Martial and the Book

Abstract

Alongside Catullus and Ovid, Martial is the Latin writer who tells us most about the ancient book, and he receives detailed treatment in most histories of ancient book production: he has a chapter to himself, for instance, in Roberts and Skeats' The Birth of the Codex. Books and reading are a central concern of his poetry from his very first publications: around 10-15% of the epigrams deal with this theme. The topic has received, however, much less attention from literary critics than from scholars interested in the Realien of ancient book production, and those who have paid attention to it have tended to play down the importance of the published books compared to the ‘occasional’ reception of the epigrams either through recitation or through informal pamphlets (the so-called ‘libelli’ prominent in the important work of Peter White). Even John Sullivan, who was more aware than many of the importance of the book in Martial, sees the published books as ‘open-ended collections, to which material could be added as it became available or necessary’ and declares that ‘Martial is less careful about the endings of his books…than about their beginnings and general structure’. I have suggested elsewhere that, on the contrary, the endings of Martial's books may be seen as possessing particularly ingenious effects of closure, and in general it seems to me that the engagement with reception in book-form shown by Martial's epigrams is extremely sophisticated.