Talk:Martial

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"One of his epigrams was about a one-eyed woman." -- And??

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Here we go: http://www.tylatin.org/keys/Key25.html

-- 'Quintus loves Thais.’ 'Which Thais?' 'One-eyed Thais.' Thais doesn't have one eye, he [doesn't have] two. (Martial, III, 8) (ii) You refuse no-one, Thais, but if you are not ashamed of that, you should at least be ashamed of this, Thais, [viz] to refuse nothing. -- I think I can take the line out of the article.

What about some structure ~~?

This badly needs some cleanup and restructuring. Since I like Martial, I'd do it, but I don't really know his history, etc. that well. Maybe I'll give it a try anyway. --GenkiNeko 13:51, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree. The stuff about Martial's "faults" (particularly "grossness") is totally POV and should go. I've made a start at re-working the article into clearer English, and moved his work, the most important thing about him, up to the top, but there's a lot of forest to hack through. --Nicknack009 17:59, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

There needs to be introductory information (structure as mentioned above).

His sexual outlook is consistent with that of his place and time, thus same-sex love is a recurrent topic. Many of his epigrams are of a pederastic nature, which coupled with his often misogynistic tone has given more than one reader the impression that he looked with favor upon relations with boys.

I didn't edit this right away because I was a little unsure, but if my memory serves me, this isn't entirely true. I thought that the taditions of same-sex relations and "apprenticeship" were attributed to the Greeks, and that the Romans actually frowned upon it. Then again, I wasn't so sure, so someone who knows should make the final call as to whether that line should be altered a little.TheTomato 02:03, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Romans didn't actually frown upon homosexuality, allthough it was indeed more normal with the Greeks (and a few centuries earlier?). Krastain 10:20, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

You can't generalize anything, least of all the Romans' view of erotic experience. For pederastic epigrams, look at I31, I88, III65, IV7, IV42, V48, VI34, VII15, VII50, VIII46, VIII55, etc, etc. Haiduc 03:52, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Catullus

In this article, Martial is credited as the creator of the modern epigram and is also called the first insult comic, because of the witty attacks common in his works. Despite this, I, and many classicists with whom I study, would argue that both of those distinctions belong to Catullus (who lived at the time of Cicero), as he also wrote epigrams, similar in style, length, and content, and as he wrote many poems which lampooned his friends, acquaintences, and personal enemies in any number of witty and/or crude ways. Thoughts?

Yeah, I agree. To be fair, Martial sucks, and isn't very funny. "You have the face of someone swimming underwater." What the fuck? Catullus, on the other hand, is hella witty. Original insult comic my ass.

You obviously haven't read enough Martial if you don't think he is funny, or else you have been too fixated on finding "hella witty". RedRabbit1983 15:38, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The "creator of the modern epigram" (which I presume to be the emphasis, since the claim is otherwise nonsensical) needs to be sourced. The rest of the article does a very poor job of placing Martial in the epigram tradition. This isn't about whether Martial or Catullus was "better" (they're very different poets — hard to imagine Martial writing the Peleus and Thetis 'epyllion') or "funnier"; it's about how to place them respectively in the literary tradition, based on standard literary histories. No history of ancient Greek or Latin literature would go so wrong as to call him the inventor of epigram; however, it may well be that perfectly acceptable English literary histories consider Martial the most direct antecedent of modern epigram (to offer an comparable example: the introduction to a Penguin history of horror literature called Lucan the father of the genre; strikingly odd observation, but not inept). I'm inclined to think of Ovid as, say, Oscar Wilde's Latin antecedent in epigrammatic turn of phrase. But the point is that this assertion about Martial is unsupported as it stands — two years later. Cynwolfe (talk) 23:36, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

General

This page is really quite out of date...no reference to the fact it's satire and the idea of persona, no reference to Martial's HUGE debt to Greek Skoptic Epigram (cf. J. P. Sullivan (1991) Martial: The Unexpected Classic, G. Nisbet (2003) Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial's Forgotten Rivals, also important is the work of D. Fowler), and really given the huge amount of scholarship, quite basic.

130.209.6.40 10:09, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Brittanica 1911

Can we tone down the language of the original Brittanica article? The 1911 version of Brittanica is often dreary to read. RedRabbit1983 15:36, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Translations

I reworked some of the translations in order to reflect Martial's original choice of language; I can't understand why the author of the earlier translations in this article decided to "tone down" his poems. Just read the original Latin; he often uses curse-words and dirty language in his verses. Plus I removed that whole "Dr. Fell" nonsense, which had absolutely nothing to do with Martial. Rsazevedo 01:44, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Lindsey Davis

This is almost certainly too vague and silly to go in the article, but I found it amusing. In chapter XXXVIII of Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco novel Ode to a Banker (set in AD74) we get a scene in which a soldier (Passus) is going through a deceased publisher's heap of his authors' draft scrolls:

"Yes." Passus consulted a note-tablet. "I found some rejections among them. Poems by someone called Martialis had had scrawled on them, "Who is this? No — crap!" in red ink.

Loganberry (Talk) 02:27, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Birth date

Knowledge of his life is derived almost entirely from his works, which can be more or less dated according to the well-known events to which they refer. In Book X of his Epigrams, composed between 95 and 98, he mentions celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday; hence he was born on 1 March 40 (x. 24), under Caligula or Claudius.

This sentence contains a blatant nonsense. In fact, we only know, that Martialis was born at March, the 1st, but we do not know the year date, and this is what is really said here: if the writer was celebrating his 57th birthday in 95, 96, 97 or 98 AD, then he must have been born in 38, 39, 40 or 41 AD, and NOT in 40 AD. Mamurra (talk) 13:37, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Interesting "Occupation"

Is "Master of Rippage" an actually recognized term for writing epigrams? 76.117.247.55 (talk) 03:26, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Nope. That was vandalism, and it's been removed. Graymornings_(talk) 01:12, 4 May 2009 (UTC)