UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Martial and the Poetics of Popular Consumption Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fw913sb Author Piros, Elliott G Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Martial and the Poetics of Popular Consumption A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Classics by Elliott Gene Piros 2019 © Copyright by Elliott Gene Piros 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Martial and the Poetics of Popular Consumption by Elliott Gene Piros Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Francesca Katherine Martelli, Co-Chair Professor Amy Ellen Richlin, Co-Chair My dissertation argues that, in addition to their thematic content, the form of epigrams written by Martial expresses an understanding of four phenomena that were central to Imperial Roman consumer experience: buying, gift-giving, the extension of credit, and deceptive advertising. A Hispano-Roman poet who wrote over one thousand five hundred epigrams and compiled them into structurally innovative volumes for a general readership, Martial has drawn attention in recent decades for the realism and materialism of his work, qualities that distinguish him from other Roman authors who wrote in a first- person voice. Martial reveals a world of venal calculation submerged in social life and inconsistent with more idealizing notions of exchange and communal bonds. His poetry also tirelessly sifts through the accumulated wealth of empire, indulging in descriptions of ii luxurious and everyday consumer goods. Scholars have variously interpreted this departure from established poetic interests as historical evidence for the precarious and degraded mentality of free but impoverished individuals; a symptom of the cultural milieu surrounding holidays such as the Saturnalia, with Martial as an elevated example of the scurra or court jester; a rhetorical strategy by a client of independent means who used exaggerated talk of poverty to secure publicity for his literary project from wealthier patrons; the development of a new meta-poetic language that, despite its ostensible disinterest in the immaterial immortality of poetry, nevertheless enhances the poetic qualities of Martial’s verse (with “poetic” defined here in opposition to ephemeral socio- economic advantage); and as an effort to record in poetry the texture of urban life under the Flavians, in a city that had internalized the contours and contradictions of a global empire. While previous studies that link the compositional dynamics of epigrams and collections of epigrams to the juxtapositions and paradoxes of urban life have focused on space and social attitudes, my project focuses on a new area: the economic institutions that structured consumption in Martial’s day. I begin with the purchase of commodities with cash. Martial highlights the possibility for coins to be both functionally identical numerical counters and totally individual configurations of matter, no two alike. In the movement between these two possibilities, I locate an aesthetic paradigm that appears throughout the corpus of epigrams, even in poems that have no obvious concern with cash. Next, I turn to the use of tickets in gift lotteries, small pieces of cheap material allotted selectively or sometimes tossed into crowds at private or imperial benefactions, to be exchanged later for actual gifts. Martial’s depiction of these lots provides the key to understanding the tension iii between accumulation and release that informs so many of his poems. Next, I show that for Martial, the primary social antagonism of credit, a term I use to encompass loans with and without interest, is a disjuncture in time between giving and reciprocating. The feeling of being out of joint resurfaces in epigrams wherein Martial complains that he lacks time to write epigrams; that is, he writes about not having time of his own to write. Foregrounding the importance of time in relations of credit allows Martial to nurture throughout his corpus an impossible double dream for communal ownership and time that is truly his own. In my final chapter, I explore a category of masking substances in the epigrams that I call goop, stuff that is smeared onto or builds up residually on objects and people. In the many references to goop made by Martial, we find fantasies of ownership, aspirations to move up in society, and the commemoration of dead people. We also find a rhetoric of deception that allows for the false appearances contrived by goop to nevertheless say something truthful about an individual or thing. By arguing that the smearing of objects and people with goop provides a material analog to verbal practices such as false advertisement, I conclude with a model for consumer fantasy that sustains gift-giving, buying, and borrowing as we find them described by Martial. iv The dissertation of Elliott Gene Piros is approved. Alex C. Purves John P. Bodel Amy Ellen Richlin, Committee Co-Chair Francesca Katherine Martelli, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 v For my parents, who showed me that dreams are possible And for you: transtiberinus ambulator, qui pallentia sulphurata fractis permutat vitreis vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements viii Vita ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Properties of Property 30 Chapter 2: Lots of Things 80 Chapter 3: A Loan in Time 123 Chapter 4: The Stuff of Fantasy 168 Conclusion 209 Bibliography 210 vii Acknowledgements More than anything, the city of Los Angeles has inspired this dissertation, both as a presentation of the contemporary moment and as a place to think through memories from a time before I lived here. In the Southland, UCLA, where my students over the years have challenged me to make the study of antiquity matter to people whose lives intersect and diverge with mine in so many unexpected ways, has been inexpressibly supportive and stimulating. My home in the Department of Classics has always felt like a home. Thank you especially to Francesca Martelli, Bob Gurval, Alex Purves, Amy Richlin, Brent Vine, Lydia Spielberg, Kathryn Morgan, Giulia Sissa, and David Blank. Rebecca Langlands, Shane Butler, and Mario Telò have all been formative for this project. Conversations with Andre Matlock are behind some thoughts contained here, the good ones at least. Thank you also to John Bodel of Brown University, and to everyone at the University of Puget Sound: Aislinn, Bill, David, and Eric. You set me on the right course. Thank you to Danny and Megan. Without you, I would not be here. Thank you to Grant and Miranda. Someday I want to be like both of you. Thank you most of all to Ben, who showed me the overlook. viii Vita Elliott Gene Piros obtained a BA with honors in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Puget Sound in 2012. He entered the PhD program in the Department of Classics at UCLA in 2012, obtaining a MA in Classics from UCLA in 2015. He anticipates obtaining a PhD in Classics from UCLA in June 2019. Elliott Gene Piros has taught extensively at UCLA for the Department of Classics between 2013 and 2019. ix Introduction This dissertation describes how Martial’s epigrams are informed by experiences that can be called economic. Anyone who reads Martial will notice, in more or less stark contrast with other Latin literature, a preponderance of ignoble themes: buying and selling sex, books, and other consumer objects, scrounging for loans and gifts, feeling anxiety over one’s position in a world of unequal, imperfectly reciprocated exchanges, carping at individuals higher and lower in the Roman social hierarchy, and tactlessly revealing a world of venal calculation submerged beneath prevailing ideologies. To offer a new model for interpreting Martial’s realism and materialism, I argue that gift-giving, buying, and lending appear in his work as poetic forms as well as leitmotifs. By unpacking the drives, competing logics, and sensations of these activities as they appear in the epigrammaton libelli, I find a language that also articulates the structure and feeling of epigrams. From the perspective of the scholarship on Martial, my dissertation performs several maneuvers that I will situate in this introduction. It returns to reading epigrams closely at the individual level but without discarding intratextual and intertextual connections – verbal, formal, and thematic overlaps between epigrams in the corpus and between Martial and other authors. It suggests an alternative to the binary opposition of gift exchange and commodity exchange. It also proposes a new way to approach the thorny question – arguably the big question of Martial scholarship – regarding persona: was Martial’s life actually as precarious as his work would often have us believe? Or, by extension, why did he engage so heartily in fleshing out a mendicant persona, driven by thoughts of income and the lack thereof? Finally, it creates for Martial a local version of a larger theoretical framework used 1 by scholars of both Greek and Latin texts to discern socio-economic or socio-political thought in poetic form. More intuitively, without capitulating absolutely to the movement of his writing, this dissertation adopts, as a principle of reading, the habit we find in Martial of associating disparate images and institutions, cutting through spheres of life and skipping haphazardly