types or regions. Martial packs his poetry with references to urban structures, and, conversely, saturates his epigrammatic city with images of his own poetry. For Martial, the physical book is the conduit of his work, and its movement through the city marks the extent of his poetry's immersion in urban life. While Horace and Ovid offer up images of travelling books, and Ovid goes some way toward situating literary activity in an unapologetically urban environment, Martial, predictably, goes further. The opposition between book (as integral aesthetic object) and city (that tarnishes and corrupts it) collapses as Martial's restlessly mobile book merges with the city through its insertion into vividly imagined contexts of reception and social use.

IV ITINERARIES OF THE BOOK

In the second epigram of his first numbered book, Martial directs his reader where to buy a codex edition of his epigrams:

Martial's book is located behind Vespasian's Temple of Peace and behind the Forum Transitorium,Footnote ⁷⁰ here uniquely named after its dominant temple. Just as the first epigram of the Liber Spectaculorum describes the world-wide prestige of the Flavian Amphitheatre, followed by an epigram situating the Amphitheatre within the city, so here an introductory epigram announcing the book's world-wide glory (‘toto notus in orbe’, ‘known throughout the entire world’, 1.1.2) precedes an epigram on the book's exact location in the city (‘ne … erres / urbe vagus tota …’, ‘so that you don’t wander, straying, through the whole city’, 1.2.5–6). In the same book's penultimate epigram (1.117), Martial, with neat ring-structure, again represents a potential place of purchase for his book, this time not a codex but a scroll: in the Argiletum, across from the ‘forum of Caesar’ (probably referring to the Forum Transitorium, 1.117.10), there is a shop with its doorposts covered with advertisements for the poets on sale (11–12); Atrectus, the shop-owner, will hand you a ‘Martial’ from the first or second niche for five denarii (13–18).Footnote ⁷¹

Of note here is the immense precision and explicitness of description, progressing from general location to specific shop to the very niche (‘de primo … alterove nido’) from which Martial's book will come. Material/materialistic emphasis converges with topographical specificity. The epistolary Horace was already pressing at the limits of literary decorum, when he named, not only the location where his book yearned to go (‘Vertumnum Ianumque’, ‘Vertumnus and Ianus’, 1.20.1), but also the name of the bookseller where it might be sold.Footnote ⁷² Yet ‘Martial’, who is identified with and embodied in his book, is already in the city, in more than one shop, available in more than one physical form: there is less emphasis on an author-figure separate from the book restraining its trajectory toward the city and more on the embeddedness of the book/author in the city's consumer fabric. At the same time, Martial carefully plots his book's position in relation to the emperor's monumental complex — at a stone's throw from, but not actually in, the Forum Transitorium. Martial is able to acknowledge the emperor's urban building projects, while remaining in the humble, untidy world of epigram — shops and streets, quotidian transactions and pedestrian itineraries.

What both topographical reference and materialist book-description have in common is a realist view of literature that envisions concrete, specific acts of writing, reading, and circulation. In Epigrams 1.70, Martial sends his book on a vividly plotted path to the house of his patron Proculus.

Martial's ingenious ploy of sending the book as substitute salutator (morning caller) allows him to derive social benefit from a patronal connection without personally carrying out time-consuming duties.Footnote ⁷⁴ The topographical arc described by 1.70 coheres with its social function as surrogate salutatio (morning greeting). We might compare the book's urban progress with that of the satiric target Selius, whose manic pursuit of a dinner traces a circular path over the flat plain of the Campus Martius. Selius ends up in the same place, and significantly, at the same elevation, at which he started. 1.70, which concerns the aspirations of the epigrammatist himself, depicts the hunger for social elevation more optimistically. The book begins in the low-lying Forum, and then, after turning near the shrines of Bacchus and Cybele (and in view of the Colossus), follows an upward-tending path toward the Palatine before veering left at Proculus’ house (‘nitidos … Lares’).Footnote ⁷⁵ Martial deftly compliments Proculus’ cultured household, but, as Geyssen has argued, the emperor Domitian also appears to be on the epigrammatist's mind, and the poem may be tracing the earlier phases of a progress that ideally ends at the Palace itself.Footnote ⁷⁶ Compared with the flat plain of Selius’ zero-sum game, the rising curve of 1.70 is suggestive of Martial's literary and social ambitions at a crucial turning point in his career. The book's journey up the Palatine, however, in addition to mapping the epigrammatist's present and future path of ascent in Flavian Rome, traverses significant intertextual territory: the most important book to travel a similar (though not identical) path up the Palatine previously was Ovid's, sent from exile in Tristia 1.1 and 3.1.Footnote ⁷⁷ Ovid's book approaches the public library in the Palatine Apollo complex, but in the end, will find refuge in a private household. Martial inverts this sequence: he first finds refuge in a private household on the slope of the Palatine; later, perhaps, he will be received in an altogether more exalted house, where the Muses are no less honoured.Footnote ⁷⁸ The motif of salutatio via book also comes from Ovid's exile poetry,Footnote ⁷⁹ yet Martial, significantly, adds the dimension of clientage.Footnote ⁸⁰

The deeper pattern resides in the congruence of literary materiality and topographical specificity for both Ovid and Martial. To track the book's itinerary through the city is to envision what poetry is in materialist terms. In Martial, however, the contexts of the book's reception are notable for the extent to which they are multiple, fragmented, and at times cynically profit-driven: specific cliental and mercantile uses situate the book's constant movement among a diversity of locations and itineraries. Previous poetic books are shown on the move, but in Martial's epigrams that movement is sliced into multiple, thickly described segments. In 10.19/20, addressed to the Younger Pliny, Martial once again sends his book on an uphill journey without authorial accompaniment.

The libellus (little book) is evidently Catullan,Footnote ⁸¹ yet whereas Catullus places the book directly into Nepos’ waiting hand (‘habe tibi’, ‘take it’, C. 1.8), Martial sends his book on a journey to reach the patron's lofty, intimidating abode. Indeed, Martial makes much — almost too much — of the distance between himself and the ultra-serious Pliny. As in 1.70, the book must travel uphill, from the low-life milieu of the Subura to Pliny's house on the Esquiline (‘altum vincere tramitem’, ‘to overcome the steep path’). The book will first pass by what appears to be a fountain depicting Orpheus soothing wild beasts with his music,Footnote ⁸² and the house of the Augustan epigrammatist Albinovanus Pedo.Footnote ⁸³ Topography, in this case, speaks volumes. The mythic poet Orpheus appears alongside the king of birds, the eagle that carried Ganymede to Zeus, whereas a lesser eagle (‘aequilae minore pinna’) is chiselled in relief on Pedo's house, suggesting a hierarchy of literary as well as architectural grandeur. The same verb is used to convey (pertulit) Ganymede to the Thunderer as conveys (perfer) Martial's book to Pliny's house via his epigrammatic Muse. Both Martial's libellus and Ganymede are attractive aesthetic objects whisked off to supply convivial entertainment to weighty, powerful figures. It goes without saying that Ganymede is an ideal mythic exemplum for correlating movement from lower to higher altitude with change in social elevation.Footnote ⁸⁴

Once again Martial combines representation of the material book with description of the urban fabric in the process of constructing a complex picture of his poetry's insertion into contexts of social interaction and use. Martial replaces traditional metaphors of literary circulation with concrete scenes of dedication, mercantile sale, and patronage, while exploiting those scenes’ metonymic potential: the book's urban itineraries map out social and literary hierarchies. The eventual end-point of such itineraries is often, as in 1.70, the imperial palace.Footnote ⁸⁵ Later epigrams explicitly represented the book's ascent up the Palatine in hopes of obtaining imperial favour.Footnote ⁸⁶ Domitian's death by assassination in a.d. 96, however, naturally disrupted this familiar path of ascent for Martial's book. In the first poem of Book 11, published under Nerva, Martial first asks if his book is going to see Parthenius on the Palatine, but then corrects that false impression: he is too busy reading petitions to read poetic libelli (little books).Footnote ⁸⁷ Martial is possibly registering, with mild humour, the awareness that his books were all too often observed travelling the path up the Palatine to be received into Domitian's ‘mighty hands’ (‘magnas … manus’, 6.1.5). Now, his book will have to content itself with falling into the ‘lesser hands’ (‘manus minores’, 11.1.8) of idlers in the portico attached to the Temple of Quirinus near Martial's house.

The tone is self-denigrating and mildly repentant, and the shift in topography telling: his book will no longer make the long journey to the Palace, but will remain in the plebeian milieu of the nearby Porticus Quirini. Ovid, whose book failed to find lodging on the Palatine and comparably sought reception in the hands of the people (‘plebeiae … manus’, Tristia 3.1.82), affords a suggestive precedent:Footnote ⁸⁸ his exilic circumstances and imperial disfavour resemble Martial's post-Domitianic predicament and subsequent departure. As always, however, Martial goes further along the path of realist description, substituting Ovid's generalizing plebeiae manus with a sordid scene of chariot-racing gossip in the portico neighbouring the house that (unlike the exiled Ovid) he still inhabits in Rome.

Is there any alternative between venal bookshop and sordid turba on the one hand, and the uphill path to the patron's or emperor's imposing house on the other? In 7.51, Martial answers the query of the urban reader, who will not pay good money for trifling poems, but still wants to enjoy Martial's latest epigrams.

Martial now directs the potential reader not to his book's place of sale but to a person, the lawyer Pompeius Auctus, whose location in Rome he identifies with precision: ‘Ultoris prima Martis in aede sedet’ (‘he sits at the entrance of the Temple of Mars Ultor’). A well-established Roman poetic tradition personifies the book as slave (1.3). Here, instead of personifying a book, Martial does the inverse: he assigns the qualities of his book to a person. Each detail in the description plays into the opening conceit that Pompeius Auctus is not Martial's reader, but his book. He is ‘madens’ (‘wet, dripping, soaked’), a familiar term of epigrammatic self-definition — not, however, actually drunk, but instead ‘steeped in law’. Moreover, like a good Callimachean book, he is ‘limatus’ (‘filed, polished’) but ‘vario togae usu’ (‘in the diverse practice of the toga’) — a polish of a different kind.

Auctus comes off as an appealingly open character, willing to recite Martial's epigrams to anyone who is willing to share a bite to eat with him. The small shared dinner nicely adequates Martial's humble, sociable genre. Yet, despite epigram's notionally limited scope, a book of epigrams may go on longer than its more impatient readers might prefer.Footnote ⁸⁹ So also Auctus: ‘nolis licet, ille sonabit, / et cum “iam satis est” dixeris, ille leget’ (‘even if you don’t want him to, he will sound on, and when you say “enough already”, he will go on reading’). In the following poem, 7.52, Martial expresses his gratitude that Auctus recites his books to Celer, Legate of Nearer Spain. In a witty development, Auctus the reciter is at the same time a lawyer pleading his literary case before a formidable judge.

The listener is not chosen at random. Urbicus (‘Urban’)Footnote ⁹⁰ was to be Auctus’ audience in the previous city-focused epigram; now, the choice of the imperial legate Celer as addressee broadens the scope to include the wider world, specifically Martial's native Spain. Auctus’ location is central in both literal and symbolic terms: the Forum of Augustus was a key site of activity in Rome's civic core and a focal point of imperial Romanitas. Celer, by contrast, represents Roman fides (trustworthiness) in the provinces: ‘nec fuit in nostro certior orbe fides’ (‘nor was there steadier trustworthiness in our world’). According to Cassius Dio (55.10.2–4), provincial governors departed from the Forum of Augustus and returned there after their tour of duty, while triumphing generals dedicated spoils of victory in the Temple of Mars Ultor. Auctus’ customary position in front of Mars Ultor thus functions as the symbolic counterpoint to Celer's Spanish provincia: the two figures stand at opposite points of a shared centrifugal/centripetal circuit from Rome to province and back again. Between them, 7.51 and 7.52 map out relations between city and province, ruler and ruled, the literary capital and provincial readers and writers.Footnote ⁹¹ There is perhaps a final point in the names themselves: Celer and Auctus, Speed and Increase,Footnote ⁹² may be seen as a witty pairing of the two principles of Martial's literary circulation throughout the city and the world.

V IMPERIAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Martial, as we have seen in the preceding section, increases the range of contact points between book and city. He represents his books’ movement through, and at the edges of, major public monuments, along the winding streets of the Subura, and among the mansions of the Esquiline. Representation of literary materiality and explicit topographical reference are already meaningfully combined in Ovid and Horace, but Martial introduces a new degree of diversity, fragmentation, and graininess of material detail in his depiction of his books’ urban itineraries. His libelli are relentlessly mobile, and not only in one or two directions. Whereas the Augustan books of Ovid and Horace typically enact a discrete, mono-directional transition (from the poet's protected villa to the outer world, from exilic periphery to imperial capital), Martial's books splinter off into multiple directions, following an often highly uneven path that touches on and hints at other possible trajectories.Footnote ⁹³

Martial's propensity for topographical explicitness and constant engagement with poetic predecessors in literary representation of the city are equally in evidence in his treatment of the Domitianic city. Of the Flavian emperors, Domitian pursued the most far-reaching and ambitious programme of urban and provincial building and restoration. Martial, for his part, shows himself adept at using the medium of epigrammatic verse to interpret and appreciate Domitianic urban renewal. Martial's panegyric of Domitian emphasizes topographical and architectural elements: the Palatine residence comes to function as metonym for the emperor himself, and the emperor's virtues and greatness manifest themselves in concrete works of monumental building and urban restoration. Some of Martial's praises address the broader outlines of the emperor's care for the city: in 5.7, he proclaims that the city of Rome under Domitian, like the phoenix, is rising again from the ashes.Footnote ⁹⁴ Other epigrams address specific monuments and aspects of the emperor's building programme, as in the following distich from the Apophoreta.

Martial's toga with admirable density refers at once to Domitian's Temple of the Flavian Gens on the Quirinal (‘qui dedit astra patri’, ‘who gave the sky to his great father’),Footnote ⁹⁵ his laws reviving Augustan laws enforcing the wearing of the toga, and Virgil's Aeneid. According to a story in Suetonius, Augustus, upon seeing Romans wearing ordinary dark cloaks in the forum, reprovingly quoted Virgil, Aeneid 1.282: ‘Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam’ (‘Romans, lords of the world and the toga-clad race’, Div.Aug. 40.5). Domitian's restoration of proper Roman attire in public places such as the forum ‘makes’ (facit) contemporary Romans lordly and dignified in accordance with Augustan moral standards and with Virgil's prophecy of Roman destiny.

The epigram creates a surprising double genealogy: from Augustus as builder and moral legislator to Domitian as builder and moral legislator; from Virgil as poet/ideologue of imperial Romanitas to … Martial. The anti-climax is humorous, yet hints at an important role for the epigrammatist in Flavian Rome. Martial may not produce poetry of Virgilian grandeur, but he can redeploy Virgil's poetry within an impressively compressed epigrammatic frame. Martial's epigram links Domitian both with Augustus, the founder of the Principate, and with Vespasian, founder of the Flavian line, whom he honoured not only in the Temple of the Flavian Gens, but also in the Porticus Divorum and the Temple of the Deified Vespasian and Titus. Augustus comparably built his adoptive father's temple, and amplified Caesar's monument to his ancestor goddess through the adjoining complex of his own genealogically obsessed forum, which has, in turn, been compared with the narrative architecture of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita and Virgil's Aeneid. Martial's choice of citation in 14.124 thus brilliantly frames the architectural embodiment of dynastic continuity with the Virgilian locus classicus of imperial genealogy.

Jupiter's words of consolation to Venus shore up the integrity and eternity of the imperial gens with the authority of divine prophecy, and at the same time, outline a proleptic history of Roman space, building, and expansion. The entire passage, as the italicized terms demonstrate, traces a genealogical line stretching from Aeneas to Caesar and Augustus: ‘Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo’ (‘a Julius, a name descended from great Iulus’).Footnote ⁹⁶ In Martial's citation of Virgil, literary inheritance and imperial legacy merge: Augustus and the Augustan poets pass on the torch to Martial and the Flavians, while Jupiter's authority underpins both dynasties.Footnote ⁹⁷ Martial's poetry elsewhere routinely identifies Domitian with Jupiter, whose temple first Vespasian, then Domitian took pride in restoring after its destruction in a.d. 69. The present passage aligns Domitian with his divine father Vespasian, the divine Augustus, and ultimately with the Virgilian Jupiter, who first dubbed the Romans ‘the toga-clad race’. Martial's use of a carefully selected citation to emphasize divine genealogy and continuity may be responding, at some level, to the Flavians’ concerns with legitimacy and the lack of a sufficiently ennobling genealogy. It was previously suggested that Martial's celebration of the present over the past in the Liber Spectaculorum was coherent with the ideological emphases of a new imperial family unanchored from the Julio-Claudian line: the present strategy of emphasizing continuity of imperial authority and rôle despite genealogical discontinuity may be seen as both complicating and complementing the earlier stance.Footnote ⁹⁸

Martial's materialist vision of the city unlocks the latent significance of an item of quotidian use, the toga.Footnote ⁹⁹ A later epigram, no longer confined by the fiction of Saturnalian gift-exchange, lends more expansive treatment to the Temple of the Flavian Gens.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

9.1, like 14.124, refers to Domitian's Temple of the Flavian Gens within the thematic nexus of time, the Roman race, monumental building, and the immortality of the imperial gens. In the present epigram, time is the focus: like Caesar, Augustus, and Janus, Domitian has incorporated his name into the Roman calendar, and his family's monument will be co-extensive with the endurance of Roman institutions. In both 14.124 and 9.1, Martial links imperial genealogy (Augustus–Vespasian–Domitian) with a divine progenitor (Ianus/Jupiter), who oversees the cosmic order. In 10.28, Martial, addressing Janus as progenitor of time and the cosmos and guarantor of the Pax Flavia, praises the new quadrifons Janus in the Forum Transitorium that replaces the Janus Geminus of the Roman Forum.

In doubling his number of faces, Janus has significantly doubled the number of foraFootnote ¹⁰¹ he encompasses. Martial, praising the current emperor's project for surpassing previous structures, at the same time plays his own game of literary one-upmanship. Ovid's Janus Geminus stood at the juncture of only two fora.Footnote ¹⁰² In his ability to draw out the significance of contemporary monuments, Martial rivals the Augustan poets, just as Domitian sets himself up as the rival of previous emperors in monumental building. Emulation, however, also functions as differentiation. Martial, especially in his later Domitianic books, pursues a markedly encomiastic approach to the emperor's building projects by comparison with the more guarded references in Augustan poets. Even instances of full-blown architectural ecphrasis in Augustan poetry rarely develop into explicit panegyric of the builder Princeps. The Augustans, moreover, counterbalance their praise of the Princeps’ city with pride in their own poetic monumenta. Martial, in awarding primacy to Flavian bricks and marble, subverts the Augustan motif of the superior durability of poetic words.

In the epigrams devoted to Domitianic monuments, Martial stresses the Jovian divinity of the emperor as reflected in works of celestial grandeur. In several instances, Domitian's prestige even eclipses Jupiter's.Footnote ¹⁰³ The celestial imagery typically employed by Martial in his descriptions of Domitianic monuments is summed up by his praise of the majestically towering Palace: ‘par domus est caelo, sed minor est domino’ (‘the house is equal to the sky, but inferior to its master’, 8.36.12). The Augustan poets, following a tradition that goes back to Ennius and Pindar,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ insisted that they were building their own monuments out of metrically-arranged words, monuments that glorified their authors as much as the Princeps. Horace challenged the privilege accorded physical monuments in C. 3.30, when he proclaimed that the monument he had built would outlast the pyramids. Martial does not despise the glory he garners from his monumental oeuvre of epigrams,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ yet in architectural ecphrases assigns the lion's share of glory to the emperor's works, sometimes explicitly inverting Augustan topoi of poetry's monumental status.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ 8.36, written in praise of Domitian's Palace, begins, like Horace C. 3.30, with a claim that the pyramids have been surpassed: ‘regia pyramidum, Caesar, miracula ride’ (‘laugh at the royal wonders of the pyramids, Caesar’). The name immediately following pyramidum, however, alerts us to the fact that it is not Martial's poetry, but the emperor's residence, that has merited such praise. In a more explicit allusion to C. 3.30, Martial proclaims the eternity of the Temple of the Flavian Gens in terms recalling the Augustan motif of the temporal endurance of the Roman social and religious order: ‘Tarpeia summi saxa dum patris stabunt, / dum voce supplex dumque ture placabit / matrona divae dulce Iuliae numen’ (‘as long as the Tarpeian rock of the supreme father shall stand, as long as suppliant matrons shall propitiate Divine Julia's fair deity with speech and incense’, 9.1.5–7).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The allusion becomes yet more pointed when we recall that the Temple of the Flavian Gens also served as family mausoleum:Footnote ¹⁰⁸ the durability of Horace's poetic monument outstripped the ‘royal decay/site’ (‘regalique situ’) of the Pharaohs’ pyramids and the tomb of Mausolus — perhaps implicitly Augustus’ mausoleum as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Domitian's family tomb, easily outperforming poetic monuments, is as enduring as the cosmic order itself: ‘manebit altum Flaviae decus gentis / cum sole et astris cumque luce Romana’ (‘the lofty glory of the Flavian line shall endure along with the sun and stars and Roman daylight’, 9.1.8–9).

In Book 8, dedicated to Domitian, Martial's introductory epistle addresses the emperor as a deity, and announces that the book devoted to his praises will be purified of epigram's customary obscenity: ‘cum pars libri et maior et melior ad maiestatem sacri nominis tui alligata sit, meminerit non nisi religiosa purificatione lustratos accedere ad templa debere’ (‘since the greater and better portion of the book is tied to the majesty of your holy name, let it recall that only those purified by religious lustration ought to approach temples’). Poetry in the divine Domitian's honour, according to a well-established metaphor, is figured as a temple. Martial, as poet, is the temple guardian: ‘quod ut custoditurum me lecturi sciant, in ipso libelli huius limine profiteri brevissimo placuit epigrammate’ (‘So that those about to read may know that I will be guardian of this principle, I have decided to announce it on the very threshold of this little book with a very short epigram’). The architectural metaphor of the limen (threshold) arises in the preface's closing sentence — i.e. at the book's threshold. The following poem, 8.1, remains on the threshold: the book is about to enter (‘intrature’, 1) the laurel-adorned residence of the emperor (later described in 8.36). Martial, conscious of his role as guardian of his book's purity, sends away nude Venus, and summons instead Caesar's Pallas (‘Pallas Caesariana’, 4). In the following epigram, 8.2, Janus, father of the calendar (‘fastorum genitor parensque’, 1), wishes he had even more faces to look upon the victorious Domitian. The choice of deities in these opening epigrams is significant: Martial is outlining the main elements of the Forum Transitorium. After the preface, which resembles the entrance to a templum, the book's first two poems feature Minerva and Janus, the deities honoured in Domitian's new forum. Martial's book thus shows deference to Domitian not only in refraining from obscenity, but also in accommodating itself to the shape of the emperor's monumental project.

Book 8 marks itself out as different from other books by Martial. In a comparable way, the epigrams on imperial monuments partake of a sacral awe and encomiastic style quite unlike Martial's satiric treatment of the urbs. What is the relation between the emperor's works and the sordid, defiling city that normally absorbs Martial's attention? 10.28, addressed to Janus newly installed in the Forum Transitorium, briefly references the city's attritive force: ‘pervius exiguos habitabas ante penates, / plurima qua medium Roma terebat iter’ (‘Previously you inhabited a meagre dwelling on a thoroughfare, through the midst of which Rome's great crowd wore a path’, 3–4). Now Janus occupies the more protected precinct of the new imperial forum. Caesar's monuments are imbued with the sacred reverence owed to the emperor: they cannot be worn down or defiled. Domitian's palace seems to belong to another realm: it exists in Rome and yet somehow is not of Rome. Specifically, the emperor's domus belongs to the heavens, as does the Temple of the Flavian Gens, itself apparently constructed out of the emperor's birth-house: ‘caeli est’ (‘it is of the sky’, 9.1.10). The height, massiveness, and dazzling materials of Domitian's palace, as well as its expansive occupation of the Palatine hill, contributed to the impression that it belonged to a higher realm all its own.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The contrast with Augustus’ house, which presented itself, at least in part, as one especially distinguished house (domus) among others, has been amply appreciated by scholars. In Martial's encomiastic epigrams, Domitianic monuments are abstracted from the urban fabric, just as, to a certain extent, they stand out from the scoptic epigrams that surround them within the space of Martial's books.

Of course, it might be doubted whether the emperor's buildings can be truly sequestered from the urban fabric any more than an encomiastic epigram can remain sealed off from the contextual intrusions of surrounding epigrams in the ‘juxtapository environment’ of Martial's books.Footnote ¹¹¹ An especially revealing point of contact between emperor and urbs is legislation focused on the city. In 7.61, Martial lauds Domitian's edict of a.d. 92 forbidding shopkeepers from allowing their stalls to extend into the street.

The effect of Domitian's edict is uncanny. The usual state of affairs in Martial's satiric vision of Rome is promiscuous mixing, erasure of boundaries, and the destruction of moral and spatial distinctions. Such was the case before the edict: ‘inque suo nullum limine limen erat’ (‘no threshold remained within its own threshold’, 7.61.2). A praetor being forced to walk through filth (7.61.6) is precisely the sort of thing that characterizes the Rome validated as authentic in the Epigrams. By the end of 7.61, however, limina are neatly preserved; everyone keeps to their own space. Domitian's Haussmanizing scheme imposes an unfamiliar (not to mention implausible) degree of order on the normally chaotic streets, and so wins an exceptional status in Martial's epigrammatic image of Rome.Footnote ¹¹²

The question of the relation between the emperor's awe-inspiring, sacred monuments and the sordid city surrounding them ultimately resists easy resolution — and it may well be that there is not meant to be a resolution. A final example will serve to illustrate the contours of the problem. In Book 9, Martial juxtaposes two epigrams designed to be read as a pendant-piece. 9.59 and 9.61 are both long epigrams in elegiac couplets exactly twenty-two lines in length, and begin with markedly similar patterns of syntax and word-order.

Despite parallelism of syntax, the subject matter is systematically contrasting. In 9.59, Mamurra, wandering through the trendy shopping area located in the Saepta Julia, affects to be a rich buyer seriously considering expensive merchandise, but in the end purchases only two cheap wine cups which, since he has no slave, he must carry off himself (9.59. 21–2). Mamurra makes false pretence of his resources, and practises consumer voyeurism: his lust for luxury items, as his viewing of slave boys suggests (‘inspexit molles pueros oculisque comedit’, ‘he inspected the soft slave boys, and devoured them with his eyes’, 3), is compulsive to the degree that it is unfulfillable.Footnote ¹¹³ While 9.59 takes place in the capital, 9.61 concerns a house (domus) in southern Spain. In the clearer air of Corduba, there is plentiful natural resource and tranquil affection (‘placidum … amat’). In the middle of the Corduban house is an immense plane tree originally planted by the ‘auspicious right hand’ of Julius Caesar while he was visiting Gades during his Spanish campaign of 44 b.c.

The tree, removed from Rome, has remained pure and integral, a living embodiment of the continuing glory of the Caesars (‘perpetuos … honores’). Whereas Mamurra will never have a right to claim ownership of the diverse objects he puts his hands on, the plane tree planted by Caesar's hand belongs to him perpetually as the manifestation of his undying fame.

Despite these contrasts, there is an underlying connection between the two sites honoured in their respective epigrams. The term Saepta (‘enclosure’) refers, of course, to the Saepta Julia, a monumentalization of the Republican voting pens, planned or begun by Julius Caesar and completed under Augustus by Agrippa in 26 b.c. It was damaged in the fire of a.d. 80, and quickly restored by Domitian: the renovation appears to have made a positive impression on contemporaries (Statius, Silvae 4.5.2; Martial, Epigrams 2.14.5, 57.2; 11.59.1; 10.80.4). The structure attested to a connection between Julius Caesar and Augustus, under whom, respectively, the project was begun and completed, and Domitian, who restored it. Both the Caesarian plane tree (‘platanus … Caesariana’) and the Saepta Julia embody the perpetual glory of the Caesarian gens — a tree in the province that still puts forth green leaves, and a stone structure in the city, continually repaired by Caesar's successors. The name of Martial's satiric target Mamurra has not been chosen at random: excoriated in Catullus’ poetry for his immoral voraciousness, a Mamurra was Julius Caesar's notorious chief of engineers.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Catullus’ Mamurra devoured patrimonies, invaded everyone's beds, and plundered provinces. Martial's Mamurra has no patrimony to devour, must content himself with staring lecherously at unattainable boys, and, far from plundering a province, barely succeeds in removing two wine cups from an urban market. The movement from Julius Caesar to Domitian, and from Catullus to Martial, is marked by both continuity and progress. Whereas Catullus’ Mamurra and Caesar are all too closely conjoined,Footnote ¹¹⁵Epigrams 9.59 and 9.61 ensure that Caesar and ‘Mamurra’ remain morally and topographically separate. In Domitian's restored Rome, ‘Mamurra’ cannot become Mamurra: his voracious desires are safely confined to the Saepta.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Spanish location of Caesar's tree in 9.61 tree is not accidental. In Martial's pendant-piece on the urban and provincial legacy of the Caesars, he honours his own two patriae. Spain and Rome intertwine throughout Martial's Epigrams, defining each other through complementarity and opposition. Yet while Martial sometimes builds up the cachet of Spain, Rome remains the chief focus. This essay has explored how Flavian and especially Domitianic interest in urban buildings informed Martial's poetic representation of the city: a heightened awareness of urban topography characterizes both the new regime and the epigrammatist. It is misleading to prioritize either the tendency of the epigrammatic genre to enable a newly explicit mode of urban description, or the determining impact of the Flavian urbs on Martial's poetry: both phenomena are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing. The concepts of the consumer city and world-city cohere, as we have seen, with the underlying dynamics of Martial's earliest collections. Martial's work also engages with specifically Flavian concerns with the public display of art, the post-Neronian restoration of the city, the emperor's divinity, and the genealogy of the imperial line. In fashioning his urban poetics, Martial drew upon the seminal work of the Augustan poets and especially Ovid. At the same time, he developed his own distinctly epigrammatic themes of saturation, juxtaposition, dissonance, and the attritive relentlessness of the city.

It is a measure of the importance of the city for Martial that when, at the end of his life, he returns to Spain, he nonetheless includes some of his most vividly imagined scenes of urban life in his final, twelfth book. In 12.57, the epigrammatist explains to his rich friend Sparsus Rome's power to undermine sleep. Sparsus might not understand such things, since he resides in the rarified domain (regnis) of his suburban villa: ‘in profundo somnus et quies nullis / offensa linguis, nec dies nisi admissus’ (‘sleep in the depths, and a quiet undisturbed by any tongues, and no daylight unless it is admitted’, 12.57.24–5). Martial, by contrast, lives in threatening intimacy with the city: ‘nos transeuntis risus excitat turbae / et ad cubile est Roma’ (‘as for me, the laughter of the passing crowd rouses me, and at my bedside is — Rome’, 26–7). In a shocking phrase, Martial reverses his normal metonymic procedure of representing Rome's totality through its materially specific components: next to the poet's humble bedside is — not some specific person or thing, but the City itself. Despite Martial's complaint, loss of sleep can be advantageous in poetic terms: the Callimachean poet was conventionally known for his sleepless devotion to the composition of exquisite verse. In Martial's Epigrams, the City's relentlessly intrusive presence creates another kind of insomniac, and another kind of poetry.