University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Hidden in Plain Sight: Martial and the Greek Epigrammatic Tradition Joseph M. Lucci University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons Recommended Citation Lucci, Joseph M., "Hidden in Plain Sight: Martial and the Greek Epigrammatic Tradition" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1864. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1864 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1864 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Hidden in Plain Sight: Martial and the Greek Epigrammatic Tradition Abstract Martial, perhaps the best-known author of Latin epigram, has enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly attention over the past two decades, and much has been made of his self-professed debt to earlier Latin epigrammatists, especially Catullus. Less prevalent, however, has been discussion of how he relates to authors of Greek epigram, which may not be surprising given that Martial passes over the Greek epigrammatic tradition in nearly total silence. This dissertation seeks to explain the silence. Through close readings of specific poems yb Martial, both in themselves and alongside epigrams by his Greek predecessors, I argue that he has fashioned an intentionally ambivalent attitude toward the Greek tradition. Martial contends with a fundamentally Roman literary condundrum – he must negotiate the inevitable and irreconcilable tension between acknowledging the importance of his Greek predecessors and asserting his own claim to superiority over them. But Martial, I suggest, relishes such tensions, depicting Greece and Greek epigram as inconsistent and even bipolar entities which he can then exploit as sources of humor or self-aggrandizement.