Introduction

Abstract

How a culture handles marvels is revealing, as Rebecca Langlands demonstrates in this volume. How it manipulates and twists its clichés is equally so. This paper investigates the handling of the clichés of exemplarity in texts of the Nervan/Trajanic period, with a particular focus on two relatively short texts, Martial 11.5 and Pliny Ep. 8.6. Both are about Republican exempla though they differ in genre and in mode: Martial's epigram seems to offer playful panegyric of a new emperor's effect upon the best of Rome's (long dead) Republican citizens, while Pliny's letter briefly adduces Republican exempla to attack the memory of an imperial freedman and deplore his effect upon the contemporary Senate -one of Pliny's rare moments of invective. What unites them is a treatment of exempla in counterfactual terms to explore human responses to powerful individuals. This counterfactual treatment of exempla strikes me as gaining ground in the period between Julius Caesar and Trajan, particularly in both satirical and panegyrical modes as they appear across multiple genres -a curious phenomenon that is eloquent of the disconnection from (or rejection of) the past that marks the sense of modernity that defines the literary horizons of this period. 1 Book 11 was Martial's first publication in the post-Domitianic period (its likely publication date is December 96), and presents itself as (yet another) collection for the Saturnalia, and the holiday's drinking and mayhem are celebrated in poems 2, 6 and 15. Although its opening poem is not addressed to the new emperor, it is clearly marked as Nerva's book; he presides over the Saturnalia in 11.2 2 , appears as Augustus restored in 11.3, as a third-time consul under the protection of Julian/ Trojan deities in 11.4, and as the princeps who (unlike his predecessor) gives married women no easy cover for their infidelities and forces them to sin openly in 11.6. The book is distinguished by a high degree of obscenity, which seems to mark a renewed sense of freedom and gaiety under Nerva. The sense of a return to the Augustan Golden Age is also implicit in echoes of Ovid in the opening poems. 3 The representation of a new Emperor as a new Augustus is a rhetorical move that is, by now, conventional in the praise of a new Caesar, as each successive ruler is matched against the one Caesar who became the exemplum for them all. 41 On the 'porous boundary' between praise and mockery, see Garthwaite (2009) 427. 2 This poem too, with its implied recusatio of imperial epic, is expressed in the counterfactual (if there were a Maecenas now…). 3 In 11.2, for example, the remark about Martial's works being read by the stiff centurion in the Getic frosts marks how far we have come since Ovid tried desperately to escape them and bring his poems home;