Martial's Rome Empire and the Ideology of Epigram

This provocative book is a major contribution to our understanding of Martial's poetics, his vision of the relationship between art and reality, and his role in formulating modern perceptions of Rome. The study shows how on every scale from the microscopic to the cosmic, Martial displays epigram's ambition to enact the sociality of urban life, but also to make Rome rise out of epigram's architecture and gestures. Martial's distinctive aesthetic, grounded in paradox and inconsistency, ensures that the humblest, most throwaway poetic form is best poised to capture first century empire in all its dazzling complexity. As well as investigating many of Martial's central themes - monumentality, economics, death, carnival, exile - this books also questions what kind of a mascot Martial is for classics today in our own advanced, multicultural world, and will be an invaluable guide for scholars and students of classical literature and Roman history.

Introduction: getting to know Martial; 1. Copyright and contagion: the city as text; 2. Vigor Mortis: living and dying; 3. Poetic economies: figuring out Martial's maths; 4. Mundus inversus: Martial's Saturnalia; 5. The space of epigram; Epilogue.

A study of the poetics of the Epigrams which explores Martial's radical vision of the relationship between art and reality and his role in formulating modern perceptions of Rome. This is a major contribution to the rehabilitation of Martial and to the understanding of Flavian literature and Roman material culture.

Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Rome, La Sapieza. She has published Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002), Ovid's Lovers (2006) and Martial's Rome (2008), and has also contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (edited by Kirk Freudenberg, 2005) and Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (edited by Jason Konig and Tim Whitmarsh, 2007).