Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature
This chapter reads Martial’s Epigrams in chronological order. It pays particular attention to the poems about the emperor. It is sensitive to their quantity, quality, and position relative to the remaining poems. Themes from the imperial poems are put in contact with other non-imperial poems, especially poems that are proximate to poems about the emperor. The narrative arc is fairly clear. One begins with a narrative voice that conjures a rising star who is on the make and playing a pseudo-dangerous game with power. Over time the poetry draws closer to an emperor who is himself waxing in size and strength. The poetic voice becomes ever more exuberant even as the relationship to power feels increasingly split. The poet admires the prince. The poet is also afraid of him. The last is never stated, though. The symptomatic figure of this split is Earinus, the emperor’s beautiful and disgusting eunuch boyfriend. Domitian’s death precipitates a disastrous liberation. The chapter ends with an examination of the fraught project of constructing a post-Domitianic Martial in the wake of what had come before. The poet is reluctant to even say what, exactly, had come before. Instead, one finds books of poems that are marked by erasures, rewrites, and chronological irregularities. They celebrate a “newfound freedom” and a “return to art,” but things are falling apart. The poet praises a new Rome that he ends up leaving.