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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
by strict convention avoided. But nonetheless, when that is said, literary
propriety could inhibit — and on that Juvenal is emphatic. A Roman Medea in
his satire on women elicits the confession that the limits of form can no longer
restrain him:
fingimus haec ahum satura sumente cothurnum
scilicet, et finem egressi legemque priorum
grande Sophocleo carmen bacchamur hiatu,
montibus ignotum Rutulis caeloque Latino?
nos utinam uani. sed clamat Pontia ' fed,
confiteor, puerisque meis aconita paraui,
quae deprensa patent; facinus tamen ipsa peregi.' (6.634-40)
Am I making the whole thing up, careless of precedents, mouthing
Long-winded bombast in the old Sophoclean manner
That's quite out of place here under Italian skies?
How I -wish that it -was all nonsense/ But listen to Pontia's
Too-willing confession- 'I did it, I admit I gave aconite
To my children. Yes, they were poisoned, that's obvious.
But I was the one who killed them.' (Tr. Green) 1
Earlier, in his fourth satire, an account of Domitian's council about ' a fish of
wondrous size', he had recharged the resources of satire with devices taken
from epic — and parody of Statius. 2 Likewise, in his second, the Aeneid had
been used to vilify and condemn the profligacies of Otho. 3 Martial, on the other
hand, will not disobey convention:
a nostris procul est omnis uesica libellis,
Musa nee insano syrmate nostra tumet. (4.49.7—8)
Any form of turgidity is alien to my works,
Nor does my Muse swell with unhealthy bombast.
Life is his theme: epic and tragedy are unreal and divorced from the world
that we know, offering nothing to the simple observer of mores and fashion.
True, Martial will sometimes stray from his course, to attempt the genus
medium in his non-satiric poems, but without a great deal of success. A fifty
line set-piece like 3.58, with its expansive, well-wrought opening:
Baiana nostri uilla, Basse, Faustini
non otiosis ordinata myrtetis
uiduaque platano tonsilique buxeto
ingrata lati spatia detinet campi,
sed rure uero barbaroque laetatur. . .
1
Green's Penguin Translation of Juvenal (© P. Green 1970) is used throughout. Some of the
translations of Martial are my own, some loose adaptations from Ker's version (1919).
1
See Valla on 4.94, quoting four lines of Statius" De hello Germanico (FPL, 134); also Highet
(1954) 258—9, and Griffith (1969) 134—50.
3
See, for instance, Lelievre (1958) 22—5.
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