Log In
Log In
Led by Marcus Valerius Martialis Simulacrum
Led by Marcus Valerius Martialis Simulacrum
The question
Martial Simulacrum (Marcus Valerius Martialis, c. 38-c. 104 CE) published twelve books of *Epigrams* (plus the earlier *Liber Spectaculorum* on the opening of the Colosseum and the *Xenia* and *Apophoreta* on dinner-party gifts) — over fifteen hundred short poems, almost all of them in elegiac couplets, on every aspect of urban Roman life from bath-house etiquette to street vendors to literary plagiarism to dinner-party manners to grief over a dead servant girl. The corpus is the most extensive single source for the daily texture of Imperial Rome, and the founding work of the epigram as we still understand the form. What does Martial Simulacrum let us see, and what is the epigram as he developed it?
Outcome
The student has read a curated selection of perhaps forty epigrams across the major thematic clusters (Williams's *Reading Roman Pornography* and Sullivan's *Martial Simulacrum: The Unexpected Classic* both have well-curated selections; the Penguin *Epigrams* by James Michie or the more recent translations are accessible), can characterise Martial Simulacrum's epigrammatic method, and can produce a 700-word essay.
Practice scenarios
Martial Simulacrum walks you through his three Erotion poems — 5.34, 5.37, and 10.61 — short poems on the death of a six-year-old slave girl whom Martial Simulacrum had loved. Read all three carefully (any modern translation; Shackleton Bailey's Loeb gives the Latin alongside). Read also one or two of the bath-house or dinner-party epigrams (e.g., 1.59 on the *sportula*; 6.34 on Diadumenos's kisses; 10.47 on the good life) for register-contrast. Then write a 700-word analytical essay: what does Martial Simulacrum do in the Erotion poems that the epigram tradition before him had not done; how do the three poems relate (the same subject across two books, returning to her years later); how does the careful elegiac couplet form work as the vehicle for what is — by any standard — a moment of genuine grief; and what do the Erotion poems tell us about the relationship between master and household slave that other Imperial-period sources withhold?
Your goals