Inscribing Flavian Rome: Epigraphic Strategies in Martial’s Epigrams

Inscribing Flavian Rome offers the first systematic investigation of Martial’s dynamic engagement with the full range of Roman epigraphic habits. Breaking new ground in the study of Roman epigram, it establishes a new interpretation of early imperial writing culture which reconsiders literary and epigraphic modes of communications as inter-permeable. The volume argues for conceptualizing epigrammatic poetry and epigraphic writing as complementary cultural activities that involve not only thematic and generic interactions, but also intersecting audiences and interconnected socio-cultural phenomena, such as Saturnalian carnival and damnatio memoriae.

Sitting at the juncture between Latin literature and Roman epigraphy, Inscribing Flavian Rome examines the nature, functioning, and critical consequences of the relationship between literary epigrams and epigraphic texts, reshaping our understanding of the production, consumption, and circulation of poetry across different media. This book offers a transformative reading of Martial’s poetic project and a thorough reconsideration of the value of epigraphic texts as central to the understanding of Roman literary culture. With its interdisciplinary approach, it demonstrates that what we distinctly perceive as ’literary’ and ’epigraphic’, ’poetry of the book’ and ’poetry of the street’, engage in a mutual, expansive dialogue.

Through a series of close comparative analyses of literary epigrams and a range of Roman writing practices such as monumental inscriptions, epitaphs, and graffiti, this volume makes a timely intervention in the debates surrounding the interaction between literature and epigraphy. Martial’s epigrammatic corpus is examined in its wider cultural, literary, and historical contexts, integrating philological and historical analysis, close reading of epigrams and on-site investigation of epigraphic texts. By exploring key concerns about literary materiality and monumentality, authorship and plagiarism, parallel techniques of intertextual allusions, this book offers a pioneering analysis of epigraphic strategies in Martial’s corpus, including the construction of anonymous readers 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.

Alessandra Tafaro, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, British School at Rome

Alessandra Tafaro is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the British School at Rome, working at the intersection between Latin literature and Roman epigraphy. After completing her BA and MA degrees at La Sapienza, University of Rome, she pursued her doctoral studies at the University of Warwick, where she was awarded her PhD in 2021. She has conducted research across Europe and the USA including at Princeton University, the International University of Venice, and the University of Cambridge. She was recipient of a prestigious Rome Award at the British School at Rome in 2022 and held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (CRASSH) in 2024.