Talk:Martial

Reads like poor prose
The whole article needs a major cleanup. There's a lot of opinions in there, and someone (nay, somebody) has written large parts of it in a snobby high-school kid language. The fact it has a sentence starting with "nay,.." says a lot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.219.25.190 (talk) 21:50, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree; it's too pompous and needs editing. Kanjuzi (talk) 07:10, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

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

Untitled

 * 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 &mdash; 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)

Need to explain, clean up and harmonize notation
Some of the classicists who maintain this article need to clean up the notations and explain what they mean to non-classicists who are in the majority among Wikipedia readers. I'm somewhere in between those groups, so I can guess that "x. 24" probably means something like "epigram number 24 in Volume 10" (or Book 10, or whatever; but do we really have to use Roman numerals just because Martial did? He was a Roman, after all, so "x" meant "ten" to him, but for WP readers ten is 10), although it is certainly possible that I've guessed wrong. Readers shouldn't have to guess.

Also, we need notational harmony within the article. I guess (again) that "x. 24" (lower-case "x"), "I. 113" (upper-case "I"), "2:14" and "Book III, No. 52" (all copied from the article) all provide the same type of information, but a single format should be adopted and clearly explained to the reader.

I can see that the almost self-explanatory format "Book III, No. 52" (if it said "Book III, Epigram No. 52" instead, it would need no explanation at all) may be more appropriate in the attribution of a block quote than as an in-line reference, so it seems reasonable to include short and long formats—but the short form in particular must be explained for non-expert readers. Also if, as seems likely, "Ep. iii. 21" refers to a work not by Martial but by Pliny the Younger, since it appears after a quotation from him, then that should be more clearly stated (likewise "Juv. i. 117", which I assume refers to something by Juvenal instead of by Martial).

The purpose of this article is to provide information about Martial to English-speaking readers who are (with very few exceptions) not classics scholars and are entirely unaware of shorthand and notational conventions that are very familiar to editors who are. We should help those readers, not lay traps for them, even though we may not be aware that we are laying traps.

The format for referring to books also needs to be standardized. The article includes examples both with and without a strange-looking dot after the book number ("In Book X of his Epigrams ..." and "... the first edition of Book X. appeared at the end ...", for example&mdash;and even "A revised edition of book X., that which we now possess ...", with a comma after that odd dot and a lower-case "b" in "book"). If that strange mid-sentence dot after the book number (which occurs several times, so it can't be an isolated typo) is the normal notation, then that fact should be stated (in a footnote is fine) and the examples without the dot should be corrected. (It's fine with me if all the notational explanation is done in footnotes rather than in the body of the article, as long as when the reader comes across "x. 24" he's given some way to decipher what it means.)

I'll state again my view that Arabic numerals are more appropriate than Roman numerals in an English language Wikipedia article, even when the subject himself would have used Roman numerals. Wikipedia is a work for the masses of English speakers, not a textbook for classics scholars. I can see that using different numeral styles to differentiate book number from epigram number (as in "x. 24") can have some value, but "10:24" would provide the same differentiation using Arabic numerals alone. But I know how precious arcane conventions can be to fans in any field, so I won't press that issue any further.--Jim10701 (talk) 19:25, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Transmission
After reading Latin obscenity, I wonder how the Epigrams were transmitted until the Renaissance. In my uncultured opinion, they would not be liked by Medieval monks. Were they appreciated and copied in Byzantium? --Error (talk) 20:52, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * From http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2012/2012-07-32.html
 * The suitability of Martial’s epigrams as a school text is not a recent discovery: as is well known, the Jesuits found them particularly useful, so they undertook the task of expurgating them and provided generations of students with an abridged and bowdlerized Martial.
 * So Catholic transcribers could appreciate his non-obscene work. Did they also copy the rest of the work for private use? --Error (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Portico of Agrippa
_"He lived at first up three flights of stairs, and his "garret" overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa."_

I've read two versions of this - that this refers to his house on the Quirinal and that he could see _as far as_ the Portico of Agrippa (also known as the Porticus_Argonautarum. Or, the house indeed was located next to it (what would now be the east side of the Pantheon). If anyone can figure this out would be grateful.

Paul Moloney (talk) 14:14, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Truly a VICMAEL work
This photo is by VICMAEL Victor Emanuel

Yea, truly a Work of Art, including the Artist's signature. Perhaps it could be made larger? Never mind if Martial actually looked like this or not. 2A02:AA1:1007:7AF:B412:BB3C:6497:2BAB (talk) 17:07, 9 February 2023 (UTC)