David Sutton (University of Toronto)
The epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis wrote, according to common consensus, either nine or ten poems to his lifelong friend and confidante Julius Martialis. These epigrams, which depict an affectionate relationship and include philosophical reflection on friendship itself, build up a picture of a personal and intimate relationship which, for many readers and scholars of Martial, is exceptional and even unique within the poet’s corpus; Martialis is referred to with some variation of the phrase “Martial’s best friend” in, for example, Grewing 1997, 69; Sullivan 1991, 17; Citroni 1975, 61; and Vallat 2008, 51. However, few critics have investigated the representation of this relationship, and how and why Julius Martialis comes to be regarded almost universally in this way, at considerable length or in particular detail (the most detailed studies of the friendship between Martial and Martialis being Schäfer 1983 and Kleijwegt 1998, both of which treat the relationship principally from the perspective of biographical criticism and the distinction between friendship and patronage).
In this paper, I will interrogate some of the strategies of communication and representation that contribute to the privileged status of Martialis in Martial’s collection. These include creative intertextual dialogue with important texts of poetic predecessors (such as epigram 1.15, which quotes Ov. Tr. 1.5.1 and invokes Cat. 5 and 65), the use of mediating devices like country villas and book exchange to channel and instantiate amatory relationships (4.64 on Martialis’ villa on the Monte Mario, and 3.5 and 7.17 on the gift of a book), and homoerotic suggestion (especially in the language of 11.80, on an invitation to spend time in the notorious resort of Baiae). These strategies, as depictions of relationships of intimacy between men, will be contextualized by ideas around homosocial desire that arise principally from the seminal work of Girard 1961 and Sedgwick 1985.
Taken together, this survey of the Martial-Martial epigrams will provide justification for and lay the groundwork towards investigating what would seem to many readers a counterintuitive dimension of Martial’s epigrammatic corpus: his poetics of intimacy.