Lindsay C. Watson

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Epigram

Lindsay C. Watson

1. General characteristics. The question ‘what is an epigram?’ is famously difficult to answer. A standard formulation such as ‘a short witty poem culminating in a striking thought or expression’ is less than satisfactory in the context of a survey of Latin epigram. In the first place, it leaves out of account the vast (and for the Romans vastly influential) corpus of Greek, especially Hellenistic, epigram, which does not (broadly speaking) conform to the above definition. More important, it is predicated on the canonical form imposed upon epigram by its most famous exponent, the first century AD writer Martial, whose work represents the culmination of a long process of development in the course of which the genre’s polymorphous diversity was amply displayed. A more representative definition might run ‘a brief tightly structured poem, written for preference in the elegiac distich, tied to an object or a particular circumstance, the interpretation of which is shaped by a powerful controlling intellect’ (Laurens (1989), 25).

In what follows I look briefly at the major surviving representatives of Roman epigram. These are, in rough chronological order, the so-called ‘circle’ of Lutatius Catulus, Catullus and the Neoterics, the pseudo-Vergilian Catalepton, Martial and the Priapea. Space does not permit consideration of works of marginal importance such as the seventy epigrams attributed to the younger Seneca or late flowerings beyond the period of this volume such as the Epigrams of Ausonius, the Epigrammata Bobiensia (c. 400AD) and the derivative epigrams of the Carthaginian Luxorius (early 6th century AD). Before proceeding to a diachronic survey, it will be helpful, in view of epigram’s receptivity to a wide range of styles and subject matter, to catalogue various characteristics which are common to all or most of its main exponents and serve to erect a profile of this most hospitable of genres. Of course, even to speak of the ‘genre’ of epigram is problematical. The term ‘epigram’ did not come into currency as the designation for a recognisable literary form until the 1st century AD (Puelma (1996)). Moreover, Catullus, the major Roman epigrammatist prior to Martial, was in Antiquity and continues to be variously designated an iambist, a lyric poet, or an elegist, as well as an epigrammatist: cf. Quintil. Inst. Or. 10. 1. 96, Newman (1991), 43-74, Wray (2001), Heyworth (2001); Havelock (1939), Johnson (1982), 108-23, Fitzgerald (1995)); Wheeler (1934), 153-82, Day (1938), 106-11. Finally, the terminologyapplied by the Ancients to what is now categorised by the portmanteau term ‘epigram’was distinctly labile; Pliny the Younger famously spoke of such productions in the following terms (Ep.4.14.9) : ‘whether you prefer “epigrams” or “idylls” or “eclogues” or, as many do, “short poems”, you may so call them: but I stick to “hendecasyllables”’.

It has been thought paradoxical that Statius in the preface to Silvae 2 assimilated these sometimes extremely lengthy pieces to epigram. Yet Statius had a rationale for so characterising the Silvae, their occasionality. For there is no doubt that this was a defining characteristic of Latin epigram. Countless pieces have their origin in a particular set of circumstances (whether real or fictitious), e. g. Martial 12. 77, on a hunter of dinner invitations who farted in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and was punished with dining at home for three nights; 7. 37, a quaestor who arranged that, when he wiped his nose, this should serve as a signal for an execution, but found himself unable to remove a frozen icicle which hung from his nostrils lest the gesture be fatally misinterpreted; or a brief anecdote of Catullus (53),

Risi nescio quem modo e corona,

qui, cum mirifice Vatiniana

meus crimina Calvos explicasset,

admirans ait haec manusque tollens,

‘di magni, salaputium disertum!’

‘I laughed just now at someone from the crowd who, when my mate Calvus had brilliantly expounded the crimes of Vatinius, said in admiration and lifting up his arms “ye gods, what an an eloquent phallicle!” ‘

All three poems just mentioned are relatively short (of twelve, eight and five verses respectively). This too is a characteristic feature. Brevity was a watchword of epigram, at times insisted upon by its practitioners with a doctrinalism that borders on hyperbole (Lausberg (1982), 20-76): it is most conspicuously realised in numerous pieces which comprise only a single elegiac couplet. In the debate over the appropriate length for an epigram Martial had his say: while generally embracing the principle of brevity, he intersperses poems such as 1. 49 (42 lines) or 6. 64 (32 lines), which in compass far exceed the norms observed in the near-contemporaneous Garland of Philip (mostly eight lines maximum)and offers a spirited defence of the practice by appealing to the precedent of his Latin models (2. 77).

Epigram, which already by the fourth century BC enjoyed a de facto existence as an independent literary form (Reitzenstein (1907), 81) was traditionally located at the base of the generic ladder (cf. Mart. 12. 94, Tac. Dial. 10. 4), labelled a lusus or paivgnion, ‘triviality’: a verdict which Martial, in a conscious inversion of literary hierarchies, counters by pointing out that it is mythological epic or tragedy which, with their fantastical divagations on tralatician or recondite themes, are in fact trivial, whereas epigram, firmly anchored in the everyday and empowered by sociocritical zeal, has a moral earnestness that is lacking to the more elevated genres (Citroni (1968)). But Martial speaks in a spirit of deliberate paradox, and epigram’s low generic ranking is confirmed above all by its language, which, in conformity with the principle of stylistic decorum, is everyday and colloquial in flavour (Watson (2003), 21-6). Of particular note here is the free admixture of primary obscenities which would not be countenanced in more repectable genres, a feature towards which Latin epigram adopts a disingenuously ambiguous stance. On the one hand it excuses its linguistic crudity by invoking the lex operis (law prescribing what is appropriate to a genre): in the prefatory epistle to Bk. 1 Martial states

‘I should apologise for the bawdy explicitness of my vocabulary, that is to say the language of epigram, were the example of my making; but this is how Catullus writes, and Marsus, Pedo and Gaetulicus and anyone else who is read right through’

(cf. Sullivan (1991), 64-74), while Pliny the Younger, apropos of his forays into epigram, issues a similar apologia (Epp. 4. 14. 4). On the other hand, the epigrammatists unabashedly avow that the purpose of including erotic material and language is to gratify readers by provoking sexual arousal, a line of argument which is spawned by Catullus,

qui [versiculi] tum denique habent salem et leporem,

si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,

et quod pruriat incitare possunt,

non dico pueris, sed his pilosis

qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos,

‘which [trifling verses] then and only then have wit and charm if they are rather suggestive and a bit naughty and can provoke a sexual itch - I don’t mean in young lads, but in those hairy types who are unable to bestir their unresponsive groins’ 16. 7-11 [cf. Mart. 1. 35, Hallett (1996)].

Explicit verbal obscenity, it is vital to note, was a distinguishing feature of Roman, as opposed to Greek, epigram: Martial styles it latine loqui, ‘to speak Latin’ (Bk. 1, praef.). Greek epigram, while by no means eschewing sexual themes, largely avoids what we term four letter words. The difference in approach may be illustrated by comparing Priapea 29 (three primary obscenities, ‘balls’, ‘cunt’ and ‘prick’ in five verses) with a twelve-line piece, AP 11. 328, by the (?) Neronian epigrammatist Nicharchus. Here, although the subject matter is expressly pornographic (the triple penetration of a woman), the several entry positions adopted in this extemporised ménage à quatre are recounted in figurative terms compounded parodically from a farrago of Homeric allusions e. g. 5-8 :

‘but Hermogenes got a loathsome dank dwelling, the farthest spot, passing down into an unseen place, where are the shores of the dead, and breeze-stirred wild figs are tossed by the blast of ill-sounding winds’.

A constant in mainstream Latin epigram - with the notable exception of the Priapea - is the foregrounding of the authorial persona. There is an insistence on the importance of the speaker’s likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, one of a number of features which epigram shares with iambus. This characteristic, omnipresent in Catullus’ shorter poems, duly reappears in the Catalepton, with its markedly Catullan flavour, and is one of the most important strands in Martial’s Catullan legacy. Anchored as it is in the everyday life of Rome, much of Martial’s poetry is devoted to articulating sardonic or mocking reponses to the ingrained norms, bêtises and idiosyncrasies of metropolitan society: indeed he complains in the preface to Book 12 that his retirement to Biblilis has deprived him of the inspiration for his themes.

Next, a few words on metre. By the 5th century BC or possibly earlier (Holzberg (2002), 21) the elegiac couplet is established as the metre of choice for Greek epigram. In Latin epigram elegiacs likewise predominate. Also important are Catullus’ or, rather, the Neoterics’ favourite hendecasyllabics, as well as iambics, particularly the scazon or ‘limping’ iambic. The reasons which determined a personal poet’s choice of metre in a given piece are in need of investigation (Morgan (2000)) and can be difficult to fathom. Nonetheless certain factors were identifiably at work in Roman epigrammatists’ privileging of these particular systems. The scazon had long been associated with abuse (Loomis (1972), 102-118, Kay (1985), 203-4) and as such was appropriate to the invective and satire which bulk so large in Latin epigram. As for the hendecasyllable, it seems to have been considered a suitable vehicle (Quintil. Inst. Or. 1. 8. 6, Plin. Ep. 4. 14, Morgan (2000), 115) for the obscenity which was a distinguishing feature of the genre: in the case of Martial, its use also serves as an act of homage to Catullus and on occasion adverts to the existence of a specific Catullan model. Lastly, the elegiac couplet, with its inbuilt rise and fall, is well accommodated to the balance and antithesis, point and counterpoint which are a feature of Latin epigram, particularly Martial, and admirably subserves its tight and self-contained logical structure. At the broader level, all three systems are notably uncomplex and thus suited to the directness and incisiveness of epigram. Martial surely has such considerations in mind when he rails against the preciosity of abstruse metrical systems (2. 86).

One last general point is the genre’s enormous thematic receptivity. Most visible in the conventional division of the Palatine Anthology, our major surviving collection of Greek literary epigram, into sixteen books according to subject categories, great breadth of thematic range is equally characteristic of its Roman sibling. As regards Catullus, the sheer diversity of topic and tone encountered in his shorter poems has been one factor in sparking the debate over how to classify him generically, while the individual pieces in the Catalepton exhibit a remarkable heterogeneity which embraces inter alia an envoi to poetry in favour of Epicurean quietism, a sophisticated take-off of Catullus’ phaselus ille and several examples of excoriating invective. Martial enriches still further the thematic ambit of Latin epigram, availing himself liberally of the satiric and courtly strains which were a late arrival on the epigrammatic scene (Laurens (1965)) and elevating to poetic status the hitherto largely unexplored minutiae of Roman society. The sole exception to this pattern is the Priapea, where the monomanic phallocentrism of the divine protagonist inevitably circumscribes both thematically and physiologically the collection’s focus.

2 : The Beginnings. Historians of Latin epigram cite as its earliest beginnings, in the third to second centuries BC, the Scipionic elogia, mostly in Saturnians, from the family tomb on the Via Appia (cf. Courtney (1995), nos. 9-13). Latin epigram, like Greek, thus begins its career by faithfully reflecting its etymology (Gk. epigramma, ‘inscription’). But in contrast to its Greek congener, Roman epigram rapidly became divorced from its original inscriptional context. Another clutch of early epigrams, of dubious authenticity but seemingly datable to the 2nd century BC, the verse epitaphs for Naevius, Plautus and Pacuvius preserved by Gellius NA 1. 24, are parasitic on the fictitious and highly literary epitaphs for dead poets which are common in Anthologia Palatina book7. Equally marked is the literary character of the next works to call for mention, the four or six line epigrams by Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus and Lutatius Catulus quoted by Gellius 19. 9 and supplemented in Catulus’ case by Cic. ND 1. 79: they are sometimes taken as evidence for a poetic grouping that formed itself around Catulus, who, born in the 150’s BC, was consul in 102 and committed autothansia in 87. All five poems are amatory, showing profoundly the influence of Meleager’s Garland (c. 100 BC), the first artistically arranged anthology of pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic epigram. They are characterised by alliteration, preciosity of expression, mannered striving after verbal conceit and rigorously ordered balance and antitheses. All in all, they represent an early blossoming of Roman Alexandrianism (Laurens (1989), 163-77, Morelli (2000), 109-223). Such indebtedness is most marked in the epigram of Catulus preserved by Gellius,

Aufugit mi animus; credo, ut solet, ad Theotimum

devenit. sic est; perfugium illud habet.

quid si non interdixem ne illunc fugitivum

mitteret ad se intro, sed magis eiceret?

ibimus quaesitum. verum, ne ipsi teneamur,

formido. quid ago? da, Venus, consilium,

‘My soul has fled. I believe that, as usual, it has gone to Theotimus. Yes, that’s it: it has taken refuge there. Just as well that I forbade him to take the runaway into his house, but [told him] rather to toss it out. We shall go to look for it. But I’m afraid, lest I myself be captured. What am I to do? Advise me, Venus’.

This is a refashioning of Callimachus Epigr. 4 Pf.

‘Half my soul is still breathing, but as for the other half, I know not whether Eros or Hades has stolen it, except that it not to be found. Has it gone off again to one of the boys? And yet I often forbade them “do not receive the runaway, young men”. For it is somewhere there, I’m sure, that the miscreant, the disastrously in love, is hanging about’.

The most notable feature of the adaptation (leaving aside its skewed logic) is its explicit Greekness, advertised not merely in the overt evocation of its model but also in the recasting of the original as a miniaturised drama, a recognised technique of Hellenistic epigram. This stands in stark contrast to the later tradition as represented in Martial, who insists on the essential Romanness of his oeuvre, self-consciously invoking his Latin predecessors and making no more than passing mention of Greek epigram (4. 23. 3-4).

3 : Catullus and the Catalepton. The discussion now turns to Catullus, whose status however as an epigrammatist is, as noted, moot (for other discussions of Catullus’ diverse output, see Levene, Chapter 2 above, and Harrison, Chapter 13 above). He himself never speaks of his ‘epigrams’, only of nugae, iambi and hendecasyllabi, the last of which might with some justification be regarded as melic (Laurens (1989), 197, Cameron (1995), 165). The final third of the collection (69-116) could qualify as epigram on account of the metre, elegiac couplet, the preferred medium of the genre, yet it is the first third of the corpus (1-60), the so-called polymetra, which exhibits far closer resemblances to earlier epigram: poems 3 (on the death of Lesbia’s passer) and 4 (phaselus ille) are two examples among many (Laurens (1989), 184-7). It is, then, not entirely a paradox that Laurens in his major study of the form devotes twenty pages to questioning the applicability of the term epigrammatist to Catullus (Laurens (1989), 183-203). Among other things, he notes that the polymetra exhibit a complexity of structure and sentiment which is alien to epigram, that the length and elaboration of many of these pieces exceed the canons of epigram and that single poems - as in the Lesbia-and Gellius-cycles of the elegiac segment - often represent a fragment of a larger experience, which distinguishes them from Hellenistic epigram, where the individual compositions are typically self-contained.

Against these qualifications must be set the undeniable fact that Martial considers Catullus the greatest of Roman epigrammatists (Swann (1994), Citroni (1991), 181). There are several reasons why Martial so regarded him. It was Catullus above all who was responsible for determining the future shape of Roman epigram. First, many of his poems are fashioned as intense and outrageously one-sided outbursts of personal opinion; and vigorously trumpeted prejudices and feelings - be they of love, hate, sorrow, derision, or contempt - lie at the very bedrock of Latin epigram, Greek epigram being an emotionally altogether more jejune affair. A good instance of such intensity, complete with epigrammatic fulmen in clausula (‘concluding thunderbolt’), is the famous lines accusing Lesbia of behaving like the cheapest of prostitutes:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,

illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam

plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,

nunc in quadriviis et angiportis

glubit magnamimi Remi nepotes.

’Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia, that Lesbia whom Catullus loved above all, more than himself and all his own people, now at the crossroads and in back alleys peels back the descendants of great-hearted Remus’ (58).

Second, Catullus provocatively affirms the pre-eminence of private life, using his verse to articulate personal values and to mirror his experience of social and literary intercourse. This development too proves profoundly influential. At the very core of Martial’s epigrams is the poet’s depiction of himself as a poor client and struggling artiste orbiting the atria of the great, while successful prosecution of the lead character’s ithyphallically-determined lifestyle also gives to the Priapea its thematic locus. Greek epigram is not on the whole characterised by humour: Catullus on the other hand is replete with it, particularly humour of a sardonic or self-mocking vein. This feature is one of Catullus’ most important bequests to Martial, and the Priapea too are a beneficiary, the emphasis on the god’s intrinsic ridiculousness and obsessive pursuit of sexual gratification being a radical departure from the Greek tradition of Priapea. Most important, Catullus’ savage invectives, particularly against sexual malfeasance, find countless echoes in the Priapea, the Catalepton and above all Martial. Of course such invective represents the confluence of several influences, Greek and Roman, literary and popular, but in the case of epigram Catullan precedent will have been the primary determinant: a notable example is poem 97, a scabrous attack on one Aemilius, where the density of imagery, grotesquerie of language and extreme obscenity all have their correlate in Martial. Here are lines 1-8: