Up at a Villa, Down in the City? Four Epigrams of Martial
It did not seem to us that rendition into the rhyming couplets of, say, an Alexander Pope from an earlier age or a James Michie from our own, or into the more contemporary free-verse style of a Palmer Bovie, would offer any more faithful a guide to Martial than the sort of fidelity we were aiming for. Especially for a readership coming from a background in modern English poetry, it seemed to us that a translation which attempts to simulate the discipline and constraints of the elegiac couplets, the hendecasyllabics, the limping iambic trimeters, and so on, of Martial’s original poems might have real value.
A Study of Fulvia
Who was Fulvia? Was she the politically aggressive and dominating wife of Mark Antony as Cicero and Plutarch describe her? Or was she a loyal mother and wife, as Asconius and Appian suggest?
Sabinus the Muleteer
It is well known that the tenth poem of the Vergilian Catalepton on Sabinus the Muleteer closely parodies Catullus Phaselus ille. The one poem elegantly describes the career of a sleek ship, its heroic voyages and its final retirement from service. The other humorously reports the career of a lowly mule driver named Sabinus, his business trips, his life in retirement.