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• Ennodius und Martial

  195–205

  Tamás Adamik

  Views:

  90

  Magnus Felix Ennodius, the bishop of Ticinum (modern Pavia), died in 521. He has left letters, poems, oratorical pieces, saints’ lives and controversial literature. Ennodius’ writings were composed for specific audiences on particular occasions. His Latinity is very literate, syntactically complex, and difficult to understand. He cultivates the short literary forms: letters, panegyrics, declamatory themes (dictiones), short poems, epithalamium, epigrams, epitaphs, hymns. In the preface of his epithalamium for Maximus, he displays the essential qualities of spring with Martial’s vocabulary. This fact directed my attention to the relation of Ennodius to Martial. Comparing Ennodius’s epigrams with Martial’s, I realized that in his epigrams Ennodius imitated Martial both in topics and expressions.

• Antulla’s tomb and Martial’s: poetic closure in book 1

  41–56

  Patricia Larash

  Views:

  68

  The final seven epigrams of Martial’s Book 1 form a subtle but important closural sequence (epigrams 1.112-1.118 inclusive). Despite their great variatio of topics, the seven epigrams are linked through concerns about the boundary between life and death, the integrity of a monument, and the theme of dignus legi, or what makes someone “worthy of being read.” Through a series of close readings, this article argues for the coherence of this sequence on formal, thematic, and verbal grounds. The sequence is centered on a pair of epigrams on the kepotaphion or tomb-garden of a young girl named Antulla (1.114 and 1.116). The function of this closural sequence is both formal, to bring closure to a disparate collection of epigrams, and thematic, to reprise themes from the mock-epitaph with which Martial opens book 1 (1.1).

• Epic meals: Who should read epic poetry in Rome?

  195–201

  Gergő Gellérfi

  Views:

  148

  In this paper, the presence of food and dinners in connection with epic poetry in three different Juvenalian poems is discussed. The first is Satire 4 containing a mock-epic, the plot of which revolves around a giant turbot that is described with epic-style elements, and that is given to the emperor Domitian characterized by uncontrolled gluttony. The other two poems, Satires 5 and 11, both focusing on dinner parties, are in connection with the epic genre as well: while in the closing poem of Book 1, several epic connotations appear in the description of the gluttonous Virro’s extravagant dinner, in Satire 11, the enjoyment of epic poetry is praised and compared to an almost pornographic dance performance in a luxurious feast. Reading the three poems together, it might be proved from another aspect that we have to make a distinction between the Juvenalian evaluation of topics described using epic-style elements and the epic poetry itself.