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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

mistress as metaphor, women, Martial, literary mistress

College

Humanities

Department

Comparative Arts and Letters

Abstract

Martial features women as his subjects in roughly twenty-five percent of his epigrams .I Just as his other epigrams explore a wide range of subjects and themes, these poems differ in the ways that they use women. Some are merely crude jests2; others explore mythological or historical subjects3; still others, such as l 0.35 and 1 0.38, written about Sulpicia the satirist, are encomiastic. In addition, some of the poems about women can be read as programmatic statements about Martial’s and others’ poetry. Martial employs various programmatic devices to explain his epigrams. Although these types of poems occur throughout the Epigrams, they are concentrated in Books 1, 8, 10, and 11 and include both written women such as Martial’s literary mistress Thalia and allusion to the mistresses of previous poets, especially Catullus’ Lesbia. Martial’s awareness of his poetic tradition suggests that he is more than merely a second-rate poer4: he has a conscious programmatic goal of returning the Latin poetic cycle to its starting point, to the neoteric poems of Catullus. In my discussion of how Martial provides a significant contribution to what has become a much-debated topic, i.e., the scripta puella ‘s programmatic role, I will first summarize recent scholarship on the elegists which points towards a programmatic interpretation of women, and then provide my own analysis of specific poems in Martial’s Epigrams which, through a demonstrable relationship of diction and subject matter to Catullan poetry, further support a general programmatic interpretation of the mistress in Latin poetry.

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