Martial

Keiran Carson offers the first English commentary on Martial Book 12. Focusing on intra- and intertextual readings, he shows how Martial constructs and organises his poems both individually and collectively. Poems from the beginning, middle and end of the book give a précis of Martial’s final work.

Book 12 is the only book of Martial’s epigrams that still lacks a published commentary. Keiran Carson fills that gap with interpretative commentaries on selected poems, reading them closely against one another and against the wider epigrammatic tradition, and cataloguing the technical detail that shapes Martial’s style and purpose. He gives priority to lexical choice, metre, departures from standard compositional practice – Martial’s own and other poets’ – word placement and the interaction of neighbouring poems. The essays, which follow the epigrams and translations, evaluate each poem, its key themes and its structure and style. Thereafter, lemmatised entries treat aspects of individual lines or words throughout the poems. Apart from individual poems treated in selective commentaries, the only full-scale account of Book 12 remains Bowie’s unpublished Oxford thesis (1988); Craca’s two editions (2011 and 2018) offer extended essays and partial commentary on most of the poems. Carson’s is the first English-language commentary to treat the book as a whole.