Who's Reading Me?:
Measuring Success and Renown in Martial

Peter J. Anderson (Grand Valley State University)

There is a discernible tension in Martial's statements about his own success measured both in terms of public praise and in terms of his readership (or audience). In this paper I argue that Martial plays with the portrayal of this tension. The interesting shift I describe, one that conflates an anonymous readership (.e.g Roma, lector) with public praise, ultimately reveals the essential emptiness of fame based on a readership without personal connections to the author.

The question of what this readership might have been for Martial has been addressed by Best 1968 (against Best's claims that nearly every level of Roman society read Martial see Harris (1989) 227, Kenney in CHCL 2 (1983) 10), Starr 1987, Spisak 1997, the very important article by Johnson 2000, and of course Nauta 2002. Indeed, the importance of readership as a measure of a poet's success and renown is evident in Martial's assessment of other poets as well as of his own. Martial, for example, wrote epigrams on several successful poets which explicitly mention their "currency" for readers: 5.10 (Ennius), 10.35 (Sulpicia), 7.63 (Silius), 7.97 (Turnus), 10.78 (himself). And Martial claims that Cerrinius, who withholds his epigrams from the public, would be read more than even he (8.18.1-4). Conversely, not being read is a signal of ultimate failure for a poet (cf. 3.9 and 6.61); failure to be read also lies behind Martial's attack on Sextus in 10.21. Martial often disparages, and sometimes disdains, public praise as an unreliable measure of fame and success because it is so often counterfeit. For instance, Martial recommends Selius in 2.27 as a willing toady for any pleader or reciter, and in 5.63 portrays himself as a flatterer (with a nasty twist) to a certain Ponticus; likewise 12.40. 4.49 highlights the tension between praise (which as we saw above may be counterfeit) and true literary success: Martial attacks poetry on mythological themes, claiming that, while this poetry wins general commendation, epigram is actually read. This apprehension of public praise in opposition to the appreciation of an intimate readership has significant parallels in Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus and Pliny's portrayal of poetic culture in the Epistles.

Named readers form the early focus of Martial's assertions about his success and he scoffs at public praise and recognition (e.g. 2.86.11-12 scribat carmina circulis Palaemon: | me raris iuvat auribus placere). Very few early poems, in fact, focus on his fame at all (note that 1.1 and 1.2 belong to a later edition of Books 1-7, see Dau 1887, Citroni 1988, Sullivan 1991, Holzberg 2002). But with the increased importance of the Emperor as patron starting with Book 4, Martial begins to assert praise garnered from the anonymous readership provided by the Emperor's support; this reaches its peak in Book 8 (cf. 5.15, 5.16, 8.praef.)  In later books this growing interest culminates in Book 10 with an exceptionally prominent role for the anonymous reader in the portrayal of his success and fame; in 10.2 for example, the justification for the revised edition of Book 10, Martial points – as he had in 8.praef. to Domitian – to his reader, a gift of Roma herself, as the source of his renown in the future. Martial now seems to downplay the importance of the Emperor-as-patron and the patron-amicus in the dissemination of his poetry (and therefore also in his success as poet), refocusing the measure of his success instead on the support of an anonymous readership. But in Book 11's topsy-turvy world, Martial makes it clear that the phantom and unprofitable readership's support can only be manifested in his own poetry (a fact which Martial bemoans explicitly in Ep. 11.3), and that the value of widespread fame (assured earlier through the Emperor's support) is resoundingly hollow; indeed, the last poem of 11 (11.108) is an exceedingly brusque good-bye to the anonymous reader. This tension, at critical levels in Books 10 and 11, is released in Book 12 as Martial reintegrates several patron-amici into his schema of readership and success (cf. 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.21).