How should women be read in Martial? To be quite honest, as a woman who has spent her entire academic career reading Martial, this question has long haunted me. Ilaria Marchesi’s approach offers a fresh, complex and eye-opening answer from a thought-provoking angle: she regards Martial as a “cultural semiotician” (p. xi) and “self-appointed censor” (p. 1), while the women in his poetry are read as “signs”, as “transparent signifiers of male identities. They are, furthermore, subjects who may comply with the social identities projected upon them collectively, but they may also individually resist, displace, and even control these identities” (p. xi). Epigrams can be read as “microcosms of semiotic negotiations” (p. xii) and Martial, a “guardian of signs” (p. xviii), “adopts semiotic categories” when isolating individuals who disrupt social norms: by exposing them, he folds them and their behaviors back “into the discursive fabric of society” (p. xii). According to Marchesi, women are a particularly interesting case study because they are “unstable signs” (p. xii), that is, the meaning they convey is not their own. Instead of applying Manichean labels, Marchesi introduces a new categorisation of female characters in the Epigrams: “women may be either obsequiously or defiantly semiotic” (p. xiii). Simplistic interpretations are impossible, for even when women are portrayed in a positive light, semiotic tensions emerge.
The introduction lays the foundations for this study by focusing on the interplay between grammar, social norms and semiotics. It also unravels the censorial nature of Martial’s poetry at a time of “semiotic crisis” (p. 10). The book is then divided into two parts that complement and mirror each other: the first one, entitled “Guardians of Signs”, focuses on the treatment of “woman” as a “socially and culturally charged semiotic object”; the second offers an “articulated and cohesive typology of the semiotically charged deviant behaviors which Martial attributes to most of the women in his Epigrams” (pp. 10-11). The second part also includes a selective but thorough close-reading analysis. In fact, only 36 female characters from the Epigrams are listed in the general index, whereas many other women appearing in Martial are omitted. The additional presentation of some of them could confirm and strengthen the ideas of the book, but I wonder if others could also contribute to refuting some of its arguments. In the same vein, even understanding why Marchesi only focuses on Books I-XII, the exclusion of Martial’s other works deserves an explanation or informative note.
The first chapter, “Women as Signs”, starts by asserting the widespread presence of women in a variety of contexts, while arguing that Martial treats them collectively as signs. Women have a paradoxical dual role: as a daughter, a woman must transmit her father’s image, name and values to the next generation, but as a wife, she must also transmit the “imprint of her husband, and of him alone” (p. 22). Women have to be steadfast and mutable at the same time. Some examples of “daughterly transparency” in Martial and other authors, notably Pliny the Younger’s Epist. 4.19, are examined in the first section to illustrate the deep tensions that the paradoxical role of women creates in literature. Some other Epistulae could reinforce Marchesi’s approach: in 1.16, the literary education of Pompeius Saturninus’ wife recalls Pliny’s interaction with Calpurnia; while Hispulla’s formative drive could be compared to that of the more ambiguous Ummidia Quadratilla (4.19.6 nihil in contubernio tuo uiderit, nisi sanctum honestumque; 7.24.3 Vixit in contubernio auiae delicatae seuerissime, et tamen obsequentissime). Without completely abandoning Pliny, the second part of the chapter focuses on how Martial’s epigrams on generation deal with women as “a transparent sign of male identity” (p. 43). Two examples in contiguous epigrams are contrasted, viz. the unnamed wife of Regulus (6.38), mother of his child who is his spitting image, and the promiscuous Marulla, whose children’s physical traits reveal both her recurrent adulteries and their servile origins—to the shame of her husband Cinna.[1] The internal contradictions of women’s status “as signs of their husbands and fathers” (p. 57) are not only latent in epigrams dealing with antimodels, for exemplary women—like the Catonis uxor and horribiles Sabinae of 11.15—are also unstable signifiers.[2]
The second chapter focuses on how women signify through their bodies by analysing the “varied phenomenology of corporeal women which Book 11 surveys” (p. 62). The semiotic exploration of female corporeality in epigrams 11.23, 11.27, 11.29 and 11.99–104 confirms that they are “particularly problematic”, as “unstable bearers of meaning” (p. 80). Chapter 3 (“A Typology of Martial’s Women: Resisting, Controlling, and Subverting Signifiers”) draws from the premise that women in the Epigrams are “both the women of Roman society of the first and second centuries CE and the women made in—as well as by—the literature that is produced and circulated at that time” (p. 81), a premise that, incidentally, is also valid for men. They are not only the “object of the text” and “the object defined and controlled in the text” (p. 81), but also its receptors in their internal and external role as readers. This chapter contrasts “positive” and “negative types” of women, highlighting the intrinsic instability in both kinds of portraits. Elements of tension are to be found even in epigrams praising model women. The positive (yet unsettling) portraits in this chapter include those of Argentaria Polla (Lucan’s widow), the poetess Sulpicia (the contemporary of Martial) and the combined figure of Claudia Peregrina and Claudia Rufina. Polla (7.21–23) is not just “a transparent vehicle for her husband’s memory,” but “quite literally, if uncannily, projects him as her shade. Lucan is both a shade enjoying memorialization and his wife’s memorialized shadow” (p. 86). I am more reluctant to accept that Sulpicia (10.35, 10.38) “must be dead from the start in order to find room in a book that is quite thoroughly intent on killing women” (p. 91). As I have argued elsewhere, the fact that Sulpicia is dead is crucial in this book, albeit not because she is a woman but because Domitian is also dead. It is true that just as women’s deaths are prominent in Book 10 (Marchesi mentions 10.16, 10.43, 10.63, 10.67,[3] 10.90 and even 10.8),[4] so too are men’s (10.50, 10.53, 10.71, 10.77). Death is one of the guiding threads in Book 10, but in a broad sense (not just the erasure of women): there are also references to death and memory (10.2), near-death experiences (10.97) and resurrection (10.72.10-11; 10.101). Lastly, the joint reading of 4.13 and 11.53 (Claudia Peregrina/Rufina) is quite revealing, since the sequence is read as a process of assimilation by which she becomes a “semiotic docile woman” (p. 97). But I also wonder about the mutation of the husband. The counter-models analysed in the second half of the chapter include Bassa (1.90), Naevia (1.68) and Laevina (1.62), whose semiotic interpretation is the prelude to a more comprehensive set of behaviors “that transgress the semiotic structures of their society” (p. 107).
Chapter 4 is devoted to the first type of semiotically deviant women, viz. those resisting self-erasure. Several groups of epigrams are contrasted: 2.34 and 4.9, where the wrong choice of partner provokes “inter-generational issues” (p. 109); 5.75, 6.45 and 6.90, three legalistic texts on marriage and adultery; and two apparently unrelated epigrams based on the verbs facere and dare (9.15 and 7.75). To start with, three epigrams written in persona auctoris (11.104, 12.96 and 11.43) reveal the connection between pedication (anal intercourse) and predication, another proof that in the Epigrams grammar and behavior go hand in hand.
Chapter 5 analyses “women who take the field and reverse the identity-defining mechanics of language, by projecting on men material wealth, social standing, and ultimately semiotic identity” (p. 131). Epigrams 3.70, 9.95 and 9.80 are contrasted, and some other “portraits of imposing and controlling women” “on the side of economics” and “in the sexual arena” (pp. 137-138) are listed. The second part of the chapter deals with “the social theatrics of marriage”, namely, how women stage social performances and impose “masks and roles” (p. 139), by analysing epigrams 3.86, 3.87, 5.61 and 11.7. Finally, “reversing the grammar of marriage” (p. 149), as occurs in 8.12, 9.10 and 10.69, is seen as another means of threatening the “assumed social (unbalanced) relationship between the sexes” (p. 154). But what happens when the context is not satirical but laudatory? I wonder, for instance, how we should interpret Mummia Nigrina (4.75), who shares her wealth with her husband. Is she both transgressive and compliant? Is she also “engaging in a particularly dangerous abuse” (p. 154)?
The final chapter approaches women as “shifting and confusing” signifiers, who “attempt to speak a different truth to the power that controls them” (p. 155), who organise “their own selves in public performance” or who “strive to replace a whole set of identifiers with new ones” (p. 156). This includes old women pretending to be young (1.10, 10.39, 3.42, 8.79), masculine (7.67, 7.70), crying (1.33, 4.58) and coughing women (1.10, 2.26). For the first time in the book, epigrams on the same topics featuring men are systematically contrasted with those satirising women. According to the author, there is a differential treatment of men and women in these strategies of self-presentation (p. 178). In my view, contrasting these female characters with male figures playing fictional roles in public performances (especially in those epigrams dealing with the Lex Roscia Theatralis)[5] could also have been very useful here. I also missed a more outspoken intersectional approach combining gender, age, status and so forth: what kinds of signifiers are, for instance, (enslaved) young girls, such as Antulla, Erotion and Canace? Does death change their semiotics? What about historically powerful (and transgressive) women, like Fulvia (11.20), whose words are quoted in an epigram attributed to Augustus himself? Perhaps, her military and sexual agency, together with the references to pedicatio, could cast light on the predication/pedication section of Chapter 4.
The book ends with a conclusion and an epilogue. The former does not deal with Martial but explores, in an illuminating analysis, the excision of women “from the social and political dynamics of power” (p. 190) in Pliny’s Panegyric (Pan. 7). I wish the author had also included Pan. 83–84 on Trajan’s formative (generative) force over his sister and wife, which mirrors some of Pliny’s ideas elsewhere. The epilogue inquires into some other unstable signifiers and signs in the Epigrams, such as parvenus, freed and enslaved persons, captatores and fake philosophers, among others. Together with women, they reveal that Martial’s (plus Pliny’s and our own) world is immersed in a “semiotic crisis”, where “any certain connection between signifier and signified, between objects and values, has ceased to be trustworthy or trusted” (p. 195). The book is thankfully rounded off with two indexes (an Index locorum and a general index) which contribute to its usability and worth.[6]
I have read many wonderful books on Martial and, after reading Women in Martial with appetite, interest and attention, it has already become one of my favorites, even though some interpretations leave room for disagreement and constructive controversy. To my mind, it is a commendable, entertaining and serious piece of scholarship.
Notes
[1] Marchesi assigns Marulla a servile status (p. 56), but nothing in the poem suggests this. On the contrary, her status as a domina (Farouk Grewing, Martial, Buch VI, Göttingen 1997, p. 274) who has sex with her entire servile household makes her behavior more problematic from a semiotic perspective.
[2] The anachronistic Lucretia reading Martial’s book (11.16) could have been added here. Apparently a stable sign in Roman culture, she appears in the Epigrams in dual or paradoxical contexts, as in 1.90 (p. 99) and 11.104, an epigram that “contains, in fact, the perfectly constructed body and behavior of the woman, a subject who may receive any meaning that is wished upon her, being ready to turn, in the author’s fantasy, from Lucretia to Thais at her husband’s will” (p. 63). As for the Sabine women, they are discussed on pp. 57–60, 103–105, but not enough attention is paid to 9.40.5, where they are jokingly mentioned in connection with fellatio.
[3] She has written 10.77, but this is a typo.
[4] Erotion (10.61) could be added to this list.
[5] Only epigram 5.38 is analysed in the introduction.
[6] In 2.8, Martial apologises for his errors. All books contain some or other typo and mistake, but in Marchesi’s they are rare: futit instead of futuit (p. 51); p. CFP9, instead of p. xv (p. 75 n. 14); predication instead of pedication (p. 109). As for the bibliographical references, my colleagues (Alberto) Marina Castillo and (Juan) Fernández Valverde are wrongly rendered as Castillo (or Castilla) and Valverde: my book should be cited as Moreno Soldevila, Rosario, Marina Castillo, Alberto, and Fernández Valverde, Juan, A Prosopography to Martial’s Epigrams, De Gruyter 2019. Finally, the edition of Pliny followed in this book is not included in the editions section in the bibliography.