In the conclusion to his ground-breaking study of the relationship between Latin literature and politics in the age of Nero, J.P. Sullivan looked forward to the literature of the Flavian period, offering a broad survey of the leading writers and their political and literary affiliations. His portrait of Statius, written with his typical wit, is distinctly unappealing:

Alongside Catullus and Ovid, Martial is the Latin writer who tells us most about the ancient book, and he receives detailed treatment in most histories of ancient book production: he has a chapter to himself, for instance, in Roberts and Skeats' The Birth of the Codex. Books and reading are a central concern of his poetry from his very first publications: around 10-15% of the epigrams deal with this theme. The topic has received, however, much less attention from literary critics than from scholars interested in the Realien of ancient book production, and those who have paid attention to it have tended to play down the importance of the published books compared to the ‘occasional’ reception of the epigrams either through recitation or through informal pamphlets (the so-called ‘libelli’ prominent in the important work of Peter White). Even John Sullivan, who was more aware than many of the importance of the book in Martial, sees the published books as ‘open-ended collections, to which material could be added as it became available or necessary’ and declares that ‘Martial is less careful about the endings of his books…than about their beginnings and general structure’. I have suggested elsewhere that, on the contrary, the endings of Martial's books may be seen as possessing particularly ingenious effects of closure, and in general it seems to me that the engagement with reception in book-form shown by Martial's epigrams is extremely sophisticated.

D M

J. P. Sullivan

In chapters 24 and 25 of the Poetics Aristotle discusses an aspect of poetry which is important even for satire. Aristotle states that to thaumaston, the element of ‘the wondrous’ necessary for tragedy, depends on what he terms to alogon, ‘the irrational’ (Poet. 1460a11-14). He continues to explain that ‘once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity’ inherent in it (an de thēi kai phainētai eulogōterōs, endekhesthai kai atopon <on>). Accordingly, Aristotle postulates that the poet should prefer ‘likely impossibilities to unlikely possibilities’ (adunata eikota mallon ē dunata apithana). Aristotle stresses the importance of this demand by repeating it later (Poet. 1461b11f.). The poet's justification for proceeding along such lines rests on the effect he achieves: his composition becomes ‘more striking’ (ekplēktikōteron, Poet. 1460b24-27). The irrational does not necessarily violate reason, ‘for it is likely that something may happen contrary to likelihood’ (eikos gar kai para to eikos ginesthai; Poet. 1461b15). Although not real, the irrational is ‘better’ (beltion); it is not that which is, but that which ‘ought to be’ (hōs dei). S.H. Butcher summarises the subject by observing: ‘These so-called adunata are the very dunata of art, the stuff and substance of which poetry is made …. The adunata, things impossible in fact, become pithana [likely].’

Pignus Amoris

I begin with a pre-text. It is a short poem about intellectual hypocrisy which might have been written by Martial had he lived in southern California in the 1990's. Its author is in fact John Sullivan. The title of the poem is ‘Pop Sociologist’.