Martial 2.8

Latin Learning Latin
1

Hello everybody :slight_smile:

I would like to hear your opinion about this Martial’s epigram:

Si qua uidebuntur chartis tibi, lector, in istis
siue obscura nimis siue latina parum,
non meus est error: nocuit librarius illis
dum properat uersus adnumerare tibi.
Quod si non illum sed me peccasse putabis,
5 tunc ego te credam cordis habere nihil.
‘Ista tamen mala sunt.’ Quasi nos manifesta negemus!
Haec mala sunt, sed tu non meliora facis.

When I read the epigram for the first time, without any conditioning from the commentary, I found funny the unexpected ending, which I understood this way:

“my verses are bad, indeed, but you don’t make them [my verses] better”

Less literal:

“my verses are bad, indeed, but you don’t help!”

As if he were reproaching the ill will of the reader. As when someone says “hey, this situation is not good, but you are making it worse”. The funny, I think, is that he is talking about verses, making thus the reproach really absurd.

But then I was disappointed when I discovered that my reading was not in agreement with that one of the commentary, which is:

“sed tu non meliora facis ‘the verses which you write are no better’ (cf. 3). M.'s admission of his shortcomings in 7 is amusingly undercut by the revelation that the criticisms which he seeks to defuse are the tendentious ones of a fellow poet”. From Martial Select Epigrams (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

To sum-up, the commentary understood meliora as applying to the verses of the “lector”, not those of the author, as I did.

Is there is any hint in the text that rules out my reading from the onset? If there is not, is my reading far-fetched? Is there any context that I’m missing that supports the commentary’s reading? I’d appreciate to hear your opinion :slight_smile:

Regards,
Huilén

2

My first reaction when I read this just now before looking at the commentary was to interpret the last line exactly the way the commentary interprets it, i.e., “you yourself don’t make better [poems].” That seems to me a more pointed response, and one that seems more appropriate in context.

What makes it clear that the interpretation of the commentary is correrct, I think, is the emphatic pronoun tu, which would otherwise be omitted but here sets up the contrast–you might say, contest–between Martial and the reader. The in-your-face, mock-insulting, humorously offensive tu, I think, drives home the point that the reader him/herself can’t make better poems. (Not really insulting, because the reader recognizes it joke). The emphasis here is on tu, not on meliora, as it would be if your reading were correct.

I’m not sure your reading is absolutely impossible, but I think that if that were what M. intended, he would have taken the trouble to make it clear, perhaps by adding a another pronoun to refer back to haec, maybe ea. That wouldn’t scan in the verse as he wrote it, of course, but Martial would have no trouble in fashioning a verse that would have made your interpretation clear if that’s what he intended.

3

Thank you very much for the response. Your point makes sense: he would have ways to make it clear if that was what he intended. I think maybe I was not expecting the reader to be another writer, and that’s why I interpreted it that way when I read it the first time.

4

I too instinctively read the epigram the way the commentary does. What sinks your reading, huilén, I think, is not the tu, but the sheer pointlessness of saying the reader doesn’t improve these verses. How could he, now that they’re there on the page? Martial, or his persona, acknowledges they’re not good. If his lector doesn’t have the grace to accept that that’s all the fault of the copyist (ha ha), the only reply available to the putdown of his verses is a reciprocal putdown—the lector’s are no better. The lector can find fault—fault is admittedly there to be found—but can he do any better himself? No.

It’s all a jeu d’esprit, of course.

5

but the sheer pointlessness of saying the reader doesn’t improve these verses. How could he, now that they’re there on the page?

I think Huilén may be on to something. Multiple readings are quite commonplace in Latin authors so it would not be unusual to have a surface meaning here as well as another reading. Martial’s verses have no life until the reader performs them, so the sense of melior is that not only can the reader not make better poems but he cannot improve Martial’s through the act of reading (performance). So there maybe here an ambiguity in facis performance of Martial’s verses or the composition of the reader’s own verses.

6

This isn’t Vergil, this is Martial–a simple joke by a purveyor of light verse. There’s no textual basis for reading an alternative interpretation into it, and doing so undermines the force of the joke. The poem works better without over-interpretation.

7

ἀπόλλυται

8

Thank you for your answers, I appreciate them all :smiley:

Yep, something like the reader’s performance was what I had in mind. I read several times that Romans put special emphasis in that. And after all, he started off the epigram looking for a scapegoat. Can’t be the editor? Then it must be the reader! I thought in that sense this reading was more consistent with the chain of ideas the epigram was following. The childish “but your verses are not better than mine!” seemed to me a little out of place, though now I’m thinking that maybe that was exactly the intention; as a person who is getting out of ideas and desperately brandishes an ad hominem argument as his last resort: “ok, my verses are bad, but your verses are no better!” :stuck_out_tongue:

But anyway, this is my first approach to Martial, and I haven’t developed a “feeling” yet as to know what I should expect and what I should not.

For example, as I went through the book I came across other epigrams ended in a pretty similar way, and where the sense is unquestionable and totally undermines my reading!

Non sunt longa quibus nihil est quod demere possis,
sed tu, Cosconi, disticha longa facis.
(Martial 2.8 )

Here is another:

Scribere me quereris, Velox, epigrammata longa.
ipse nil scribis: tu breuiora facis.
Martial 1.110

9

The childish “but your verses are not better than mine!” seemed to me a little out of place, though now I’m thinking that maybe that was exactly the intention; as a person who is getting out of ideas and desperately brandishes an ad hominem argument as his last resort: “ok, my verses are bad, but your verses are no better!”

Yes I think that’s exactly it. The poem is in dramatic form—it’s not static. Martial finds himself forced to retreat, and in the end can only lash out, feebly.

M.: If anything in these pages, lector, strikes you as unclear or unlatin, don’t blame me, blame the copyist.

M.: If you won’t buy that, you’re a heartless brute.
<Lector, sticking it to him:> “But they’re bad.”
M. (switching tack): Any fool can see that—but yours are no better. (Take that, lector!)

It’s pathetically weak as a retort, but he’s been backed into a corner, and reciprocal attack is all that’s left to him. Martial inscribes the reader into the poem.

10

I liked your vivid translation :laughing:

11

This isn’t Vergil, this is Martial–a simple joke by a purveyor of light verse. There’s no textual basis for reading an alternative interpretation into it, and doing so undermines the force of the joke. The poem works better without over-interpretation.

Martial clearly occupies a marginal space, “satiric” without being “satire” as Freudenburg puts it but I think “purveyor of light verse” is a description which is as misleading as it is dismissive.

As i said I think Huilén’s interpretation provokes us to think about the performative aspect of reading poetry. True there are no textual markers to indicate multiple meanings but that is often the case in poetry, we should not always expect signposts. It maybe that for the reasons you advance about the emphatic pronoun “tu” that eventually we have to discard Huilén’s interpretation but it has made (me at least) think about the lines in a less obvious way.

I am very much in favour of readings which open up the possibilities of interpretation.

12

There’s the reader within the poem, and there’s the reader(s) of the poem, and of course their status is not identical even though Martial makes out that they are. The external reader of the poem has to figure out what’s going on in it—without the dubious benefit of editorial quote marks, btw. The relationship between the one and the other is essentially the same as Catullus’ odi et amo epigram with its “fortasse requiris” incorporation of the reader.

Poems can be read in multiple ways, some more viable than others. They can also be misread. Huilen’s first reading was marginally tenable grammatically (and not damned by the tu, in my opinion) but nonetheless wrong, as he himself realized after reading some other epigrams. There are constraints on interpretation, which are respected by the competent reader (a useful construct developed by Jonathan Culler). It’s Martial, in the context of his time and his literary environment, who sets the terms of how to read him. We don’t have to embrace intentionalism in order to see that in Martial the author’s presence always makes itself strongly felt, and I think the best, the most competent readings will be by readers acclimatized to this kind of verse and attuned to Martial’s poetics. As Huilen said, we need to develop a feel for him.

He represents himself as (in Hylander’s phrase) a purveyor of light verse, a composer of nugae. And we should take him at his word—but only in a generic sense. We can recognize the self-characterization as intertextually asserting affinity with Catullus (without the Callimachean aesthetic that disdained popularity), and we should understand that he’s setting his verse in a certain tradition. We are now in the world of the epigram, and of the epigram book.

It’s hard not to accept at face value sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic … (1.16), but in the present poem it would be wrong to agree that haec mala sunt. It’s a well-crafted piece. But not one open to multiple interpretations.

13

Mwh thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I always think that when poets start playing with the idea of their readers that they are indulging in metapoetics and we take what they say at face value at our peril.

But it is what you have to say about “Martial, in the context of his time and his literary environment, who sets the terms of how to read him” which I disagree most strongly. I am much influenced by Charles Martindale’s “redeeming the text” who makes the powerful argument that it is not possible to recreate in an absolute way the “context of [a writer’s] time and his literary environment”. Any such reconstruction can only ever be that, a “reconstruction” essentially a new creation. It seems to me that you are arguing that there is some “authentic” reading which, with enough expertise, we can elicit. This seems to me to involve making a number of unstated assumptions. The very idea of an authentic reading of a text is itself a modern invention. I think of my reading as an act of reception necessarily and inescapably influenced by everything that I and others have read. I hesitate therefore to label interpretations as wrong. I may not be persuaded or I may not like them but that is a different kind of judgement. However much we might not like it we are trapped in our own time and cannot escape the past and present reception of a text.

These are complex issues and my distillation is probably not very clear. But I recommend Martindale’s book, although it took me several attempts to grasp what he was driving at.

As a postscript are we really to take at face value that M. was a writer of “nugae”. Isnt this the same term that Catullus uses in his prefatory poem about his own work?

Martial certainly wasn’t Virgil but he had read him and Catullus and everyone else so in one sense he is. :laughing:

14

That’s … postmodernism :slight_smile:

Epistemic uncertainty doesn’t make all statements equally valid. I mean, the fact that we do not know perfectly the mindset of imperial Rome doesn’t mean all interpretations are equally good. After all we do not know what’s going on in a black hole and probably never will, but that doesn’t mean anybody’s guess is as good as Stephen Hawking’s.
Making value judgements is indispensable in the act of reading (as it is in nearly all other areas of life) and inspired literary criticism cannot do without it. Or so I think. That’s why I like Austin.

15

Bart I think the issue is not whether all statements are “equally valid” but that we dont make assumptions in our reading which are not explicit and make claims about “authenticity” that cannot be met.

Your example about black holes is not really apposite because Hawking has in fact conceded that information is obtained from black holes via black hole evaporation. :smiley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

16

seneca, Bart answered for me, but of course I agree with much of what you say (and I have read Martindale). Theoretical commonplaces are rarely adequate when it comes to the particularities of a text, however, and risk being reductive.

I’m sorry you got so little from my post. I think in terms of competent readings, not authentic ones. A more competent reading of my post would have recognized that.:stuck_out_tongue:

Yes Catullus in his dedication poem refers to his work (or some of it) as nugae, but that has to be read in context. The same goes for Martial, where nugae implicates Catullus. I didn’t say we should take anything at face value. That was my point.

I’ll let it go at that.

17

I’m sorry you got so little from my post. I think in terms of competent readings, not authentic ones. A more competent reading of my post would have recognized that.> :stuck_out_tongue: >

Ouch! But point taken.