Text, Book, and Textbook: Martial's Experiments in the Codex

Abstract

Of all the Roman poets, Martial is perhaps the most concerned with his material medium; the physical book itself is a major character in theEpigrams. In the context of epigram-writing, this is not so unusual; as a genre, epigram is traditionally self-conscious of its development from ‘stone to book’. As recent scholarly work has shown, however, Martial's concern with the materiality of his poetry goes to the heart of his poetic project, as he reworks images inherited from Greek epigram as well as from Catullus, Horace and Ovid to fashion a new poetics of Flavian epigram and a correspondingly unique concept of the poetry book.