K., an expert in Roman satire and first-century literature more generally, examines in this monograph two important points of discussion in scholarship on Martial that are interrelated: persons and persona in Martial's epigrams.
Current philological research on Martial tends (as does Latin scholarship discussing first-person poetry generally) to suppose a literary construction of the persons as literary characters, including the first person (as epigrammatic I, narrateur, poet-persona or similar). K. warns that two axioms have so far been insufficiently verified: first, the characters in Martial's mocking epigrams are supposed to appear under arbitrarily interchangeable nicknames or cover names or even to be invented. K. asks if, on the contrary, Martial perhaps uses plain names referring to specific contemporaries and, ultimately, allows readers to identify the named individuals. Secondly, according to current scholarship, Martial's first-person statements are to be attributed to a persona, and the relevant epigrams are thus to be understood as role-playing poems. K. asks whether the poet, making autobiographical statements (e.g. as a husband or lawyer), possibly wants to be taken seriously after all and to be recognised as an individual in his own right.
These are fundamental questions with consequences for scholarship on Martial (p. 152). Regarding these questions, K. examines the corpus as a whole (catalogues of real names, pp. 15–140) as well as Martial's programmatic statements in particular (pp. 141–8), and he finds well-founded and interpretatively relevant answers that lead to a reassessment of individual poems (a list of epigrams that need reconsideration is on p. 206).
K. begins with real names (‘Klarnamen’) within Martial's environment: he catalogues the names (giving a short characterisation and indicating the epigrams) in seven groups, using social position as a criterion instead of the difficult division into patroni and amici: ‘upper class’, ‘middle class’, ‘(Nur-) Adressat’ = ‘isolated vocative’ (with R. Nauta, Poetry for Patrons [2002], p. 46), individuals poetically honoured by Martial's epigrams, marginal figures within the town, slaves and others. He argues that pseudonyms for these people do not offer any benefits, or rather they reduce the advantages for the addressee and for the author, since there was no need for pseudonymisation that sometimes would only reduce the effect of the epigrams. Sometimes the lists seem a little bit too long or too positivistic, but they build the basis for the interpretation (pp. 76–9). The groups of people for whom we can eliminate an invention of name or fictionalisation is long. K. objects to L. Friedländer's conclusion that identical names occurring in different epigrams are an argument for the arbitrariness of Martial's choice of names as over the years relationships may change.
Having examined the names of individuals with more or less positive connotations (the easier cases), K. moves on to the more delicate names of ‘victims’ (‘“Opfer”-Namen’, pp. 80–151). He objects that even in Martial's scoptic epigrams the modern interpreter must not doubt that one name indicates one person and encourages readers to feel entitled to reflect about the lifeworld background of the epigrams and to explore possible connections outside the text. The eighth group of names (‘Katalog 8’), in alphabetic order, as are the other catalogues, is a relatively long collection of material (pp. 84–120) and lists the ‘victims’. The guiding question is why we should distinguish between ‘fictional character’ and ‘real character’ if the characters are coherent. Is not this distinction a priori irrelevant, as K. asks in the introduction? This distinction is still made by R. Moreno Soldevila et al. (2019) in their prosopography, mentioned by K. in the introduction in a footnote (p. 13 n. 9) with criticism in this regard. Of course, readers may initially have doubts if another publication on people in Martial's epigrams after the publication of this important and useful prosopography, is necessary. But this is exactly the crucial point: do we content ourselves too quickly with textual ‘realities’ within the epigrams? Could/Might there be a lot more of real-life reality regarding the epigrams? K. opts for real names, even for victims (p. 123). He argues that a joke with names only works if it is based on a real name of a concrete person (p. 140), an argument that is not fully convincing. K. discusses Martial's programmatic statements that have often been brought up as evidence for the use of pseudonyms (e.g. 1 epist. 1–9, 2.23, 9.95), but he rightly states that none of these passages indicates that the characters are obliterated by the use of pseudonyms (p. 141). He sums up that there is essentially a connection to reality regarding people, names and events in Martial's epigrams (also in the skoptika). This leads to the second question of the book: is Martial's persona a fictitious mask or an authentic I?
K. argues against exponents of a fictional persona such as N. Holzberg, to whom he assigns the burden of proof if data given in the text are not contradictory. K. analyses epigrams that reveal something about the material circumstances of Martial's life (pp. 165–85): Martial as pauper eques, his housing situation and properties, financial situation and cash needs, exchanges of gifts or his status as a cliens. Since Martial's statements could be a consistent realistic scenario, K. claims to have debunked the assumption that the epigrammatist stages himself in various literary characters (‘in der Unverbindlichkeit von Rollengedichten’, p. 164). In the following chapter K. discusses the same questions regarding further key points of Martial's life: Martial and Domitian, Martial as a lawyer and Martial as a husband, interpreting the epigrams as a reflex of biographical reality.
The concluding chapter sketches the consequences of K.'s basic premise for scholarship on Martial. You do not need to use single quotation marks or complicated terms to indicate the person who speaks, but write simply Martial, since, according to K., the author-I and poetic I do not substantially differ. Historians and sociologists are, therefore, allowed to use the epigrams for studies on Flavian society without being criticised by philologists.
Perhaps K. is a little too severe in his statement that today's philologists tend to use the term ‘poetical I’, ‘I of the poet’ and so on in order to elude a priori answers regarding the autobiographical background of literary texts (p. 159). In any case he does well to call attention to the real-life basics within the epigrams that are indeed present. Modern scholarship should not analyse and interpret them as mere art for art's sake or take the text only as material for exercises on literary theory. On the other hand K.'s fundamental assumption risks not distinguishing between characters of the text and real individuals at all, neglecting the constraints of the literary genre (therefore historians and sociologists should still exercise prudence in using Martial as their source): undoubtedly, K. would not fall back to too simple biographical interpretations of the epigrams, but perhaps he underestimates his concession that there may be elements of self-fashioning (‘Mag dieser seine eigenen Auftritte auch zum Zweck der Leserlenkung mit Elementen einer Stilisierung versehen haben’, p. 203). We should steer a middle course. Taking names and information more seriously than has previously been the case and seeking coherence can be helpful for the interpretation of single epigrams the point of which has not been clear so far (e.g. 8.41 and 9.95 with Athenagoras and 12.42 with Callistratus for the interpretation of 9.95b, pp. 86–7, 89–90, 147: vester peccat Athenagoras in 9.95b, 6 indicates sexual deviance set free after the death of the wife). Therefore, K.'s objections to skipping too quickly over the reality outside the text and concentrating only on literary games inside the text will bring benefits to scholarship on Martial and Classics in general.
