Inscribing Flavian Rome : epigraphic strategies in Martial’s epigrams

This thesis explores Martial’s dynamic engagement with Roman epigraphic culture and interrogates how the poet rethinks the paradoxes of poetic monumentality through the lens of textual materiality. It examines the nature, functioning and critical consequences of the relationship between literary epigrams and epigraphic texts, advancing our understanding of the production, consumption and circulation of poetry across different media. The thesis investigates epigraphic strategies in Martial’s corpus, including the construction of anonymous readerships as travellers passing by epitaphs inscribed upon tombs and the power of epigrams and inscriptions to transform the ideological connotations of monumental spaces in the context of damnatio memoriae. By pursuing a close comparative analysis of literary epigrams and a range of Roman writing habits, i.e., monumental inscriptions, epitaphs and graffiti, which Martial identifies with scrawls on walls in chalk or charcoal or with texts neatly incised in stone, the thesis investigates key concerns about literary materiality and monumentality, authorship and plagiarism, parallel techniques of intertextual allusions and the construction of urban spaces which characterise both literary and epigraphic contexts. By combining perspectives deriving both from literature and material culture, this study reconsiders epigrammatic poetry and epigraphic writing as complementary cultural activities which involve not only thematic and generic interactions, but also intersecting audiences and interconnected socio-cultural phenomena. As well as analysing central concerns of Martial’s epigraphic strategies, the thesis explores what changes when we interpret Roman epigrammatic poetry and epigraphic habits in dialogue with one another. At the juncture between literary criticism and studies in material culture, this project offers insights into the distinctiveness of Martial’s poetry and re-considers the value of epigraphic texts as central to the understanding of early imperial writing culture