| This dissertation concerns the role of literary apology in the poetic corpus of the late first-century Latin epigrammatist Martial, and the relationship that Martial's apology for his work has with concerns of literary genre that are also a prevalent feature of the corpus. Critics have generally been inclined to diminish the import of Martial's elaborate apologia by removing his "literary-critical" comments from their context within the collection (taking this simply as one theme among many that the poet occasionally treats). It is the aim of this study to inquire more deeply into the purpose and rhetorical function of Martial's apologia, and thus to set on a firmer basis the place of Martial's apologetic and generic concerns in the corpus as a whole. The basic conception of literary apology employed is that of Bundy, which serves to ground apologetic expression firmly within a rhetorical framework, and thus allows interpretation of it that departs from the reconstruction of the author's literary-critical opinions. Martial's apologia is not a supplement to the text in which it appears, nor does it take as its base a set of prescriptive and preexisting generic norms that define epigram. The apologia, rather, functions to generate and manipulate these generic norms. The view of literary genre that I employ (drawing elements from Hirsch, Bakhtin, Conte, and others) is specifically designed to complement this view of apology. After an initial chapter which discusses at length theoretical and methodological considerations, the following four chapters examine four crucial aspects of the poet's apology. Chapter 2 concerns Martial's stylistic self-presentation and the positioning of both work and author within the literary system as a whole; chapter 3 the apologetic use and significance of appropriation of extra-literary goals (namely money and fame) within the framework of the verse; the fourth chapter takes up issues of incorporation of "high" material and style, especially themes adopted from the mythological tradition; and the fifth the incorporation of "low" material and style, especially the use of obscene vocabulary. |
