by Martial
Selected Epigrams
MARTIAL
Translated with notes by
Susan McLean
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martial, author.
[Epigrammata. Selections. English]
Selected epigrams / Martial; translated with notes by Susan McLean.
pages cm — (Wisconsin studies in classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-30174-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-30173-6 (e-book)
1. Martial—Translations into English.
2. Epigrams, Latin—Translations into English.
I. McLean, Susan, 1953–, translator. II. Title.
III. Series: Wisconsin studies in classics.
PA6502.M37 2014
878´.0102—dc23
2014007450
Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through the generous support and enduring vision of Warren G. Moon.
Contents
Preface
Introduction Marc Kleijwegt
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five
Book Six
Book Seven
Book Eight
Book Nine
Book Ten
Book Eleven
Book Twelve
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Who was Martial? He was a talented poet with a particular genius for humor, wit, and satire. He was also an outsider of modest means from a distant province in what is now Spain. He came to Rome as a young man hoping to earn a living from writing, which could be done only by finding wealthy patrons. The contradictions between his skills and his goals were many. Readers enjoyed satiric and humorous verse, but ranked it very low among forms of literature. Satire was also dangerous. Satiric poets ran the risk of alienating patrons if the patrons suspected that they were butts of the satire. Although the emperor was the most desirable patron of all, since he could provide the greatest rewards, prominent writers such as Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan had been forced to commit suicide when they had angered their ruling emperor, Nero.
Martial’s response to these challenges was pragmatic. To the dangerous emperor Domitian, he offered poems of hyperbolic flattery. Martial seems to have been largely disappointed in his hopes of generous reward from Domitian. Although he did survive that ruler’s fifteen-year-long reign, he later found that his praise of Domitian did not ingratiate him with subsequent emperors. He also flattered a large number of lesser patrons, writing poems in praise of them and often addressing them in poems as friends who would concur with his satirical gibes at others. Unlike Catullus, whose satirical epigrams Martial admired, Martial publicly insisted that his satire was not directed at real individuals. Other than patrons, real people named in his satirical poems were already safely dead. From his patrons Martial received enough income to qualify for the privileges of a knight and to support his taste for good wine, good food, and attractive slave boys. He did not, however, achieve the kind of financial independence that would free him from the onerous duties of paying morning calls on patrons (as he often complained) until he finally retired to his hometown in Spain near the end of his life.
To write effective satirical epigrams, a writer needs a keen sense of the ridiculous, incisive wit, and trenchant punch lines. In addition to these skills, Martial had insight into the quirks of human behavior, and a delight in bawdy humor. Since many of Martial’s poems are putdowns of one kind or another, one might assume that he had a malicious or sour personality. But the poems themselves provide contrary evidence. His tender epitaphs for child slaves, such as Erotion (5.34) and Pantagathus (6.52), his poems in praise of balance and moderation in life (5.20; 10.47), and his poems that poke fun at himself (6.82; 10.9) all reveal a man who combined wit with feeling and who was as ready to laugh at himself as at others.
As Freud points out in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, humor often has a sexual or aggressive element in it (97). Because these impulses must normally be repressed in social interactions, humor provides pleasure, both for the person telling the joke and for those laughing at it, by enabling the impulse to be expressed despite the social taboos against it (100– 101) and by providing temporary relief from the psychic energy used to maintain the repression (118). Freud notes that “innocent” jokes, which lack this element of violating taboos, seldom cause a burst of laughter (96). Martial, when satirizing an unnamed writer of bland and innocuous epigrams (7.25) or an epigrammatist whose language and subjects are always chaste (3.69), implies that such approaches just aren’t entertaining. His use of generic names for the targets of his satire allows Martial to make jokes about even the rich and powerful, because he can do so without making his emperor or patrons think that he is attacking them. In a joke about a generic target, no individual gets hurt. Martial is thus able both to enjoy rebellion against authority figures and, by satirizing those who violate the standards of acceptable behavior in society, to align himself with those in power, using embarrassment as a tool to maintain social codes.
It is difficult to winnow a clear notion of Martial’s personality from the many stances he adopts for the sake of his jokes and satires. He visited and dined with the wealthy and powerful, but his dependent status meant he was not treated as one of them. He often jokes about his poverty, his mean apartment, his meager farm in Nomentum, and his threadbare toga, yet some of his complaints may have been intended as hints to patrons that more support was needed. He appears to be proud of his fame, irritated by plagiarists who try to claim his wit and skill for themselves, and unwilling to accept the general assessment that epigrams were a lesser form of literature than the odes, epics, and tragedies that people of his time valued more. Any dissatisfactions he had with his patrons had to be expressed as jokes and directed at pseudonymous targets in a way that wouldn’t anger the actual patrons. Yet despite Martial’s need to be circumspect in his writing, Pliny the Younger, who knew him, states in one of his published letters (3.21) that Martial had no less candor than wit and acerbity (236; my translation). Undoubtedly Martial was as complex and contradictory as most people, yet I have found in translating his poems that he comes across as a man with an irrepressible gusto for life and a fascination with human behavior in all its forms.
This translation of about a third of the Latin epigrams of Martial is meant to provide a wide cross section of Martial’s satirical themes, subjects, and humorous and poetic techniques, in contemporary, colloquial language, for an audience of college students and general readers. The poems are translated into rhymed, metrical verse in an attempt to capture the poetic polish of the originals. I selected these
epigrams to convey a vivid and varied portrait of Roman life in the first century CE, to show the range of Martial’s tones and subjects, and to showcase his satirical wit and often racy humor. I tended to favor the shorter, funnier, and more accessible epigrams over longer ones (in which the final point often does not seem to be worth the long setup), those that are overfull of allusions to classical myth or history, those that are mainly intended to flatter patrons, those that depend on untranslatable puns, or those whose humor would not come across to contemporary readers. Some of Martial’s humor depends on obscenity, which has often been avoided or minimized in past translations, and I have tried not to downplay that element, but have provided notes to explain jokes and attitudes that may seem puzzling to readers unfamiliar with Roman culture. Humor varies over time and between cultures; I have not tried to impose current standards of sensitivity on poems whose humor often may seem racist, sexist, offensive in its treatment of gay men, lesbians, and people with physical disabilities, or callous about violence toward and sexual abuse of slaves.
The Latin text on which these translations are based is the Loeb Classical Library edition of Martial by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). I have chosen to omit the epigrams from Martial’s first three collections: De Spectaculis, written to commemorate the games at the opening of the Flavian Amphitheater, later called the Colosseum; Xenia, two-line poems to accompany gifts of food and wine; and Apophoreta, two-line poems to accompany other gifts. Those three collections provide evidence of the kinds of shows presented at the arena and the kinds of gifts that would have been exchanged at the Saturnalia, but they hold limited interest for the contemporary reader, whereas the satire of human behavior contained in the main twelve books is perennially interesting and amusing, while also providing a lively and detailed view of life in ancient Rome.
Martial writes in a number of classical meters, particularly elegiac couplets (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter, which make up the majority of his epigrams) and hendecasyllabics (lines of eleven syllables), but I have followed the customary practice of English translators in using English meters instead. Latin quantitative verse, which is based on patterns of long and short vowels, has very different rhythms than English accentual-syllabic verse, in which the patterns are created by stressed and unstressed syllables. A translator cannot simply substitute stresses for vowel length while maintaining the same patterns. Though some attempts to adapt classical meters to English have been made by poets such as Tennyson and Swinburne, the practice has not caught on, and for good reason. The rhythms of classical meters tend to sound odd and jerky in English; and the longer the poem is, the more monotonous the resulting pattern becomes. Dactylic meter, quite common in Latin, is rare and calls attention to itself in English; the vast majority of English poetry is written in iambic meter, which most closely approximates English speech rhythms and—with the help of common metrical substitutions—can sound both elegant and colloquial. I have therefore stuck to iambic meter in my translations. Latin words tend to have more syllables than English words, so an English translation of a Latin line will usually have fewer syllables but more words than the Latin.
Like most English translators of Martial, I have added rhymes to his poems, although classical Latin poems did not rhyme. Rhyme has for centuries been an essential feature of the epigram in English, adding surprise and wit to punch lines by bringing together dissimilar things in unexpected ways. Rhyme also can add emphasis and closure in poems. Since English poetry does not have as many meters as Latin, rhyme adds an element of poetic craft that helps to convey the polish of Martial’s poetry. Translators have most commonly resorted to rhymed couplets to convey Martial’s wit, but having the rhymes come close together can make it hard to convey the poem’s content accurately. For poems longer than two lines, I have preferred to rhyme every other line in order to gain flexibility and accuracy, sometimes using a couplet to provide more emphatic closure at the end.
I have tried to remain as close as possible to the length and number of lines of Martial’s epigrams and to avoid omitting or adding material to the poems. For Martial’s longer lines I tend to use iambic pentameter (five iambic feet), the most common meter in English, even when translating lines of hexameter (six feet), because hexameters tend to drag in English. When the content cannot be boiled down to a pentameter line, I have occasionally used heptameter lines (seven feet), which tend to be heard as alternating lines of tetrameter (four feet) and trimeter (three feet), a pattern common in English ballads and hymns. The heptameter lines can sound urbane, but the pentameter ones usually have more comic impact, so I use heptameter sparingly. On a few occasions, I have used one line of hexameter followed by a line of pentameter, in imitation of the elegiac couplet itself, but in iambic meter. For Martial’s hendecasyllabics I often use iambic tetrameter (a sprightlier rhythm than pentameter), although I try to suit the rhythm to the poem’s content, as well. Latin and Greek names, especially polysyllabic ones, can be hard to fit into the lines without making the lines quite long. I have retained the names wherever possible, but where both the satirical target and an addressee are named, I have often dropped one of the names, usually the addressee’s. Though the addressees were real people and the targets were usually invented, the addressees are named as a compliment to a patron, whereas the names of targets are sometimes relevant to the content of the epigram. If the poem has an odd number of lines, instead of adding an extra line for the sake of the rhyme scheme, I have often resorted to alternate rhyme schemes or interlocking rhymes in order to avoid padding the lines with material not in the original.
Some translators update situations or Anglicize names in their translations in order to make Martial’s epigrams seem more contemporary. I prefer to leave the poems in their own cultural context, but occasionally substitute a more common name for a lesser-known “poetic” term (Venus for Cytherea, for example) or add a compensatory gloss, filling in some details that would not have needed explaining for the original audience, in order to avoid the need for readers to consult the notes. I also substitute English idioms for Latin idioms instead of translating word for word, so that the colloquial flavor of Martial’s language can be retained. I have tried to maintain the level of obscenity of Martial’s language by finding equally obscene terms in English because the obscenity is part of the humor of the epigrams in question. Puns are usually untranslatable, and many of the sonic effects in the original wording cannot be recreated in another language; instead, I have tried to create equally musical effects using English. Because of the much larger vocabulary in English, I often have used synonyms instead of repeating the same word again, sometimes to gain variety, but more often to accommodate the demands of rhyming. In the cases in which Martial quotes a Greek phrase, I have translated it into English, too, since contemporary readers are even less likely to know Greek than to know Latin. Although in my notes I often refer to the speaker in the poems as “Martial,” and many of his poems include autobiographical details that seem to be based on fact, other poems, such as those that refer to his “wife,” seem to be written using a persona created for comic purposes, so readers should be cautious about assuming that any of the epigrams are straightforward autobiography or reflect the author’s actual attitudes.
I wish to thank the editors of Transference, Measure, Lucid Rhythms, the Classical Outlook, Blue Unicorn, the Chimaera, Amphora, Arion, Literary Imagination, Light Quarterly, Two Lines, the Formalist, and the Neovictorian/Cochlea, in which some of these translations first appeared, often in earlier versions. I also wish to thank the University of Iowa, Cambridge University, the American Academy in Rome, and Southwest Minnesota State University for their research facilities, and John Finamore, Peter Green, Art L. Spisak, Dick Davis, John N. Drayton, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their suggestions. I owe A. M. Juster a special debt of gratitude for getting me interested in Martial in the first place, and D. R. Shackleton
Bailey a much greater debt for the excellent help his literal translations and notes provided.
Introduction
A Life in Epigram
Marc Kleijwegt
The ruins of Augusta Bilbilis are located 2.5 miles north of the modern city of Calatayud, which is 145 miles northeast of Madrid. In its heyday, the first and second century CE, Bilbilis was an impressive city overlooking the valley of the river Jalón from the heights of the Cerro de Bámbola; it boasted a forum, a main temple located on an immense podium, baths, and a theater.1 The epithet Augusta suggests that the city was founded with the rank of a municipium in an unknown year after 27 BCE, the year in which the great-nephew of Julius Caesar was given the honorary name Augustus. The new foundation replaced a Celtiberian settlement, either on the same site or at Valdeherrera five miles to the southeast.2 In a municipium local aristocrats could acquire Roman citizenship for themselves and their families by holding political office. Over time this strategy produced a pool of families who became more and more Roman in outlook, mentality, and cultural attitudes, and more loyal to the central seat of power. Its success can be inferred from the complete absence of Celtiberian names in the epigraphic record and from the lifestyle and the cultural worldview endorsed and promoted by the city’s inhabitants. The houses and apartments that have been excavated since 2006 are richly decorated with frescoes, an indication that the local population was eager to share in a cultural language that originated from the main center of political power. Bilbilis is the place of birth of Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known as the poet Martial. With one important exception that will be discussed at the end of this introduction, all the information on Martial’s life and his career as a writer comes from his poetry.
