Patronage resembles food in the Roman world: it was ubiquitous; it was invested with moral significance; it was a subject for many writers and especially satirists; and it is difficult to untangle Roman attitudes and social constructions about them from their social and historical realities. (Food and patronage also share an overlap in the cena, a focal component in the gift-exchange of patronage.) In this lightly revised publication of his 2018 dissertation F.M. attempts to study patronage in a way that reminds me of E. Gowers's masterful treatment of food in The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (1993). The present book is a wide-ranging and useful study of the complex representation of the patron–client relationship in Horace, Martial and Juvenal.
Roman patronage took different forms – individual, civic and imperial patronage – and was shaped by political imperatives, mythic idealisations and philosophical ethics of friendship. Despite its near ubiquity, there is little evidence how it functioned practically in the late Republic and the early Empire. F.M. sketches some of this basic sociological framework in a brief three pages. The rest of the short introduction adumbrates the mythic origins of patronage from Roman sources, and it offers comments on the language of amicitia and some observations on the roles of humour and intertextuality. There is no clear statement of his approach to the ‘socio-poetics’ of the texts or on whether or how he will distinguish the poetic representation of patronage from the ‘real thing’.
This study is fundamentally a collection and close reading of individual texts: ‘Es gibt daher m. E. keine feste semantische Struktur der Terminologie, sondern jeder Kontext und Text legt eine (neue) Semantik innerhalb des Diskurses fest. Es muss also jeweils gefragt werden, ob es sich um eine affirmative, subversiv-kritische oder ironische Perspektive der (amicus)-patronus-cliens-Darstellung handelt’ (p. 10). His aim is to show how the texts oscillate ‘zwischen Kritik, Anerkennung, Humor und Ironie’ (p. xi). There is plenty of material to explicate. The language of amicitia obscures differences in status while pointing to complex tensions in the dependent relationship. In general, Horace appears to knit together the concepts of friendship from moral philosophy and patronage so that the tension between them is clear but ambivalent; Martial and Juvenal make that tension and inconsistency their emphatic point.
Horace's representation of patronage is the most complex among these three poets, and the chapter on Horace is the most developed. F.M. reads Horace both as an involved participant in the system of patronage, as an amicus of Maecenas, and as an external observer. For the most part, F.M. follows straightforward readings of Sat. 1.6, 1.9 and 2.6 and Epist. 1.7, 1.17 and 1.18. Horace as the ‘satirical I’ finds the boundaries between friend and client murky. The volgus views him as a mere client rather than a true friend, while he emphasises the true worth and affections of friendship. In contrast, the ‘pest’ of 1.9 is goal-oriented and transactional, and his ‘relationship’ is a burden for the patron and for Horace. Horace gives advice from his own experience on the advantages of the patron–client relationship and on the loss of individual freedom. F.M. includes Epode 2 and Ode 2.18 for Horace's commentary as an ‘external observer’ of patronage, in which he uses the form of ethical discourse – reflections on the condicio humana – to draw the excesses of the relationship from their extremes towards a middle point of resolution.
The chapter on Martial, the longest of the book, presents the challenge of organisation more clearly. Rather than continue the ‘participant/observer’ division of his Horace chapter, F.M. chooses to structure his study of Martial by client activities: cena, sportula and salutatio. This is reasonable: Horace regards these activities as the epiphenomena of patronage, while they are of primary importance to Martial. But what is their role in patronage? Are cenae synonymous with it, or do they also represent ‘real’ friendship? One thinks of the simple or philosophical meals that Horace describes in Sat. 2.1.70–4, 2.2.118–25 and 2.6.65–76 and of Juvenal in Sat. 11; yet F.M. does not discuss Horace, Sat. 2.1, 2.2 or 2.8 (the dinner with Nasidienus) or Juvenal 11. The section on Martial raises more questions. For example, how many patrons did Martial have; as a knight, did he need the 100 quadrantes of the sportula; etc.? Without a clear statement on the poetic transformations of these client duties in Martial's poetry, it is difficult to know how F.M. is framing them, although he explicates dozens of poems with insight.
In perhaps the most interesting section on Martial F.M. examines the broad correspondence and tension between amicitia and clientela and between ‘true’ and ‘seeming’ friendship. He presents this as Martial's ‘unmasking’ of the emptiness at the heart of dependency, highlighted by the overlap of colere and servire. This overlap marks the difference between colere and amare, key to understanding 2.55. The contrast between Martial 1.54 and 3.36 also shows that there was a hierarchical status among a patron's clients, and years of service merited – or should merit – a different treatment. So, in 3.36 Martial complains with military and gladiatorial language that he is being treated as a tiro by his patron Fabianus, who orders him to undertake the duties of a novus amicus, when his 30 years of service – his ‘worn toga’ – have earned his discharge (meruisse … rudem). These studies of the vocabulary of patronage are the strength of the book. The vocabulary often obscures the relationship. F.M. distinguishes the terms parasite and client, using Plautus’ Menaechmi, where both figures appear in distinct roles, to make a convincing case. He considers Horace's use of scurra, and treats Martial's use of (vetus) sodalis, amicus, rex, dominus, colere and amare at length. The complexity of the terms is conveyed in the book's title, taken from Juvenal Sat. 5, in which the client Trebius is abused at dinner by his ‘friend’ Virro, but ‘deserves it’. Although the title suggests negative conclusions about patronage, F.M.'s point is that the complex representations require careful investigation.
The chapter on Juvenal follows S. Braund (Beyond Anger [1988]) in seeing a ‘progressive disengagement’ in Juvenal's attitude towards clients from sympathy to contempt to irony. F.M. examines Satires 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9; and he notes interestingly that outside of Books 1 and 3 patronage plays little role in Juvenal. In a final addendum he discusses the ‘speaker role’ in Juvenal, but superficially. This is an issue not only for Juvenal, but for all the poets F.M. discusses. In the chapter on Horace there is regular ambivalence between references to ‘Horace’, the ‘Horace-speaker’, ‘the speaker’, the ‘I-speaker’ that should be clarified and made more consistent.
There are several features that limit the usefulness of this study. Passages are quoted, but not translated. It lacks a general index and an index verborum, making cross-references difficult. One is occasionally directed in the footnotes and in the text itself to ‘See above’ and ‘See below’ without specifics. The lengthy index locorum does not distinguish mentions in the text from mentions in footnotes, and after page 163 the index locorum page references are off by a single page. There are some two dozen minor typographical errors in the text, virtually all easy to spot and not affecting the comprehension.
