Martial by Peter Howell

Author:Peter Howell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2009-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

Martial and Roman Social Life

Even in the nineteenth century, when Martial was regarded as a trivial and rather disgusting writer, he was acknowledged to throw a brilliant light on Roman social life. For example, in 1874 the Catalan painter Marian Fortuny Marsal (father of the better known painter of the same name) wrote: ‘I have just been reading Martial, and he pleases me greatly, apart from the obscenity. What curious stuff on the habits and intimate life of the Romans! I have found there subjects for magnificent pictures, and I find it astonishing that painters have not made use of these authors to give their works the character of antiquity’. (Unfortunately Fortuny could not follow this up as he died that year.)

Martial’s desire to reflect real life in his poems has already been mentioned (p. 57), and they have generally been found as illuminating and entertaining a source as Fortuny found them. It would be a mistake always to take them at face value. Martial may have some kind of reason to reshape, or even invent, his material to suit the purpose of the moment. Often his subjects are taken from the literary tradition.

Take, for example, his attacks on old women, represented as desperate for sex, and using every means to try to appear younger than they are. It would be a waste of time to try to find evidence for this as a contemporary phenomenon, as the topic was a stock one, going back to Greek Old Comedy, and commonly found in epigram – especially in the Garland of Philip. A well-known Latin example is Horace’s Satire on the witch Canidia (1.8). To us, jokes about lack of teeth, or hair, or other forms of ‘ugliness’, are tasteless, but in the ancient world they must have been widely enjoyed. Old men are mocked too, especially for sexual impotence.

A genuine cause for complaint may underlie his attacks on the incompetence of doctors, although they too were a popular subject in comedy and satirical epigram. 1.47 is a typical example:

Nuper erat medicus, nunc est vispillo Diaulus:

quod vispillo facit, fecerat et medicus.

Diaulus was recently a doctor, but is now an undertaker. What he does as an undertaker is the same as what he did as a doctor.

Sometimes the doctor does not actually kill his patients, but merely leaves them worse off than they were. Most doctors at Rome were Greek, but even scientific writers agree that many were ignorant. One is reminded of the elder Cato’s warning to his son that the Greeks had sworn to kill off all the ‘barbarians’ by means of medicine, and that they charged fees so as to win confidence (Pliny, Natural History 29.14).

A profession rarely found as the subject of satirical literature is that of the auctioneer. This was despised, as it involved not only money-making, but also vulgar public display. It was certainly profitable: at 5.56 Martial advises the father of a thick son to make him an auctioneer or an architect, and at 6.8

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