Women in Martial: A Semiotic Reading

Women in Martial is the first monograph to treat the portrayals of women in Martial’s Epigrams in a systematic way. In this volume, Marchesi proposes a new method of exploring the cultural construction of femininity in the Flavian age, presenting an interplay between close readings of Martial’s poems and their contextualization through legal, historiographic, rhetorical, and grammatical discussions.

This book discusses the social roles assigned to women in Roman society, where they were at once called to represent their fathers and reproduce their husbands, together with the question of to what extent they are depicted as semiotic signifiers in Martial’s corpus. Noting socially aberrant behavior by pointedly using the discourse of grammar and its categories to detect and address the social issues of his time, Martial—a poet who distinctively adopts the role of a surrogate censor for Domitian—constructs the women he depicts in both negative and positive ways as signs of their time.

Using a wide range of examples from ancient Roman literary culture, Women in Martial models a way of using both historical and literary sources to address the intersection of social and cultural issues in the study of women in the ancient world, ultimately demonstrating the extent to which the social roles and identities of women were constructed and policed through semiotic categories.

Ilaria Marchesi, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Hofstra University

Ilaria Marchesi is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University, where she directs the Classics program. She is the author of The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence, on the intertextuality in the letters of Pliny the Younger (Cambridge 2008), for which she received an NEH grant. She edited and contributed to Pliny the Book-Maker: Betting on Posterity in the Epistles (Oxford 2015). She has published articles on Horace, Petronius, Martial, and, in collaboration with Simone Marchesi, wrote Live in Pompeii, on the cultural value of the archeological past (Garzanti 2016).