The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius Martials Epigrams Statius Silvae and Domitianic Rome Gunderson Full Chapter

The Art of Complicity in Martial and
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Silvae, and Domitianic Rome
Gunderson
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The Art of Complicity

in Martial and Statius
The Epigrams, Siluae, and
Domitianic Rome
Erik Gunderson
1
1
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For Tom
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature 29
A. “But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 29
B. Welcome to the show: Epigrams 1 40
i. Run, rabbit, run 40
ii. Power and play in the hare and now 50
iii. Stage-managing the passions 60
iv. It’s not just about rabbits, you see 65
C. To whom it may concern: Epigrams 2+ 66
D. Trust and truth: a confidence game in Book 5 68
E. Bigger, better . . . and badder: Book 6 76
F. High and mighty; near and far: Book 7 84
G. Turning things outside-in: Book 8 92
H. A poet’s will to power: Epigrams 9.pr 100
I. Agony, ecstasy, and emperor: Epigrams 9.1–4 107
J. Managing to both hit and miss the mark: anxiety and
Epigrams 9.5 115
K. Assigning a name to the Domitianic condition, or not 119
i. Unspeakably something: the Earinus cycle begins
(Epigrams 9.11–13) 119
ii. Everybody loves the Ausonian Father. But why? (Epigrams 9.7) 129
iii. The kindest cut: Epigrams 9.16–17 133
iv. The poetry of (ir)reverence: Epigrams 9.36 and its environs 139
v. The poetry of reverence: Epigrams 9.79 and its affines 148
L. Oops: Book 10 150
i. Forgetting how to count in Epigrams 10.1–2 150
ii. Dichtung und Wahrheit: further autobiographical
fictions (Epigrams 10.3–5) 157
iii. The (new) new start ends: Trajan (Epigrams 10.6) 163
iv. I am not going to say, “Master and God”: Epigrams 10.72 164
M. The new beginning as the end: Books 11 and 12 168
i. Approaching the palace, or not (Epigrams 11.1) 168
ii. Epigram is the poetry of private life and festal time
(Epigrams 11.2–3) 172
viii Contents
iii. Nerva dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) 176

iv. Martial’s (confused) preface to his (wretched) postscript:
Book 12.pr and 12.1–5 178
v. Now one is free to enjoy all of Helicon, or not
(Epigrams 12.6 and 12.8) 183
3. Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity 189

A. An introduction to Statius’ Domitianic literature 189
B. Says this poetry, “This is how you are supposed to read
this poetry”192
C. All that glitters makes for a golden verse 201
D. The high and the low in the here and now 204
E. The ecstatic present (and the mundanity of the traditional
sublime)210
F. An introduction to Domitianic grammar and syntax:
the psychic life of subjection 218
i. Marveling at modernity in Siluae 1.1 and 1.2 219
ii. Make way for the present 225
iii. Shut up and be happy: Siluae 4.pr 229
iv. Everything and everyone wears a happy face: Siluae 4.1 234
v. The bold have nothing to fear: Siluae 3.2 238
vi. There is nothing to complain about in this best of worlds 239
vii. True confessions of undeniable attachment to the present 242
G. Select nouns from the Domitianic lexicon 245
i. Freedom (but not that kind of freedom) 246
ii. Faith (for those naive enough to believe) 254
iii. Masters (so many, so marvelous) 259
H. Domitianic time all the time 267
I. Mastering the submission game: six case studies 270
i. Parroting and the mastery of affect (Siluae 2.4) 271
ii. The lion that was tamed (Siluae 2.5) 277
iii. As free as a freedman (Siluae 3.3) 283
iv. Dead boy: poor master, says the poet (Siluae 2.6) 301
v. Dead boy: poor master-dad, said the master-poet (Siluae 2.1) 313
vi. Castrated boy: lucky master, says the poet (Siluae 3.4) 323
4. Conclusion 345
Appendix: From Nero to Trajan: Lives and Times 377
Bibliography 379
Index of Passages 391
General Index 397
Acknowledgements
The students in my over-broad Complicity seminar put up with a lot.

From their suffering came my wisdom. They helped me to see how every-
thing could be put far more clearly and succinctly. If the book is neither
clear nor succinct, know at least that things were once much, much worse.
Charlotte Loveridge and Karen Raith were a pleasure to deal with at the
press, both helped move the project forward swiftly and painlessly despite
the fact that the world and everything in it was a mess. John Henderson of
erstwhile anonymity was wonderful, as ever: so painfully generous with
time and genius. I need to write another book, if only to get a chance to
acknowledge more of the support and inspiration he has provided over the
years. The press’s other reader I cannot name, but I nevertheless owe him
or her a debt of gratitude for, among other things, making me worry about
my own tyranny and so perhaps saving others from it, at least in some
measure.
1
Introduction
Consider the gap between the Domitianic discourse of the Domitianic age
and the next era’s discourse of the Domitianic age. What had been the best
of times was presently denounced as the worst of times.1 Furthermore it is
not at all clear that this distance between these two versions of “the
Domitianic” measures a shared conceptual unit. That is, the Domitianic
discourse of power, even if distorted, does not seem to be structured along
quite the same logic as is the Antonine discourse of Domitianic power.
And the latter is a distorted discourse as well. If one elects to follow up on
Foucault’s insight and to deprecate the repressive model of power, then an
agenda presents itself. If power is fertile and productive, rather than nega-
tive and constraining, then when it comes to the case of “imperial power”
viewed as a discourse more broadly and not just as the concrete institu-
tional capacity for an emperor to give an order and see it executed, who
stood to gain? A naive, direct answer is incomplete. The advantaged party
is not simply a partisan of a cause or an individual emperor. Imperial
power was a modality of sovereignty, legitimacy, and participation. In the
discourse of power that surrounds the Domitianic age, what sorts of
Romanness were enabled, solicited, and fostered? How? On what occa-
sions? By whom? Who, then, is the imperial subject, and what makes
him tick?
In the case of the Antonines, the need for an appraisal of their claims
about the past is glaring. The men denouncing the Domitianic era had
themselves been politically active during that same period.2 A discourse of
1 Boyle, 1995:83: “It was a period of blood, terror, opulence, spectacle, poetry, theatre, and
display; it was a period of social convolution, conformity and reordering, of sexual licence
and puritanical legislation, of rebellion and subversion, of loyalty, concealment, executions
and friendship; it was a period of cultural renewal and of immense creativity in the visual
arts, in architecture, in sculpture; a period of military adventurism, bureaucracy and
careerism, political and social patronage and favour, corrupting power, servility and self-
abasement—and of satisfied life.”
2 Griffin, 2000:55: “Like Nero, to whom Juvenal compared him, Domitian was the last of
his dynasty, and he was removed and disgraced. The rulers that followed justified their usur-
pation by treating his reign as a tyrannical aberration after which the tradition set by good
The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson,
Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0001
2 Introduction
hypocrisy springs to their lips: “The devil made us do it.3 Throughout that
period we had our fingers crossed behind our backs.4 None of it meant
all that much. But today let me assure you that, though you cannot see
them, behind my back my fingers are assuredly not crossed.”5 Words like
adulatio—a word evoking cringing, fawning flattery, a word better suited
to a dog than a man and yet so often used of men . . . —became very
important in the post-Domitianic age.6 Words like this offer a label as well
as a cloak.7 They qualify even as they also conceal the details of the
contents of the object so signed, sealed, and delivered to the contemporary
principes would be resumed. Writers under Nerva and Trajan were only too happy to elabo-
rate on the theme, especially those who had flattered and prospered under the old regime.
How can we trust any of them?” Compare Leberl, 2004:12–14; Syme, 1997:3: “When a despot
is killed or a dynasty destroyed less is achieved than some expect. After the initial transports
of newly won liberation men look around and discover that the system abides—and most of
the people.” Waters, 1969:390: “We must conclude then that at no time was there greater
continuity in the sphere of imperial advisers and other prominent administrators than in the
transition from Domitian to Trajan.”
3 Bartsch, 1994 shows just how sinister and involuted the question of acting can get for
political agents.
4 But the emperor knew that your fingers were crossed behind your backs . . . Absolutely
everybody, emperor included, knows the score. Contemporary testimony is provided by Dio
Chrysostomus 6.58: “The tyrant is not pleased when praised. For he does not think that peo-
ple are speaking their minds ([ὁ τύραννοϲ] ἐπαινούμενοϲ δὲ οὐχ ἥδεται· οὐ γὰρ φρονοῦνταϲ
οὕτωϲ οἴεται λέγειν).” Similarly, the flatterer fools only himself: “The flatterer outstrips all in
his folly. Of those who conceal the truth, he alone confidently disseminates his falsehoods
despite the fact that his audience is perfectly aware that he lies (τῷ δὲ ἄφρονι πάνταϲ
ὑπερβέβληκεν ὁ κόλαξ. μόνοϲ γὰρ τῶν ἀφανιζόντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν πρὸϲ ἐκείνουϲ θαρρεῖ τὰ
ψευδῆ λέγειν τοὺϲ μάλιϲτα εἰδόταϲ ὅτι ψεύδεται; 3.19).”
5 Leberl, 2004:16 on readings that let self-interested Romans get away with this line of
argument: “Sie setz, auf die flavische Literatur bezogen, voraus, dass kein Untertan einen
‘Tyrannen’ freiwillig und ohne Not preise, und dass Domitian seine gesamte Regierungszeit
hindurch ein Tyrann gewesen sein muss.” When it comes to “resistance” via double-speak,
Leberl raises the most devastating question of all: how is it that only Caesar was too stupid to
understand that he was being double-spoken to? As Geyssen, 1996:7 notes, he had been
trained to read this sort of thing. And, even if he was obtuse, did he have no self-interested
delator to help him get up to speed?
6 Keitel, 2006:223: “Tacitus repeatedly alludes to fides, amicitia, adulatio, and self-interest
in the narrative of 1.12–49 and shows the breakdown of traditional values among all groups
involved in the struggle for power at Rome.” And Histories 1.15.3–4 can be compared to
Pliny, Panegyricus 85.1 (Keitel, 2006:221).
7 Gallia, 2012:89: “If anything, it seems that Trajan did more to consolidate the power of
the princeps, expanding many of the authoritarian policies for which Domitian is supposed
to have been reviled.” Antonine positions are highly compromised. It is polite to avoid look-
ing too closely. See Syme, 1997:25: “Tacitus proclaims his scorn for the brave enemies of dead
tyrants, the noisy advocates of the heroes and martyrs. They had not confined their reproba-
tion to evil men, the willing agents of despotism, but had gone much further. The rule of the
Caesars depended not only on political managers or venal prosecutors. It had the support of
administrators; and the whole senatorial order was acquiescent. Tacitus goes out of his way to
make a passionate confession of collective guilt.” Gallia, 2012:91: “Pliny’s embarrassment is
understandable, given that every step of his career save the very first and the most recent had
been obtained with the endorsement of a ruler he repeatedly condemns as a despot.”
Introduction 3
moment.8 What more does one need to know other than that the situation
was revolting?
The cynical appraisal of imperial life is important and compelling. But
the portrait of a world full of mere actors who mouthed empty lines itself
comes to feel two-dimensional. The discourse of the subject and power
produced within the Domitianic age unfolds a rich constellation of prob-
lems. The Antonines denounce something that is both too simple and to
one side of this discourse. And so I have opted to offer a reading of the
Domitianic portrait of Domitianic literature. Such an agenda potentially
entails a species of meta-complicity: if the authors get to set the terms of
the debate, then one is all too likely to end up on one side of it in the end.
Similarly, one may well overlook key issues that have been pointedly sup-
pressed by the authors of the hour. Nevertheless, the converse failing is, at
least in the case of Domitianic literature, familiar enough: disgusted, one
fails to give ear to these self-serving, boot-licking flatterers of power. Their
praise turns into self-indictment. One denounces and moves on. A new
age conveniently dispenses with an old one without asking too many
inconvenient questions.
But if we linger, one’s relationship to the material on hand becomes a
somewhat fraught affair. And this is one of the points of the whole study:
can politics and art be tidily separated at any layer of analysis? The poems
are never merely political, nor are they simply art, and this is true even—
especially?—when we are invited by the verse itself to draw distinctions
and to set down lines of demarcation. Even if the contents of a poem were
somehow purely apolitical, does not the apolitical posture itself reek of
politics? Even when speaking most directly to power, is the speech ever
just political without also itself constituting an aestheticized political
object? And the lovely speech-object so produced is itself objectifying
contemporary politics as a thing of wonder and beauty.
The pseudo-antinomy of art as set against politics cannot be sustained.
Any desire to say that we are dealing with “either . . . or . . . ” must yield to a
story of “both . . . and . . . ”. Our reluctance to engage in a discourse of guilt
and innocence is almost reflexive, especially in the wake of the over-hasty
denunciations of the Antonines who seem all too eager to cast judgements.
But it is, in its own way, perverse for us to maintain neutrality given the
loud shouting of all parties that the affair at hand is indeed politically and
8 Henderson, 2001:76 on Book 3 of Pliny’s Epistles: “Altogether, these in-brief profiles of

individuals map out an embryonic political review, from a Trajanic perspective, of the first
two dynasties of Caesars. The half-light of another Panegyricus, in fact.”
4 Introduction
socially charged. The critic who decides that what confronts him or her is
merely a question of artistry has in practice taken a side both relative to
the past and relative to the present. And so one has no choice but to decide
what to do about all of the sticky questions before us. And they are sticky
because they stick to us as well.
Other polarities will likewise need to be dismantled. Freedom and con-
straint work as a useful conjunctive pair. The disjunction that posits either
freedom or constraint proves too simplistic. Poetry and power need to be
allowed to unfold themselves, to interact, to intersect, to interpenetrate.
The mutual implication of the two terms can help to steer us away from a
static portrait of anyone or anything: we need to capture the dialog and
dynamism. Conversely, even the most reductive approach to the interpre-
tation of Domitianic poetry founders at once in its own terms. Did the
historical individual named Martial think that Domitian was a good
emperor? Well, the poems of 86 and the poems of 90 and the poems of 94
differ in their presentation of the issue. They are always positive on the one
hand, but they are differently positive on the other. Maybe he thought
Domitian was satisfactory at first but not so good in the end. Maybe the
praise starts as sincere but then becomes insincere. Maybe it was never
sincere to begin with, but then it becomes bitingly critical in the end.
There is no obvious way to talk about the relationship between poetry and
power in this age that does not at once get complicated and then more
complicated still: the question of power is protean. As for the poets them-
selves, they are all too happy to sing about how someone once sang a song
about Orpheus who was singing about the children of Poseidon. And such
songs comprise their pointedly shape-shifting answer to the question of
the nature of the interaction between poet and prince.
And so we will be exploring power-and-poetry. This project entails
something more than just reading poems about power. It may well indeed
be most keenly interested in those places where the narrative voice speaks
most directly to or about power. But it is also more generally interested in
the poetic corpora in question. And, in practice, this project will be skepti-
cal of poems about poetry as somehow revelatory of the “real” project
while the poems about power are the “specious, throwaway” elements of
the enterprise.9 Instead the fertility of power, its expressiveness, and its
ubiquity will be put into dialog with the making, doing, and omnipotence
of ποίηϲιϲ. Poet and prince are nodal points in the same network, moments
9 Compare Foucault, 1990:82–83 on the impasses that arise when one examines power-
and-pleasure from a “juridico-discursive” perspective.
Introduction 5
where structural features of the system itself meet up and confront one
another. The oil-and-water immiscibility of the pair is more a pretense
than a reality. Poet and prince are masters, masters of metaphors, and
master metaphors. The exchanges between their domains and the trans-
fers effected within their own zones attest a commonality. One is the duck,
the other the rabbit. One the vase, the other the face; one the fair maid, the
other the hag. But as in the case of these famous optical illusions, the two
are part of the same image, and neither is the truer subject of the scene.
Accounts of how Statius and Martial “reflect on” or “comment on”
power will not be avoided. But such stories-of-power come as preludes to
an investigation both of the nature of this commentary and the place from
which it is articulated. This means exploring the conflicting, contradictory,
atomized, partial, now-hesitant, now-enthusiastic portraits of the emperor
within “Domitianic poetry.” When one bears in mind how little of what we
see can in any sense be said to have been “dictated” by a specific man who
held an office, it becomes easier to appreciate that we are in the presence of
a discourse of power that springs up as a fantasy of things that one might
say to and about and for power.
We see collections of masterful performances that proffer meditations
on mastery that the master may—or may not . . . —deign to observe.10
Master- Poet names the split center of the discursive field where the
trope of freedom-and-constraint plays itself out. The concrete historical
individual poet is producer and product of this free—but not totally
free . . . —play of the signifier.11 The poet both is and is not the master. The
poet both loves and loathes the figure of mastery.
What does anyone mean when they talk about “Domitianic literature”
or the “Domitianic age”? Such notions are convenient fictions: a whole
race of men was not born the day that Domitian came to office; another
did not replace these people on the day he died.12 But the fiction that the
age might have as its cause the Prince is not merely the product of a lazy
historicism that is unduly reliant on metonyms that substitute for analysis.
10 Foucault, 2000b:341: “[Power] operates on the field of possibilities in which the behav-
ior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself.”
11 Foucault, 2000b:341 on the key structural equivocation of the term “conduct”: “To ‘con-
duct’ is at the same time to ‘lead’ others . . . and a way of behaving within a more or less open
field of possibilities.”
12 Freudenburg, 2001:130: “For cultural, epochal identities, such as those suggested by the
terms ‘Augustan’ and ‘Neronian,’ are never simply synonymous with ‘the facts’ of an emperor’s
rule . . . They emerge as identities only when those facts are rendered into stories, told as tales
that ‘make sense’ inside themselves.”
6 Introduction
On the one hand, Domitian is not the cause of the Domitianic age.13 He
had help, and lots of it. In fact he had so much help from so many helpers
that he seldom needed to spell things out and to give specific instructions.
People are anticipating, intervening, adding their twist, making their
mark. Poets, sculptors, men toiling at the mint: there is plenty of work to
go around. How many of their efforts did they really expect the princeps
himself would take note of? How much of the activity was aimed at a
broader contemporary audience of fellow travelers along the Via
Domitiana? What in here is the spontaneous, unbidden, jubilant outpour-
ing of bottom-up efforts to go along, get along, and even get ahead in
Today’s Rome?
But, on the other hand, even if so many are lending their aid and acting
as the efficient causes of the Domitianic era, Domitian is routinely figured
as the one true cause of his own age. Domitian names matter, form, agent,
and end. Ask anyone. “There is no Domitianic age without Domitian,”
they will aver. That is, the metonym is “real” and “truly powerful” precisely
to the extent that there is a wide-spread mobilization of this figure of
speech as if it were indeed the figure that legitimately names the moment.
And the moment assuredly has been/will have been named, at least tem-
porarily: Domitian eventually renames September and October after him-
self.14 And yet, at the very same time, there is a smirking quality to this
deployment of the figural on the part of the members of this (so-called)
age: it is always also a mere figure. The poets “conduct themselves” as if
there were a ruler ruling, but their own conduct also betrays the simulta-
neous presence of a second order of relationships to power, specifically
that power is nothing more—while also being nothing less . . . —than
something figural.
If, as Foucault would have it, genealogy is “gray, meticulous, and
patiently documentary,” then patience will indeed be required.15 For we
are not looking into the pedigree of any given poet, his birth, his wealth,
his education, the books he read, his preferred allusions, his aesthetic
affiliations, and so forth. In the case of Statius in particular one can write
volumes about these things. And they have indeed been written. But we
13 Leberl, 2004:27: “Der Princeps war nicht der auctor aller Instrumente und Medien
seiner Herrshaftsdarstellung.”
14 Suetonius, Domitian 13.3. It doesn’t stick. But one could always dream, sometimes suc-
cessfully, sometimes not so successfully. See Suetonius, Julius 76 and Augustus 31 on the ori-
gin of the month-names of July and August. And see Caligula 15 on an earlier attempt at
renaming September as the month of Germanicus. Nero named April after himself (Nero 55).
15 Foucault, 2000a:369.
Introduction 7
are exploring instead the emergence of politico-aesthetic objects posi-

tioned at the intersection of a constellation of forces. Domitianic poetry
books both embody and body forth a swirl of forces and power relations
that are all in play. And the work effected by these forces comes with the
label “play” set upon it. Lusus is the name one frequently assigns to this
“playful” constellation of power. But that is a self-serving pedigree that
poetry bestows upon itself, and, as such, it should be immediately suspect.
Playful splashing in learned waters is not mere play as soon as one
asserts that power-and-poetry is the real name for the game afoot.16
Helicon’s font is not the only source of all of this. Instead, a founding dis-
parity lies at the bottom of it all. The essential thing to observe is that there
is no essence to begin with.17 There is only a “current episode in a series of
subjugations.”18 The list of elements that should attract the critic’s eye
might not include only allusions, intertexts, master-poets, and master-
texts. In such a flowery figuration, the question of power has been dis-
placed. It has been hidden away under a purple cloak woven of the finest
cloth, a vestment crafted by Pierian maidens, by the looks of it. Scandalous,
base-born forces might be detected tussling lustily ’neath that mantle:
social obligation, economic ties, political submission, proud self-display,
social ambition, political resistance, artistic independence, other-loathing,
self-loathing, fear of failure, fear of success. And this is only the list of
forces that one might describe as semi-subjective, as sites where an ego
might assert itself, where someone might affirm or deny or somehow
argue the point. The impersonal system as such, the forces for which there
is no personal agent have not been entertained in such a list. Not yet of
interest are ideology in the abstract, the sign system in general, power at
its most fertile, the dominant fiction at its most elusive.
Presently and below we will linger with a hermeneutics of the
subject, not because getting to the bottom of Martial—who is always also
“Martial”—or of Statius—who is always also “Statius”—is somehow pos-
sible. But we will spend time thinking about subject positions and the
rhetoric of the self precisely because this is where the poetry itself spends
its time. Even if they are not real people, these vividly drawn characters
and their fictional psychic lives need to be explored and to be taken seri-
ously precisely because one needs to be sensitive to the politics of
pseudo-interiority.
16 Habinek, 2005:5: “Play turns out to be a crucial element of hegemonic Roman culture,
not as a release from the labor of the everyday but as a proving ground for mastery.”
17 Foucault, 2000a:371–372. 18 Foucault, 2000a:376.
8 Introduction
We will be complicit with the agenda handed to us by the text, an

agenda that insists that we pay attention to how “I” feel about “you” and
“this wondrous Rome we live in.” We will be complicit in this agenda in
the name of making some headway on the question of complicity itself, for
that too is very much on the agenda. The issue of the subject and power
has been articulated as a species of cynical knowledge. The knowing know
more and know better than they let on. Deep down, say the savvy, there is
“something more.” But what if there were not really a “deep down”? What
if there was only a surface that conjured depth? Cynical knowledge would
be nothing more than a name one gives to “a practical assemblage, a
‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities.”19 Cynical knowing would
describe practices, comportments, and displays. The knower emerges as
an implicit function of the praxis, as the implied and privileged subject of
the act.20
I am describing an epistemic regime of bad faith. Even in the best of
cases the authentic self is a self-serving fiction on the part of a je who
refuses to imagine itself as anything other than the first person singular
subject of the act—“I am my ego, there is no such thing as id, not in my
case, at least . . .” The twist in this instance is that the self-service occurs by
way of self-assertion in the course of an inauthentic act. The ineffable sur-
plus of the self is presented as the visible gap between what is said and
what is meant. The subject of the statement is not the subject of the enun-
ciation. And, ironically, the ironist believes that he or she is a master of
this “gap.” The ironist is in love with his own symptom—as are we all—but,
ironically, he sees in this love a moment of mastery when the actual logic
of the symptom exposes the presence of something more, something
unmastered.21
An alternate mode of approaching the issue of cynical knowledge is via
ideology, or rather, via the manner in which the self is an ideological con-
struct.22 “The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the
19 Deleuze, 1988:51.
20 Sloterdijk, 1987:60–61: “The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and
greatest orgy of counterenlightenment . . . The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego
as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics . . . Precisely the analysis of [the] nar-
cissism [of the ego] can show how the other has already got the better of the ego.”
21 Žižek, 1989:21 on the definition of the symptom: “ ‘a formation whose very consistency
implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symp-
tom’ only so far as its logic escapes him.”
22 Before we get off on the wrong foot and think of ideology as a way of speaking about
the illusions of an ego that need to be dispelled via a process of enlightenment, see
Žižek, 1989:21: “ ‘Ideological’ is not ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being
itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. ” [emphasis removed]
Introduction 9
ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less insists upon
the mask.”23 And this yields the formula, “They know very well what they
are doing, but still, they are doing it.”24 The poetry performs a thesis of
artistic freedom in theory, but, in practice, these verses perform, repro-
duce, and body forth an ideology of freedom-and-constraint that presup-
poses imperial domination as the condition of possibility for their own
precious cynicism. A specifically imperial poetics becomes the condition
of possibility for the poetic self as such, whether one is speaking of either
the narrator or the author. But the very split between the author and
the narrator—is he? isn’t he? surely he is . . . of course he is not . . . —is
sustained by this same cynical structure that loves-and-hates and loves-to-
hate power.
We are going to jump into the lion’s jaws of poetic practice and see what
becomes of us there. There is every reason to feel a bit the fool when rush-
ing in like this since this very same act can be described as a deep dive into
the glittering surface of the world. In fact, it turns out that the affective
valences of a dangerous moment like this have already been adumbrated
by the poetry itself. The image of the lion’s maw was not accidentally cho-
sen. It is instead on loan from Martial. How much boldness does the poet
or critic really evince? How much danger is really to-hand? Are we really
in the presence of repressive power or just articulating our self-serving
speciously radical theses via a fantasy of repression? Meanwhile power in
its concrete fertility is giving birth to any number of ludic poetic fancies
that execute a festal dance around a variety of poles, one of which is the
convenient fiction that hypothesizes that “power says not to, but . . .”
How could one possibly speak of Martial and his feelings? How could
one not? Only a determined cretin would succumb to the temptation to
indulge in the biographical fallacy. And yet the poetry itself is constantly
inviting the reader to mistake author for narrator. This is part of the game.
On the one hand, none of it is real or can be real, but, on the other, is it
really the case that none of it is in fact real?25 Sincerity resides at the level
of the corpus itself.26 Whatever reluctance or reservations on the part of
23 Žižek, 1989:29. 24 Žižek, 1989:29.

25 Sullivan, 1991:xxii–xxiii: “Are we to declare that there is no connection between the
man and the work or between the work and society for which it was written? Is all the mate-
rial purely conventional so that the poems can best be understood by comparing them to
their models or even in vacuo?”
26 See Bartsch on Pliny on the (alleged) disaster for an Antonine author produced in the
wake of Domitianic discourse: “[I]n large part the Panegyricus is an obsessive attempt to
prove its own sincerity.” (Bartsch, 1994:149)
10 Introduction
the author one might ultimately decide to discuss, the fact of the poetry
remains a fact. That is, the specter of beliefs that lie “behind” the text—and
think especially of those moments that are written into the text as bait for
the critic who will see in them beliefs and especially those beliefs that con-
jure the sense of a “behind”—do nothing to eliminate the fact that words
accumulated and that, as a simple surface, they can be read and interpreted
quite independently of a conjured “interiority.” Simply put, whether or not
the poet “believes in” the praise of the emperor, the poetry praises him.
Sincere or not, the corpus believes in playing the game that it is playing.
For if it did not, it would be playing some other game. Pascal may have
wagered that kneeling would yield belief, but we are in the presence of
something that believes in being seen kneeling. This is not quite the same
thing as piety, this “meta-fidelity,” but it is nevertheless a phenomenon
worth pondering.27
Says Cassity, “[Martial] flatters the Emperor Domitian in the exact spirit
and in the exact degree of honesty with which present day academics fill
out grant applications.”28 The point is cleverly made. One could add that
the people who read grant applications are themselves individuals who
have written their fair share of them. And, naturally, they are reading
scores of them at a go. Everyone knows that it is all something of a game,
but none of this stops any of them from playing it. Indeed, their insincerity
and alienation is itself one of the most interesting features of the game, a
game that has decidedly real consequences.
“Reservations” do quite little to change the nature of the power-game.
Instead, they are one of the places where the undeceived engage in a spe-
cies of self-deception.29 In fact, the “self ” emerges precisely as the thing
that has been held back, as the too precious reserve that is too smart to fall
for all of the empty bullshit that it hears coming from its own mouth.30
Self, confidence, self-confidence: these are all part of the (confidence)
game that is being played. By not staking everything, one wins the pre-
cious notion of reserve and that surfeit of genius meaning that comes
27 Žižek on the “active” fetishism of the capitalist subject: “They are fetishists in practice,
not in theory. What they ‘do not know,’ what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social
reality itself, in their social activity—in the act of commodity exchange—they are guided by
the fetishistic illusion.” (Žižek, 1989:31)
28 Cassity, 1990:42.
29 Hence the punning truth of “les non-dupes errent.” Compare de La Rochefoucauld: “Le
vrai moyen d’être trompé, c’est de se croire plus fin que les autres.” (cxxvi)
30 Frankfurt, 2005:34–35: “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this
indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”
Introduction 11
along with the being of the “me,” a “me” that has been so cleverly hidden
behind all of the hollow ego-speech circulating at the textual surface.
One never really dives into the lion’s mouth, then. One only writes up
the gesture: a mouth, a dive, an “anxious” moment that is not so anxious
after all. An allegorical rabbit is sent down in there. We remain up here,
wherever “here” might be. But the practical situation is not quite so easy as
that. Everything could get really real at any moment, after all. The music
might stop. The bard might fall silent. A scramble for chairs would ensue.
Somebody might get caught standing in the middle of somewhere rather
than floating about in a semiotic nowhere of as-ifs. That is, it is entirely
possible for the Domitian game to turn into a game with high stakes
indeed. It can turn into a life-and-death affair. But it assuredly tends not
to. That too is part of the game. For the thousand that ride the roller-
coaster this year, the death of that one guy last year perhaps only adds to
the thrill: “I am staking everything in theory, but, in practice, I do not
expect to be asked to pay up. I am different. He was a fool, and he made a
fool’s mistake. I am so clever that nothing truly bad will happen to me.”
The contrived pseudo-anxiety of the poetry bodies forth the ironic double
and mirror image of the structure of anxiety as such for a neurotic. The neu-
rotic “only gets to his desire by always substituting himself for one of his
doubles.”31 The authorial subject finds its satisfaction playing the it’s-not-me
game. A poet is not his verses, said the poet quoting the other poet who said
the same. We will explore this below. And, in practice, the cunning reader
finds a not unrelated satisfaction: it’s-not-him, but I have the sense that I nev-
ertheless have got a hold of his “him-ness,” that precious something(-more)
that the façade conjures as its own plenitude held in reserve.
The anxious moment for both poet and critic coincides with the poten-
tial arrival of the Master Signifier at the site of the exchange of (mere)
signs: it would be such a shame if this were about an imperial something
in the end instead of so much lovely nothing.32 Or maybe it would not be
entirely a shame if an on-sais-quoi arrived at the site of the lovely je ne sais
quoi of poetic sublimity. The arrival of this abstract, impersonal
Knowledge would be not unlike the very thing one had always longed for
31 Lacan, 2014:48.
32 Lacan, 2014:89: “The phallus mustn’t be seen to be involved. If it gets seen, then there’s
anxiety.” Lacan, 2014:171 on je crains qu’il ne vienne: “It is not enough to qualify the ne as
discordantiel, because it marks the discordance that lies between my fear, because I fear he
may come, and my hope, since I hope he won’t. For my part, I see it as nothing less that
the signifying trace of what I call the subject of the enunciation, distinct from the subject of
the statement.”
12 Introduction
but never put into quite these words: the will-to-know has at last mastered
the master-text, a something concrete emerged out of all that evasive
verbal nothing.
The poet-and-prince issue gains renewed interest when one elects to see
it as a structuring structure at the discursive level. Poetry is not entirely
unreal. Power is not without its own poetry. Litotes gives the lie to the
vacuity of the situation, a situation that is “not without” its sincere invest-
ment in something, even if that something is on the order of a nothing.33
A poet’s only fear is that he might (not) be understood.34 There’s nothing
quite (un)like castration. Just ask Domitian’s eunuch boyfriend.
Critics of Martial and Statius are themselves baited into a premature reso-
lution of the crisis in the relationship—which is also a non-relationship . . .
—between form and content in this poetry. A hater of Statius says that
he is a sycophant and brushes past the poetry disgustedly. The formal
question ends as soon as one inspects the (seeming) contents: panegyric.
A lover of Statius says that he only seems like he might be a sycophant and
lingers with the poetry fondly. The verses are full of the fruits of poetic
genius. But rather than bouncing off the surface or pushing past it, one
needs to linger with panegyric precisely so that one can ask whether or not
the sublimity is not fundamentally related to the sycophancy.35 The poetry
itself needs to be approached as something that is akin to one of the para-
doxical objects that the verses are so drawn to. In particular the poetry
resembles the gloriously beautiful eunuch that it ecstatically celebrates.
But the very same celebrations are suffused with dread, loathing, remorse,
and disidentification.
Sympathetic readings of these poets easily become complicit readings.
Comprehension begets understanding which leads to forgiveness, or per-
haps even overlooking. That is, aesthetic comprehension leads to a species
of moral incomprehension. One apologizes for the awkwardness: they had
no choice; their hand was forced; power expected as much.36 Then one
33 See again Lacan, 2014:89 on “not without.”

34 Tacitus’ Antonine diagnosis of the imperial condition in general comes to mind. See a
passage like Annales 1.7: “But at Rome the consuls, senate, knights rushed headlong into slav-
ery. The higher one’s station, the more false and eager. (At Romae ruere in seruitium consules,
patres, eques. quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac festinantes).”
35 Dominik et al., 2015:3: “Statius has been wrongly regarded as a sycophant of Domitian.”
What immediately follows is not exactly a proof of an absence of sycophancy: “He was never
awarded the first literary prize in the emperor’s Capitoline games . . . and he seems to have
maintained his ties to the Bay of Naples throughout his life.”
36 Leary, 1998:43: “Before criticizing Martial for writing such poems (as Epigrams 14.179),
however, one should remember that he lived in dangerous times, when flattery, even if not
sincere, was well-advised.”
Introduction 13
moves on to the business at hand, namely aesthetics pure and simple, aes-
thetics as the essence of poetics, aesthetics undistracted by politics. One is
told that the rhetoric of consolation in the Siluae fits well with rhetorical
advice about consolation.37 This sort of remark evades a discussion of the
awkwardness of the poem’s situation: a wealthy man has lost a pretty serv-
ing boy, a dear famulus. The poor fellow. Tensions and ambiguities, allu-
sions and intertexts: these can be ways of talking about the poetics of
poetry while steering clear from the politics of poetry.38 The pleasure of
detecting an allusion in the background drowns out a discussion of the
foreground.39
But when one does talk about the politics of the poetry, this is typically
done by a strategic return to the same set of critical tools. The tensions and
ambiguities turn out to be pointedly pointing in a certain “resistant” direc-
tion. No actual political resistance is required, of course. And the sotto
voce resistance that only the cleverest ear can catch somehow undoes the
shouting affirmation that the politics of the hour is the fairest politics of
the finest of hours. The omnipotence of subterranean thought is sufficient
as a political act to undo whatever it is that utterance performed.40 The
allusions and intertexts expose a subtext that those in the know will appre-
ciate as being subtly, oh so subtly, devastating.41 And this is something we
know about both ourselves and poetry, namely that it is knowing and that
we are knowledgeable about its knowingness.
But the “either . . . or . . .” of pro and contra fails to satisfy. As Geysson
notes concerning Ahl’s thesis about the self-subverting quality of Statius’
praise, much in fact depends upon the preconceptions brought to the situ-
ation by the reader. The images themselves are both potentially positive
37 Hardie, 1983:103.
38 Contrast the typical evocation of “intertextuality” as, effectively, a species of allusion
with other possible senses of the term. See, for example, Bourdieu, 1996:205: “Keeping what
is inscribed in the notion of intertextuality, meaning the fact that the space of works always
appears as a field of position-takings which can only be understood in terms of relationships,
as a system of differential variations, one may offer the hypothesis (confirmed by empirical
analysis) of a homology between the space of works defined by their essentially symbolic
content, and in particular by their form, and the space of position in the field of
production.”
39 Consider what is happening at Hardie, 1983:170.
40 See also Marcuse’s warnings about “modes of protest and transcendence that are no
longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial
part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status
quo as part of its healthy diet.” (Marcuse, 1991:14)
41 See Sedgwick, 2003:138–139 on the limits of the hermeneutics of suspicion and its faith
in demystification. Is the paranoid mode of reading fighting power or serving its own affec-
tive ends?
14 Introduction
and negative “by nature.” That is, the sign system itself has the ambiguity
built into it.42 It is quite hard to see in the hyperbole of this poetry a neces-
sary indication of partisanship or resistance: excess is more or less a for-
mal requirement of panegyric.43 Martial’s case is similar to Statius’ with
the added complication of the simultaneous presence of jokes: which ones
are really serious? Which ones are mere jokes? While it might be notion-
ally true that the man named Statius loved Domitian fully, completely, and
uninterruptedly and that, conversely, Martial hated him and after just the
same manners, hunting for the answer to such unanswerable questions
will not be especially productive. In the case of each poet an ideology of
the text subsists at the level of its own practice, of its participation in the
game more generally, in its extension and complication of the same. What
has the maker made?44 What gets said? And what is the force of saying
precisely this?
And something does indeed seem to be happening with this poetry. On
the one hand, the Antonine age is self-serving in its efforts to distance
itself from the Flavian era. But, on the other, the Flavian era does seem to
be at least in some measure distinctive, no matter how wooly and artificial
a term like “era” might be. The testimony of the natives does not count
for nothing, after all.45 A distinguishing feature of the poetry we will be
examining is the simultaneous presence of contradictory elements. And the
contradiction is not cleanly resolvable into a matter of surface as against
depth. On the one hand, the poems tell of a wonderful age full of peace,
42 See Geyssen, 1996:87.

43 Geyssen, 1996:144: “Statius’ flattery is the result of the panegyrist’s need to exaggerate,
his desire to go beyond his tradition, exploring innovative methods of praise and new set-
tings in which these methods might be applied.” Dewar, 1994:202: “[Augustine] knew he was,
in the literal sense, lying and so did his audience—and so, more likely than not, did his
honorand—but the point is that everyone expected him to do just that.” Dewar, 1994:209:
“The extravagance of the medium, with the high value it placed on sheer outrageousness of
idea and expression alike, will always be alien in some measure to the modern reader.”
Remember as well the “banality of praise”: it is old, familiar, and ubiquitous. Dewar, 1996:xxii:
“It is clear enough that the praise of patrons, political and social superiors, or friends was
regarded as a major function of literary compositions from the earliest times, and that enco-
mium might be worked into any genre conceivable.”
44 Fowler, 1995:56: “The next step after staying our eye on the glass is to see what the pat-
terns are, to try to integrate Martial’s ideology of the book with the wider ideologies of his
world. I am not making a plea in this article for a formalism whose only values are sophisti-
cation and ingenuity. But we do need to take seriously the ways in which Martial creates his
world rather than simply reflecting it if we in our turn are to attempt to construct a satisfying
fiction.”
45 Boyle, 2003:2: “Like pre-Flavian Rome, post-Flavian Rome was perceived as temporally
different.”
Introduction 15
prosperity, and harmony.46 On the other hand, humiliation and rage are
never far from the surface of Martial’s verses.47 And Statius’ dreamscape is
filled with some nightmarish shadows. The belated re-litigation of the
Domitianic era that we find in Juvenal lingers with these very issues.48 But
“the facts of the matter” are pointedly unclear: “If you possessed too
delightful (amoenior) a villa in Domitian’s reign, Pliny tells us in the
Panegyricus, the emperor was likely to snatch it away for his own private
use. The Siluae, however, do not seem to suggest that owning a fine villa
under the last of the Flavians was a risky investment.”49
Perhaps seething hostility at humiliation and a constant fear of property
loss suffused the hearts of men in general and our poets in particular. Or it
might be that a series of compromises and contradictions plays itself out
in the poetry: “Things are great, even if some things are terrible. This age is
fine, especially when you consider others. In fact, maybe it is fantastic. Of
course, it might be a disaster as well. My friends and I have it good, but
there have been some distressing cries and whispers heard in the distance.”
In this sense the poetry performs an aesthetics of complicity. It articulates
a thesis of unqualified joy and satisfaction while also revealing a variety of
things that would act as limitations and qualifications were they expressed
directly. This complicity is both a cynical complicity—“I’m getting mine,
just you try to get yours . . . ”50—as well as a more passive, (willfully) unre-
flective complicity: “This is what life under any emperor looks like. This is
how we go along and get along. There is nothing special about my out-
landish praises that harp upon their own unparalleled quality . . . ”51
The Antonine critique hinges on the idea that one set of people are
going to call another out on this complicity. One generation will pretend
46 Henderson, 1998:104: “The sparkle of the Siluae attests social cohesion and political
order in contemporary Rome all the more emphatic for its juxtapositioning to the blocked
and choked Oedipodonian rivalry and civil war in mythic Thebes.”
47 Miller, 2012:323: “When the principle of absolute hierarchy becomes the engine of sub-
version, what results is not increase, not the liberation of repressed energies, but terror: Stalin
as the ultimate party animal.”
48 Freudenburg, 2001:214–215: “[T]his satirist has so much to say, too much, we often
complain, and in such fulsome, aggressive tones. This is satire in a time-warp, making up for
all the satires never written in the last twenty years or more.”
49 Newlands, 2002:119.
50 Gossage, 1972:208: “Statius . . . wrote to please and knew what was expected of him.”
51 Geyssen, 1996:100: we are not seeing anything especially new or different in Statius’
praise poetry. Gossage, 1972:184: “Statius and Martial preferred adulation and the survival
that it guaranteed; in any case, their position in society was such that neither of them had any
prospect of a political career, and consequently neither needed to protest on behalf of a class
whose political aspirations were frustrated.”
16 Introduction
to be shocked and appalled at the fawning and flattery of another.52 But

the Antonine negation of the Domitianic theme of joy is insufficient. This
is because it hides the fact that there really was nothing radically disjunc-
tive about the Domitianic age. Loving the emperor and loathing him as
well had long been and would continue to be conjoined affective twins.
The emperor is always both the condition of possibility for the courtier as
well as a condition of multiple simultaneous impossibilities.53
A key ingredient of complicity is the mooting of sincerity. It may well be
embittering to give up on sincerity, yet that very bitterness does little more
than to mark the site of guilty conscience. And this same site of guilt in
fact houses a species of reward. Here is where the private, authentic self
separates itself off from the hypocrisy of the world. But the world is rela-
tively indifferent to this privacy. In fact, the world has thrown the private
self out as a sop for those gullible enough to take it up. The stereotypical
stage-tyrant says, “Let them hate so long as they fear.”54 But a more
practical-minded emperor can simplify this maxim substantially: “Let them
praise so long as they praise.” Even, and perhaps especially, as a hollow
performance the enactment of praise suffices. One who praises can, more
or less, be counted upon to fall in line with the whole system that enables
and requires the very same praise. While such a person might not be
utterly reliable, he is also manifestly not an agitator. Instead he is a man
who has declared that he has a price, and that it is being paid. Of course,
problems might well arise if someone comes along and offers a better deal.
That is perhaps an “Antonine” way of putting it. Consider the quasi-
alienated individual of today: “Even though capitalism is destroying the
planet, nevertheless . . .” The alienation occurs only at the level of thought,
not action. One still goes to work, works hard, then comes home and buys
the cheapest items online and has them shipped in from China to arrive
overnight. Substantive resistance “would cost too much,” in more ways
than one. Meanwhile “clicktivism” replaces the concrete interventions of
activists. The “good conscience” of the private self enables the bad-faith
behavior of the concrete political agent who never in fact resists and often
in practice sustains the dominant order of things. “The deserts of the
52 See Kreuz, 2016:50–51.

53 “Courtliness” might seem like an anachronistic and hence potentially misleading cate-
gory, but the idea that there is a “Roman court” and that one can, with qualifications, use of it
the vocabulary familiar from other courts should not be too controversial. See Talbert, 2011.
54 Oderint, dum metuant is a suspiciously beloved line. See Cicero, De Officiis 1.97,
Philippicae 1.34, Pro Sestio 102, Seneca De Clementia 1.12.4, De Clementia 2.2.2, De ira 20.4,
and Suetonius Caligula 30.1. Compare Suetonius, Tiberius 59.2.
Introduction 17
laudandus were less relevant than the virtuosity of the laudator, duly
rewarded by his small share in the glory of the court.”55 “Despite his hint
of liberties lost, Statius endows with dignity the role of praise poet.”56
“[W]hatever discontents might be festering under the façade of loyalty, the
façade is holding up. This is something that both emperor and audience
needed to see confirmed periodically. Fides, the term that sent me off on
this trail, is doubly irrelevant.”57 Do your job well and take pride in it. It is
not such a bad job. Give the boss a boost from time to time. It would be a
shame if the company went out of business and you lost your post.
The complicity runs deep, even if so much of its discourse emphasizes
the surface of the world. The aesthetic project cannot be peeled away from
politics since one of its principal gestures is an ostentatious embrace of the
political by the aesthetic. And, in fact, the poet looks a lot like a prince and
the prince a poet. The theory of power and the legitimacy of the literary
domain are not tidily separable from the story of politics that the verses
tell, even as that same story is “fake” and “insincere.” Who better than a
poet to claim that lying is the most earnest act that one can perform: for,
without fiction, where would the poet be?
If politics is the art of the possible, the literary embrace of politics yields
a situation where the domain of the possible is constructed as an object of
artistic representation. This object is bodied forth as a fantasmatic object
that nevertheless embodies both a politics of representation and a repre-
sentation of politics. In this case we privilege the already privileged.
Tradition and authority underwrite both power and writing itself. The real
origin of the (artistically/politically) possible is retrojected onto a “real
origin” that is also an invented origin.
For example, the Flavian house is both fully legitimate in as much as it is
a house of Caesars and wholly illegitimate in as much as the Flavians as a
house are not specially positioned to assume the title of Caesar any more
than Caesar himself had been entitled to turn his specific name into the
generic name for autocratic power. The poetic will to power and so too the
will to power qua poetic force are, it turns out, traditionally both self-siring
and self-effacing when it comes to the fact that they are self-siring. It is only
a conspiracy of the convergently self-interested that enables the emperor’s
new clothes to be seen for what they are, namely a nullity that has become a
plenitude. The whiplash one experiences upon the death of one Caesar and
55 Coleman, 1988:xxv. 56 Newlands, 2002:283.

57 Damon, 2002:180. This is in fact a post-Domitianic reference, but it is useful for our
purposes.
18 Introduction
the advent of another better, yet more glorious Caesar testifies to the
supremacy of fiction/power. Without any order being issued, the stories
themselves move with lightning speed to shore up the new order of things.
The difficulties of reading each of our authors are notorious and legion.
But I think it useful to at least start from a point that I do not believe to be
especially controversial. Specifically, on the surface, at least, this poetry is
not promising revolution.58 Whatever modulations might be on offer, they
are couched in a rhetoric of satisfaction with the over-arching socio-
political order of things.59 The poems may well contain some provocative
implications for those who wish to work through the material, but whether
it is authorial intention or something else that is lurking “down there,” up
here the narrative is a positive one.
The intersection between the verse and reality produces a series of
evasions in both the poetry itself and in the criticism of the same. It seems
odd to detach the verses from the world. It seems foolish to make any spe-
cific determinations. Humor and/or panegyrical excess as features of the
poetry send up flares that warn any but the most rash against rushing in.60
But, on the other hand, the poems are quite insistent that they are very
much about the here and the now, and that there is a vital connection to
reality that animates them.61 And even if one appreciates that reality has
been worked up and worked over by the literary imagination, only a truly
58 Fitzgerald, 2007:87: “The wonders of this imperial age are not the exemplary figures
who resisted tyrants, but the displays with which the emperor regales his people; the emperor
who puts on the shows and invites his people to them is the generous host par excellence.”
59 Sullivan, 1991:115: “In fact almost all of Martial’s work is focused by a unified and hier-
archical vision of imperial society as it should be, which inspires the eulogist with the ideals
against which the satirist judges and condemns the defects and failings. It is a vision which is
coloured by a very personal view of how life should be lived and the Epicurean values it
should manifest, a life that is sheltered in the bosom of generous friends with a modest
competence secured by a warm acceptance of the ideological status quo (4.77.1–3).”

Sullivan, 1991:139: “Martial’s open support of Domitian’s politico-religious innovations, his
proclamation of the emperor’s divinity and the protection extended him by Jupiter and other
deities, is carefully and intelligently orchestrated throughout the books. In these extravagant
eulogies Martial was not just indulging in the conventional flattery of a patron, he was also
carrying out the wishes of an imperial ruler, as was Statius.” Zeiner, 2005:228–229: “The
social and cultural values that Statius attaches to these forms of capital also correlate with the
values championed by Domitian and his reign . . . . In this regard the Silvae mirror the domi-
nant culture of Domitianic Rome.”
60 Studies like Spaeth, 1929 and Spaeth, 1932 come across as very naive today: Martial’s
poems are sifted and summarized as if they provided direct documentary evidence about
Roman life and manners.
61 Fitzgerald, 2007:68: “Martial’s books have a distinctive presence to their world and, to
the extent that they are part of the very world they describe, their peculiar status shines light
on the social relationships dealt with in the book.”
Introduction 19
perverse skepticism could radically detach the poem and poets from the
world being represented.
Concrete institutions, events, and persons are constantly adduced so as
to anchor the poetic project in a Rome, even if this Rome is not “the”
Rome that the historical imagination constructs for itself. Of particular
interest is the manner in which the narrative voice of the poetry insists
that the poet himself is writing what we read owing to a special set of
material circumstances. The poetry pointedly embeds its own narrative
within a larger world. In both Martial and Statius, foundational elements
of the poetic project include moments where a figure steps forth and says,
“I, the poet, am addressing you, the prince.” The text weaves its own con-
text for us. In Statius’ case the situation is quite stark: we know nothing
about him other than what he elects to tell us.62 And yet readers of
the Siluae will feel that they know a fair amount about the author of the
Siluae.63 The same is effectively true of Martial. But in his case, at least, the
comedy makes it a lot easier to detect a gap between who the author ought
to have been and the character the narrator presents to us.64
It is easy to see the art and then to choose to keep on seeing it. The nar-
rator is not the author. The political bits are then literary. And, so, syllogis-
tically, one need not claim anything about the politics of the verse: “All
literary characters are not mortal men. This narrator is not a man.
Therefore there are no men here at all.” The poetry contains within itself
just such an invitation. It both solicits our earnest appraisal of the reality
on offer and also laces everything with abundant indications that it would
be naive to take any of this precisely at face value.
Nevertheless, it is at least somewhat distressing to observe what can
happen when the invitation to radical aestheticism is accepted. “The art of
safe criticism” in such a case is a phrase that describes the contemporary
critic. For one takes up the task of demonstrating all over again that the
poetry is very poetic. Both corpora are filled with metapoetic meditations.
And, provided one decides to linger with the theme, it is entirely possible
to see nothing but a garden of the muses instead of an actual Roman estate.
The double vision on offer in the poetry becomes singularly immaterial in
62 See Coleman, 1988:15.

63 For example, after a thorough sifting of the evidence, Newlands concludes that Statius
presents himself as “a mediator between the godlike isolation of the emperor and the impe-
rial desire for public fame and immortality.” (Newlands, 2002:279)
64 See Saller on the historian’s dilemma when reading Martial: “To provide entertainment,
Martial chose stereotypical characters and situations, which were familiar to a wide audience,
and exaggerated, distorted, and poked fun at them.” (Saller, 1983:246)
20 Introduction
the end.65 The whole universe of signs is in communication with itself, but
that communication is only a matter of semiotics and abstractions. The
mastery all resides at the level of the symbol. One declares that the artist
has mastered his tools, namely the poet has read his predecessors
thoroughly.
A necessary corrective comes with the final dialectical move. Thesis:
this is political poetry. Antithesis: this is poetical poetry. Synthesis: power
itself is metapoetical. Both author and prince are makers and doers. Both
author and prince are masters of a world of symbols. Both author and
prince are likewise posited within the (pseudo-totality) of the symbolic
construct of the verse world as Master Signifiers within the same.
Meanwhile both author and prince circulated as imaginary constructs
within the broader cultural symbolic of contemporary Rome.
Power as metapoetic allows one to see a power/poetry dyad in which
each term must be thought of in conjunction with the other. Poets writing
about poetry—that is, the standard, limited definition of metapoetic
activity—becomes a special case. It is the special case wherein the hypo-
thetical autonomy of poetry from the political is likely to be most strongly
registered. Such a retreat into a de-politicized sublime is, of course, a
political gesture and one that is expressive of the partitioning of the world
and its legibility by power, and so also power’s power to make/do/ποιεῖν.
For example, talk about sexual invective as metapoetic may well be
apposite in that one aspect of the abuse may well be a commentary about
poetry itself, but side-stepping the question of sociality more generally
turns everything into a sort of joke. And yet concrete power is assuredly
exercised within the social field when one condemns the lives of certain
classes of people to the objects of humor and consigns their complaints—
if they are foolish enough to make them—to the category of uncultured,
humorless, and obtuse grumbling. Even if the “I” speaking to us in these
poems is a poetic persona, this only complicates the question of one’s
appraisal of the modalities of speaking to power rather than mooting
them.66 Consider a comic whose act involves making a lot of misogynistic
jokes while adopting a stereotypical macho persona. People should feel
65 Consider some of the headings of Grewing, 2010: “(IV.) Groteske Körper metapoetisch;
(V.) Relativität metapoetisch; (VI.) Landgüter metapoetisch; (VII.) Frauen metapoetisch.”
66 Lorenz, 2002:4: “Vor allem die Trennung zwischen dem historischen Dichter und dem
Sprecher der Epigramme erscheint mir als eine unerlässliche Grundlage der Martialdeutung.”
Lorenz, 2002:53: “Über den historischen Martial können wir allein spekulieren, während seine
persona als ein Dichter mit einer eigenen Weltsicht sowie einem eigenen poetologischen Ansatz
auftritt und nur diese Figur für uns fassbar ist.”
Introduction 21
free to decide that they don’t think that the act is “just an act”—even
though it is obviously an act as well.67 When is a clown instead a troll?
When is clowning around itself a part of the problem? When does a pos-
ture of “plausible deniability” of itself merit criticism?
The situation is not much different but less glaring if we consider Statius’
baroque descriptions of real estate.68 The political economy of ownership
and consumption gives way to meditations on the building of word-
palaces. The idea that poetry is only about poetry leaves poetry in a posi-
tion of complete freedom: it is never really answerable to the world even as
it is clearly always intervening in, playing with, and modulating a collec-
tion of worldly referents. It is free to say anything but to be responsible for
nothing. It is autonomous and autarchic without any dependence or
responsibility. It is, in a word, imperious. And in that sense it is more
“perfectly Domitianic” than is the emperor himself.
I now conclude by glossing my specific approach to the poems of Statius
and Martial. Martial is, in many ways, “illegible.” Or, rather, there are so
many possible readings of him that there will never be one, masterful
reading. This fact, of itself, speaks to a kind of “resistance” to monological
hegemony set within the poetry. Nevertheless, to the extent that Martial is
no freedom fighter, his hide-away is also a coward’s retreat even as it is not
just and only that. In any case, my own argument will commit as its origi-
nal sin a “wholistic” appraisal of the atomistic and atomized world of the
Epigrams.69 Key themes, images, and words will also be investigated. The
books are organized internally and their structures need to be explored.70
A continuous reading of the books reveals cycles of poems. Juxtapositions,
smooth transitions, and abrupt contrasts are key features of the text’s orig-
inal presentation. One has to have some sort of account of what this spe-
cific medley of seemingly disparate ingredients reveals in its very disparity.
I will read more or less year by year and so tacitly bind the interpreta-
tion to the shifting concrete circumstances of the author himself. But the
connection, though felt, is sufficiently loose and attenuated to prevent one
67 Lorenz, 2002:19: “Durch die Unverhältnismäßigkeit des intertextuellen Vergleichs wird

also schon zu Beginn der Epigrammaton libri deutlich, dass der Sprecher der Epigramme
eine lächerliche Figur ist.”
68 But see Zeiner, 2005 for a sociological appraisal of Statius.
69 Fitzgerald, 2007:2: “The epigram being the most closed of forms, almost closure as
form, you cannot continue an epigram; you can only start again.”
70 Grewing, 2010:158–159: “Die Kunst des Dichtens von Epigrammen besteht also
weniger im Einzelprodukt als vielmehr in der Komposition eines ganzes Buches von

Gedichten . . . Um die individuelle Kürze eines Gedichts goutieren zu können, muss man sich
auf einen langen Leseprozess einlassen.”
22 Introduction
putting too much force on it. It would snap if any real pressure was brought
to bear. Here my approach to Martial pursues an agenda that will not be
unfamiliar to readers of Lorenz. The reading is chronological.71 And, as
one of its chief points of orientation, the deployment of Caesar throughout
the epigrams will be traced over time. And the role that this figure plays
relative to the poetic project of the corpus will be explored.
Caesar, that is, will be treated as a theme that is integral to the whole
rather than as an addressee to whom one speaks occasionally and only by
way of prologue.72 Defending or blaming Martial for the nature of his
address to Caesar is a trap.73 The ethical drive can short-circuit the neces-
sary preliminary work of discovering the actual state of the evidence. One
needs to resist the temptation to read the poems as if we had the transcript
of a frank speech of an individual named Martial to an emperor named
Domitian rather than a poem with a narrator that emerges amidst a col-
lection of other poems.74
As a collection of statements about power, authority, and legitimacy,
how is one to appraise the material in front of us? This is the key question.
It will be asked both of Martial and Statius. Accordingly, this project fol-
lows a specific route through these texts, but others are available. In fact,
I believe that one might fruitfully revisit some familiar topics like gender
and sexuality in Martial in the light of an expanded sense of the politics of
his poetic enterprise. So a lot of what one finds below on this particular
topic, as with so many others, is supposed to be more of a “first word” than
a “last word.”
The volume would yield an unpleasant irony were I generating an
oppressively closed set of hermeneutic possibilities. And I would be doing
this precisely in the course of discussing a tyrant. The notes highlight the
successes of others and point to avenues that have yielded productive con-
clusions. This project has followed a specific route through these texts, but
many others are available. And my basic complaint where I do take issue
with other work is that one needs to re-insert the political dimension, or at
least to acknowledge the broader political context of the poetry. Thereupon
revised, enriched, and expanded conclusions emerge. There really are
non-political preserves and reserves in these poets, but one always needs
to acknowledge that these have been carved out from some broader
71 See Lorenz, 2002:109. 72 See Lorenz, 2002:1–2. 73 Lorenz, 2002:2.

74 Any biography of Martial derived from the things the narrator says about himself will
need to confront an array of contradictions. See Lorenz, 2002:8–9.
Introduction 23
context, a context that needs to be properly acknowledged in the course of

making more local, limited observations.
One can learn a lot about “friendship” or any other number of engaging
topics in this poetry without focussing obsessively on politics. And yet my
point throughout is that the poets are themselves frequently pushing the
political context into the center of their own discussions of cultural
moments. That is, they are the ones who have effectively insisted that there
be a “politics of beauty” and so forth. My reading takes their gambit seriously.
In the case of Statius’ poetry, the general approach will be rather tradi-
tional. We will linger with whole poems. A running commentary on the
articulation of the argument will be offered. Poems on related topics will
be read next to one another. The chronological orientation of the Martial
segment will largely be displaced by a thematic one. Or, rather, we will
explore the world-building of Statius as a whole, his rhetoric of power, its
favored tropes, its preferred objects. Key ideas emerge. We will keep track
of them. A “progress” of sorts will be noted. And I work up to a crescendo.
But the climax emerges only as a function of a critic’s wholistic take on the
corpus. And this interpretive climax presents my ultimate understanding
of how one should read these poems as a collection of themes, issues, and
tropes. Earinus, in both Martial and Statius, provides the key figure who
lets one get the most vivid look at the historico-politico-aesthetic night-
mare that is “the unparalleled glory of the Domitianic age (as per the sub-
jects of the same).”
One of the readers of the typescript noted that just as there is a history
on offer in the Martial segment one could offer a highly convergent narra-
tive in the case of Statius. Specifically, one could argue that we see engage-
ment, increasing proximity, an intense and painful moment of excessive
intimacy, and then a complex aftermath where the poetry withdraws,
wounded. The insight is wonderful, and, for me, convincing. I was keen to
incorporate the idea. But it is easier to embrace this observation than it is
to prove it.
Martial has roughly a thousand poems that he writes over a decade, and
he is constantly making “where we stand right now” into an element of his
poetry. In some ways it is hard not to do a chronological reading of the
Epigrams given that his narrative regularly shouts the theme of “The
Present” at us. Conversely Statius has far, far fewer poems. And the time-
line of poetic production is less obvious, much more compressed in any
case, and, given that we have a (probably) posthumous fifth book, deeply
ambiguous. Meanwhile, internal to the verses we do have a poetic narra-
tive of “where we stand,” but it is handled in a rather more cagey manner.
24 Introduction
The historical angle is very much worth pursuing and tracing the build-
p to a crisis in 95 and/or 96 ce across corpora is a valuable project. Note,
u
for example, that the Earinus poetry which I depict as thematically crucial
is also arriving at the same moment in time in each author. So a historical
reading and a thematic reading are not actually at odds. But, for present
purposes, I think an approach to Statius that works through the material
thematically serves the general reader better in the end. Specifically, Statius
offers a “better”—or is it “worse” . . . ?—illustration of the logic of complic-
ity than does Martial, and so he is also fittingly presented as the sequel to
the Martial chapter. The Siluae are in practice less obsessed with Domitian
and less preoccupied with tying the project as a whole to the imperial per-
sona than are the Epigrams of Martial. Of course, there is plenty of that
sort of thing on offer in the Siluae too. The specific attachment to the
emperor needs to be explored. And it has been explored. But what makes
the Statian collection of themes worth examining in its own right is the
way that Statius effectively commits to “an imperial world” that is not
Domitianic in a narrow, literal sense even if a lot of the points and images
Statius deploys are indeed inspired by Domitianic particulars.
Please note that I in fact do think that one can and should read
Martial in a more diffuse, thematic sense as well. Reading Martial chrono-
logically makes vividly present one set of ideas. And reading Statius
thematically makes vividly present another set of ideas. And yet both col-
lections of ideas are more or less shared between the authors. The choice of
which reading mode is emphasized in which case is motivated by consid-
erations of clarity and coverage not by any essential gap between the two.
In short, Martial’s universe is likewise “an imperial world” even if it strikes
me as “less pointedly so” than does the world of Statius.
In any case, Statius is singing to a variety of “important people” who are
not always in fact the very most important men of the hour. These minor
luminaries are celebrated after the fashion of the emperor. The warm glow
that suffuses these poems about individuals who are “emperor adjacent”
and who are “going along with the program” is fully consonant with a
poetics of power that invests in and so connives with a certain configura-
tion of cultural domination. As such the themes as a collection provide an
“imperial imaginary.”
At the level of its manifest, repeated rhetorical formulations, this poetry
“believes in” a configuration of power that does not really require the
concrete particularity of Domitian himself. Statius offers a gateway to
Introduction 25
the Panegyrici Latini and to a lot of the Latin of the next few centuries.75
Statius is a direct influence for someone like Claudian. And the logic of
the Siluae as a logic can be said to adumbrate multiple aspects of the
Late Antique aestheticization of power. In the course of exploring the
“Domitianic” quality of this poetry one comes to appreciate that the impe-
rial adjective designates not just the man Domitian, but that, ultimately,
the term can lead us to the idea of a certain kind of imperial presence as
well as a whole mode of rhetoric that sets itself the task of depicting the
power that corresponds to this presence. In short, a reading of Statius can
quickly transfer from the specific and out to the generic. This is much
more clearly the poetry of “generalized complicity,” and, accordingly, we
have in Statius a “consummate artist of complicity.” Alas, Martial, you do
not win the crown.
Statius’ poetry assuredly keeps track of Domitian in a year-by-year
sense, but it also evinces a commitment to a Glorious Emperor whose
name (for the moment) happens to be Domitian. This means that, like
Martial, Statius is somebody whom one can easily suspect of falling out
with the emperor or of being ready to change camp when the time comes,
etc. The real point is that none of the historical vicissitudes actual or imag-
ined much affect the deep logic of the poetry itself and its esthetic com-
mitments to power, pleasure, mastery, and domination in general. In these
verses Domitian winds up as also “just a metaphor.” Domitian becomes a
pretext for complicity, a someone out there who makes Statius do what he
was going to do anyway—namely, (insincerely and hyperbolically) praise
the powerful—so as to realize his own ambitions as a poet.
The relative uniformity of tone and the general constriction of the top-
ics of the Siluae relative to Martial’s Epigrams makes it easier to make at
least an initial appraisal of the material. Here too it will be necessary to
push past the first available answer, namely that this is occasional poetry
destined for a variety of patrons and flattering to them. And, similarly, it is
easy enough to declare that the poetry about the emperor is of the pane
gyric al variety. This is not in the least an inaccurate appraisal, but it is also
only a starting point. The mental state of the author at the moment of
inscription is not the destination. Nor, for that matter, are we going to be
overly concerned with composing our own panegyrics addressed to the
75 On late antique panegyrical theory and practice see Gunderson, 2020b.

26 Introduction
author that praise his mastery of his genre, his appreciation of Callimachus,
his craftsmanship more generally.
Instead, the aim will be a full appraisal of the question of what it meant
to have said precisely this rather than something else. As a collection of
statements about an imagined, too good to be true world, what is never-
theless revealed as its constitutive theory of power/poetry? If power and
poetry are a dyad, then we need to explore as well a related phrase with a
double meaning, namely the art of complicity. The phrase designates both
a practical know-how when it comes to complicity as well as the product
of that know-how. It indicates art’s own complicity in the question of
power-as-poetry precisely because art is unwilling to give up on the idea
of poetry-as-power. And the profundity of this art acquires its depth pre-
cisely in the same measure as it deepens the hold of power upon the world.
The “ramifications” of the Siluae consist of a profusion of teeming roots
that sink down and branches that rise up as power-poetry flourishes. And
power-poetry teems with fecund vitality both in the bright light of mean-
ing and in the dark, subterranean zone of signification. While strolling
along the streets of Rome with “Martial” and surveying the woods of a
villa with “Statius,” we will be touring this special sort of art, an art that
makes all too much all too possible.
I would like to close with some brief remarks on the notes and the
translations. The notes complement and at times complicate what is said
in the body of the book. And critically, for a volume that appears in the
“Classics in Theory” series, a lot of the explicit “theory” is to be found only
there. In my earlier work I usually put the theoretical discussions in the
foreground. It is important to articulate how ideas and methods that were
originally generated to describe as well as to intervene within a revolution-
ary present of the twentieth century might facilitate an exploration of
Greco-Roman antiquity. For example: How can one use Althusser to read
the Roman arena?76 What does it mean to think of Roman rhetorical per-
formance in light of Butler’s performativity?77 How does psychoanalysis
let us open up the repressed content of declamation?78 How can one do a
Foucauldian, Deleuzian, and/or Derridean archaeology of Roman
knowledge?79 Can Slovene critical theory facilitate an encounter with
Plautus that lets us explore the social symptom of servile subjection?80
How does the uncanny Lacanian Thing make itself felt in Senecan
76 Gunderson, 1996. 77 Gunderson, 2000a.

78 Gunderson, 2003b. 79 Gunderson, 2009. 80 Gunderson, 2015b.
Introduction 27
philosophy at the point where the system simultaneously coheres and fails
to cohere?81
In this volume I see myself as building on many aspects of that earlier
work, but I was not convinced that the present study required me to insert,
yet again, the words “Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être répub-
licains.” Proof in the form of pudding seemed to be the more appetizing
option. The study is supposed to perform a symbiosis of theory and clas-
sics. Theory does not drive the agenda. It instead has a heuristic value and
offers a constant supply of practical hermeneutic service. The body of the
text is supposed to feel like a sensible appraisal of the material we have
before us in the Latin. And yet one sees from the notes that the issues that
arise from the same Latin are themselves fully consonant with major
strands of the research agenda of the humanities more generally. For
example, the efforts of the Frankfurt school to revise, expand, update, and
modulate Hegel and Marx can and perhaps should be seen as consonant
with our own efforts to (re)appraise the ancient city and to encounter it
dialectically, that is, to meet up with it again, but also anew, and to change
both ourselves and it in the process. Similarly Žižek’s cynicism about cyni-
cism speaks both to and with the canny (dupli)(compli)city of Martial and
Statius. Bourdieu cites both Horace and Homer: participating- and-
observing is very old indeed. And the invitation to reflexive sociology was
in part extended to the future by the past.
Theory has always been keen on the classics: Marx wrote a thesis on the
atomists. Freud’s couch is literally surrounded by antiquities. Adorno and
Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains an extended medita-
tion on Homer’s Odysseus. Foucault reboots the History of Sexuality with a
return to Greece. Derrida is a commentator on the Platonic corpus. Just
about everyone wants to talk about Sophocles’ Antigone. The list of exam-
ples can easily be extended. Conversely, I argue throughout the present
volume that we have always been doing theory of one sort or another
when we do classics. But any disavowal of such is problematic in as much
as we then become numb to just which authority we end up authorizing
when we generate our objects of study. The one-sided claims of estrange-
ment between classics and theory that one finds in some quarters serve
mostly as a gambit designed to safeguard a specific political economy of
philological hermeneutics. Tyrants fear amity with its fecund non-
hierarchical association, interaction, and exchange. And so I hope that
81 Gunderson, 2015a.
28 Introduction
readers will see in here that theory and the classics are old friends and dear
friends and that the only scandal is that these boon companions have
sometimes been called strangers or even enemies.
And finally, a word about the translations. People who do not know
Greek and Latin should be able to read this book. Long passages are trans-
lated in full. Phrases are as well. Most individual words are glossed on the
spot. The meaning of some terms will need to be remembered going for-
ward. If a word or phrase is not obviously translated here and now, then
what comes before or immediately after is supposed to provide the context
that shows the meaning(s) of the relevant terms. High style passages are
usually done in a higher style. Low in a lower one. Statius’ Latin is highly
artificial. Perhaps unnatural English is a good fit. His Latin is, though,
always quite clever, and almost everything means at least two things.
I hope to have reproduced at least some of the “pregnancy” of the verse.
Most of the translations are done line-by-line, and in translating each
author I typically try to capture something about the word order of the
original. Our authors use word order to provide stress and surprise, among
other things. This method of translation can leave the English feeling a bit
unnatural at times. But it is well worth knowing what words are supposed
to jump out at you in a passage and how the flow of information has been
arranged.
2
Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic
Literature
A. “But now I know that you really are

going to Rome”
It might be useful to begin with two somewhat naive questions, “In what
ways are Martial’s Epigrams Flavian literature?” and “To what extent are
they specimens of Domitianic literature?” The categories folded into the
questions themselves are coarse, and they are likely to yield a lazy confu-
sion rather than ultimate clarification. One is all but invited to turn corre-
lation into causation: specifically, given when he lived, Martial was a
Domitianic writer by definition. And here the adjective is allowed to “gov-
ern” the noun in a strong sense. One falls back on under-articulated
assumptions about the relationship between history and literature. One
leans upon relatively vague ideas about the manner in which things we
happen to know about the times can be detected in the sorts of things
Martial writes about or, conversely, fails to write about. And, succumbing
to the siren song of defective syllogisms, just as the most important man in
Rome is the emperor, so too for the literary critic the principal point of
inquiry is the relationship between prince and poet.
As a research agenda, this mode of reading, if adopted as a matter of
reflex rather than undertaken in a spirit of deliberation, readily reduces
the object of inquiry—“the poetry is really about politics”—and it can eas-
ily conjure phantoms precisely where one wanted sober conclusions. One
could use the same sort of vague thinking to call Martial a Spanish poet:
he was born there after all. Then again, how many Roman authors were in
fact born and raised in Rome? This is a trick question: virtually none were.
Or one could be puckish and call Martial a Neronian poet: Martial’s “for-
mative years” when he was between the ages of seventeen and thirty-one
(more or less . . . ) coincided with that emperor’s rule. Martial is in his for-
ties when Domitian becomes emperor.
The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Erik Gunderson,
Oxford University Press. © Erik Gunderson 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898111.003.0002
30 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature
A more revelatory way of talking about the connections between the

poet and his circumstances is needed. One cannot let calendars and labels
do all of the work. For example, a politics of Senecan tragedy is, on the one
hand, certainly worth considering, but, on the other, this same political
tenor is not at all clear as a feature that can serve as a reliable guide to the
criticism of the plays. Various plays could be assigned to any number of
different dates as a function of a political allegory that “must” be there. In
short, a “timely” reading of a poet can be a fraught enterprise. One might
be forgiven for yielding to the temptation to bracket the political and the
contemporary in any given poem and to attend to other matters which can
be demonstrated with more clarity. There is perhaps some sagesse in the
maxim that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
But in the case of Martial one has a rather difficult time avoiding a
political reading. And this is because the poems are constantly invoking
contemporary Rome.1 And we are able to catch sight of the emperor
himself in the poems. Nevertheless, Martial teases us about the pseudon
ymous quality of the many day-to-day people he conjures. This only
accentuates the fact that the emperor and very select people close to him
are the “real” names stitched onto a textual fabric that is otherwise
woven together out of generic character types. But even the last point
has its complication: the generic characters might not be generic. We are
teasingly invited to suspect that many of these stock types in the poems
in fact correspond to some concrete specificity.2 Of course, at some point
we will need to wonder as well about the extent to which the emperor is
also a mere persona despite being presented as so really real and so very
1 Rimell, 2008:4: “You feel you can see, hear and smell the city in Martial – he is, and has
been, brilliant fodder for all those ‘everyday life’ books about ancient Rome.” See, for exam-
ple, Best, 1969:208: “Martial offers the student of Roman social history a unique storehouse
of information about life and manners in the imperial capital during the reign of the
Flavians . . .” Best effectively makes the poetry immediate and autobiographical: Martial knew
the emperor at first hand; Martial knew the dregs as well. Boyle, 1995:87–88 has a more satis-
fying take that avoids confusing the literature of everyday life with life itself: “The criteria
advanced for this inversion of the literary hierarchy and elevation of epigram are to use
Martial’s terms, uita, homo, mores, te, ‘life,’ ‘man,’ ‘morals,’ ‘you.’ ”
2 “There is no such man as Athenagoras, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams, 9.95b: Nomen
Athenagorae credis, Callistrate, uerum.|Si scio, dispeream, qui sit Athenagoras.|Sed puta me
uerum, Callistrate, dicere nomen:|Non ego, sed uester peccat Athenagoras. “There is such a man
as Postumus, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams 2.23: Non dicam, licet usque me rogetis,|Qui sit
Postumus in meo libello, . . . “Your girl is no Thais, but . . .” See Martial, Epigrams 3.11.1–2: Si
tua nec Thaïs nec lusca est, Quinte, puella,|Cur in te factum distichon esse putas? . . . Note,
though, the efforts of Balland, 2010 to make vividly real and historically concrete a number
of the persons in the poems. And not all of them are necessarily to be dismissed as “courtiers.”
“But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 31
unique. But that will come later.3 And, then there’s Martial himself: poet
or poetic persona? Yes.
For now, let us linger with the idea that the reader feels the generic pres-
ence of “contemporary Rome,” a Rome that is full of stock characters and
stock situations. And then the same reader is also asked to feel the specific
presence of “Flavian Rome,” a Rome that is inhabited by a concrete dynasty
with a distinct history, a group of people who live in a very specific house.
In the former case this “typical Rome” is inhabited by a quasi-comic col-
lection of characters who themselves can be imagined as falling, for the
most part, into two general classes, the scoundrels and the disappointed.
The disappointed are those who had thought that normative social struc-
tures might somehow serve them well. The scoundrels are those who
either neglect or trample those same structures.
The collection is quasi-comic rather than comic because, unlike Plautine
comedy, this is not a critique of power launched by a member of a subor-
dinated fraction of society. Instead, this is a much more dyspeptic world in
which men snarl because, though not themselves powerful, they expect
better than they have gotten. They are likewise outraged to note that their
putative inferiors are coming out on top. In short, the laughter is reaction-
ary rather than revolutionary.
At the center of it all, even more centrally positioned than the emperor,
is Martial. Naturally this is “Martial” rather than Marcus Valerius
Martialis, a poet from Augusta Bilbilis who was born somewhere between
38 and 41 ce and who left behind his native Iberian soil and migrated to
Rome. The figure of Martial plays more than one role in the poems. The
poems stage a Martial who is a fictionalized hybrid between a concrete
historical individual and a character who is himself but one of the types on
display in the poetry. On the one hand he is “that famous Martial” in
marked passages at the openings of books, on the other, Martial may well
be just another guy looking for dinner and so a stereotype liable to fall
into familiar patterns and to make familiar complaints. “Martial” (and
Martial . . .) can be both a unique, unparalleled, inimitable poet and a put-
upon everyman.
3 For now: “Es dürfte deutlich geworden sein, dass der ‘ich’ Sagende der Epigramme eine
Dichter-persona mit offensichtlich stark fiktionalisierten Zügen ist. Zudem spricht vieles
dafür, dass auch Martials Kaiser als literarische personae auftreten.” (Lorenz, 2002:42) “Die
Darstellung Domitians ist von Martials literarischem Konzept bestimmt.” (Lorenz, 2002:112)
See also Holzberg, 2002:66–74 on the various deployments of Caesar within the Epigrams as
part of world of the epigrams.
In the epigrams we have an ostentatious slide between reality and

ction. And “Martial” is himself one of the places where one can see this
fi
movement the most readily. Accordingly, we can return to our emperor,
the “really real” figure from a couple of paragraphs ago. Domitian may
well be a specific, historically situated individual. But he too is the product
of a number of fictions. Some of these come to Marital pre-made: the
emperor as a cultural fixture is not something Martial can invent ex nihilo,
but rather something that one works with and on. This Martial doing the
work on Domitian (who is also “Domitian”) is also himself the thing-in-
quotes: “Martial.” In short, we see the poet-and-character working with,
working on, and working through the emperor-and-character. If literary
epigram mimics the “really real” epigram of words on stone, then this situ-
ation furnishes a fit instantiation of the ironies of the genre. The verses
“fix” a political reality that is all too fluid and labile.4
The “reality effect” of Martial’s verse more generally—for these poems
are regularly adduced as insights into the “lived experience” of everyday
Rome—accordingly emerges as a very peculiar species of realism. We have
a Rome so vividly portrayed that one is invited to smell it (in its loath-
someness), but, on the other hand, the people running around in this
Rome are a collection of characters from the stage, familiar types wearing
stereotypical masks and executing stereotypical gestures. And, moreover,
even the central historical characters seem to be some sort of mixture of
actual persons and dramatizations of those same persons. In short, one
might well ask of Martial’s realism, “What fictions does your mask of real-
ism in fact serve?” And, conversely, one should not be too quick to dismiss
these fictions as “mere fiction”: if reality itself has a discursive structure,
then how do these stories connive with that same discursivity so as to feed
the dominant fiction in its very dominance?5
Marcus Valerius Martialis writes up a “Martial” who is pretending to be
a scurra. But Martial/“Martial,” in so pretending, is in practice actually a
scurra.6 In this “actuality” he reveals the sort of collapse that occurs in the
English idiom where “plays the part of ” can be either “pretends to be” or
4 The idea that inscriptions are themselves “really real” is itself a fiction of that genre.
What is carved on a stone is by no means the totality of the concrete [sic] situation.
5 Silverman, 1992:28: “The ‘familiar,’ ‘well-known,’ and ‘transparent myths in which a soci-
ety or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself)’ can only in the first instance be those
through which it articulates desire and identity.”
6 Fitzgerald, 2007:9: “Martial, [in contrast to Juvenal], adopts the persona of the strug-
gling dependent not to give voice to the resentment of the unrewarded but to explore the art
of survival . . . Martial casts himself as a scurra.”
“But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 33
“serves the actual function of.” In this case the structure is not “either . . .
or . . . ” but instead “both . . . and . . . ” The oldest sense of the word scurra is
“an elegant, town-bred man.” But the smart set themselves do not spend
long mistaking any of the urbane urbani for a scurra. Already in Plautus
the term comes to have a valence that will predominate for centuries: the
scurra is “a city buffoon, droll, a jester.” He is a sort of parasite whose wit
gets him ahead in this specific Roman world.7
The prefatory letter to Martial’s Epigrams promises mere drollery.
People of good conscience are not to complain about what they read in
here. This is all fun and games (ludant), and a due respect has been shown
even for the most humble persons: “I hope that I have so achieved in my
books a due measure and mixture that anyone who has a good conscience
cannot complain of them as they play their games while leaving even fig-
ures of lower station unharmed (spero me secutum in libellis meis tale tem-
peramentum, ut de illis queri non possit quisquis de se bene senserit, cum
salua infimarum quoque personarum reuerentia ludant. Martial, Epigrams
1.pr).” It might be useful to pause to consider what “good conscience” (de
se bene sensere) might really mean given what follows. One retroactively
smirks at the conjured character of the virtuous reader: he or she does not
really belong to Martial’s Rome. The personae—the persons who are also
characters who are also masks . . . —that appear in the Epigrams are an
array of hypocrites and people with dirty little secrets. And so there is a
joke in the “serious” preface. And, conversely, but less obviously, there is
something serious about the jokes.8
But, to return to the message that the preface bears on its face, we next
hear that the “problem” with the older versions of this sort of literature was
its use of the actual names of real people, and, what’s worse, “even impor-
tant people” (magnis): “[A reverence like mine] was so wanting in the
authors of old that they abused not just actual individuals, but even lead-
ing citizens (quae adeo antiquis auctoribus defuit, ut nominibus non tantum
ueris abusi sint, sed et magni).” Martial’s “modernity” is one and the same
as his “harmlessness”: fake names for real laughs.
7 In Cicero’s very first speech we are already well aware that clowning around can mean
getting ahead and that this is very old news (uetus est, “de scurra multo facilius diuitem quam
patrem familias fieri posse.” Cicero, Pro Quinctio 56). Goldberg, 2005:147: “A scurra was a man
who lived by his wit in a culture naturally suspicious of facetiae: originally a man-about-town
and then a dandy, idler, or fop.”
8 Roman, 2001:118: “The rhetoric of playful joking in Martial presents the reader with
scenarios that cannot be taken literally, but cannot be disregarded either.”
But, before we get “too clever” in our readings of Martial, the narrator
of this preface—someone we are supposed to call “Martial” . . . —makes a
series of prayers to ward off any such approaches to the text: “Let my fame
not come at so high a price. Let cleverness be the last thing that recom-
mends me (Mihi fama uilius constet et probetur in me nouissimum inge-
nium).” Genius momentarily becomes a synonym for evil genius, for
malice: no longer merely clever, one is “too clever.” There is something
“expensive” about the license of a Lucilius and it “costs too much” to let it
be exercised. For whom the price is too high and just why are left unstated.
The second prayer ends with an “ironic” invocation of “genius”: he cleverly
asks not to be thought clever. The Latin even contains a slight ambiguity
that one might refuse to resolve: the collocation ingenium probetur might
be either “cleverness that wins approval” or something like “convicted of
cleverness.”9 Perhaps it somehow simulatenously points to both acts. In
addition to authors with nasty wits, the preface also conjures a world of
wicked over-clever readers who foist costly meaning onto mentally impov-
erished authors. The latter theme is about to receive attention in the next
sentences. These lines are tongue-in-cheek, but we are assuredly being
asked not to be so obtuse as to fail to see that reading-and-writing can be
more than just fun-and-games. Politicized literature is an avowed and
avowedly dangerous possibility.
The prayers continue apace: “Keep clear from my unaffected verses ye
spiteful interpreters” (Absit a iocorum nostrorum simplicitate malignus
interpres). The jokes are all “just jokes.” What you see is what you get.
Doubleness would be duplicitousness. And that second sense would be
something the reader invented, writes this “artless” author.10 Again, it is
quite hard to take this insistence that we take everything at face value,
especially since a second meaning of simplicitas itself is (epigrammatic)
“obscenity.”11 That is, perhaps he has only promised to write what he
9 The construction aliquid in aliquo probari is far more likely to be “to approve of X in Y”
than “to demonstrate X in the case of Y”, but see Servius, In Vergilii Aeneidos Libros 1.663:
“ . . . as is illustrated in the case of Dido herself (alatus autem ideo est, quia amantibus nec
leuius aliquid nec mutabilius inuenitur, ut in ipsa probatur Didone).”
10 Rimell, 2008:40: “Martial invites readers to play the malignus interpres, while repri-
manding us in advance for ‘over-interpreting,’ for mixing up the literal and the metaphorical.”
Fitzgerald, 2007:71: “[T]he malignus interpres is a more insidious figure, who reminds us that
in the end the author of a book of epigrams has no control over the reception of his work,
which is porous to the interpretations, imputations, and depredations of the world in which
it circulates.”
11 See the ending of Epigrams 11.20 where Augustus the epigrammatic emperor has just
used “fuck” repeatedly. The narrator then concludes, “Naturally you excuse, Augustus, witty
little books given that you know how to talk with ‘Roman simplicity’ ” (Absoluis lepidos
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Title: L'œuvre de Henri Poincaré
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK L'ŒUVRE DE

HENRI POINCARÉ ***
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
CHAPITRE PAGE
I. 4
II. 7
III. 13
IV. 14
V. 19
L’ŒUVRE
DE
HENRI POINCARÉ
PAR
émile PICARD
MEMBRE DE L’INSTITUT ET DU BUREAU DES LONGITUDES.
PARIS,
GAUTHIER-VILLARS, IMPRIMEUR-LIBRAIRE
DU BUREAU DES LONGITUDES, DE L’ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE,
Quai des Grands-Augustins, 55.
1913
Extrait des Annales de l'École Normale supérieure, 3e série, t.
XXX, p. 463 (1913).
L’ŒUVRE
de
HENRI POINCARÉ
Quelqu’un demandait un jour à J.-B. Dumas, à propos de Claude
Bernard: «Que pensez-vous de ce grand physiologiste?», et Dumas
répondit: «Ce n’est pas un grand physiologiste, c’est la Physiologie
elle-même.» On pourrait dire pareillement de Henri Poincaré qu’il ne
fut pas seulement un grand mathématicien, mais la Mathématique
elle-même. Dans l’histoire des Sciences mathématiques, peu de
mathématiciens ont eu, comme lui, la force de faire rendre à l’esprit
mathématique tout ce qu’il était à chaque instant capable de donner.
En Mathématiques pures sa puissance d’invention fut prodigieuse, et
l’on reste confondu devant la maîtrise avec laquelle il savait forger
l’outil le mieux approprié dans toutes les questions qu’il attaquait.
Poincaré ne fut étranger à aucune des sciences parvenues à un
stade assez avancé pour être susceptible de prendre, au moins
dans certaines de leurs parties, une forme mathématique. Il a été en
particulier un grand critique des théories de la Physique moderne,
habile à les comparer et à mettre en évidence leur véritable origine,
aimant aussi à signaler leurs points faibles et leurs contradictions.
Sa réputation, comme philosophe, fut considérable. Toute
conception philosophique est de sa nature controversable; mais,
quelque opinion qu’on puisse avoir sur certaines idées de Poincaré,
l’admiration n’en est pas moins vive pour le noble penseur, le
dialecticien subtil et l’écrivain au style personnel où rivalisent l’esprit
géométrique et l’esprit de finesse. A défaut d’une étude détaillée qui
demanderait un long travail, je vais essayer de tracer une esquisse
de l’œuvre du grand géomètre dont la disparition fut, l’an dernier,
une perte irréparable pour la Science.
I.
Ce qui caractérise le génie mathématique de Poincaré, c’est sa
puissance à embrasser d’emblée les questions dans toute leur
généralité et à créer de toutes pièces l’instrument analytique
permettant l’étude des problèmes posés. D’autres, et c’est ainsi
qu’opèrent la majorité des chercheurs, commencent par s’enquérir
de ce qui a été fait dans la voie qu’ils veulent explorer; la
documentation est pour eux un travail préliminaire. Poincaré
s’attarde rarement à étudier les travaux antérieurs. Tout au plus,
parcourt-il rapidement quelques-uns d’entre eux; de vagues
indications lui permettent de retrouver des Chapitres entiers d’une
théorie. Au fond, les questions d’attribution lui furent souverainement
indifférentes, et le détail de l’histoire des sciences l’intéressait très
peu.
La théorie des groupes fuchsiens et des fonctions fuchsiennes, qui
illustra son nom presque au début de sa carrière scientifique, fournit
des exemples à l’appui de ces remarques. Quand Poincaré
commença ses études sur les groupes fuchsiens, c’est-à-dire sur les
groupes discontinus de la forme qui transforment
une circonférence en une circonférence ou, ce qui revient au même,

un demi-plan en un demi-plan, de nombreux cas particuliers (depuis
Jacobi et Hermite) se rattachant à la théorie des fonctions elliptiques
avaient été étudiées. Poincaré ne les connaissait pas alors; son
point de départ est simplement le pavage du plan entier par des
parallélogrammes égaux, et c’est de là qu’il s’élance pour résoudre
dans toute sa généralité le problème du pavage d’un demi-plan par
un ensemble de polygones curvilignes. Il paraît avoir été conduit à
ce problème par l’étude qu’il faisait alors de la géométrie non
euclidienne de Lobatschewsky, dont Beltrami avait donné une
interprétation dans le demi-plan euclidien, les courbes jouant le rôle
de droites étant alors des circonférences orthogonales à la droite qui
limite le demi-plan. La loi de génération des groupes fuchsiens
paraissait extrêmement difficile à trouver. On apercevait assez
facilement une condition nécessaire; par une analyse profonde, où il
montre en même temps un sens géométrique très affiné, Poincaré
montre que cette condition est suffisante. C’était là une grande
découverte. Il fallait maintenant démontrer l’existence de fonctions
invariables par les substitutions des groupes trouvés. Poincaré
forme alors des séries entièrement nouvelles (fonctions
thêtafuchsiennes) qui lui permettent d’arriver au but; la théorie des
fonctions fuchsiennes était créée. Une magnifique moisson allait en
sortir: l’intégration des équations différentielles linéaires algébriques
à points singuliers réguliers, et l’expression des coordonnées des
points d’une courbe algébrique quelconque par des fonctions
uniformes (fuchsiennes) d’un paramètre.
Mais Poincaré va encore plus loin dans ses Mémoires célèbres
des premiers Volumes des Acta mathematica. Les substitutions des
groupes fuchsiens laissaient invariable une circonférence. N’y aurait-
il pas des groupes linéaires discontinus plus généraux? La
recherche de la génération de tels groupes, telle que la donne
Poincaré (groupes kleinéens), témoigne d’une audace
extraordinaire; il la déduit de la division d’un demi-espace (espace
situé du même côté d’un plan) en polyèdres limités par des surfaces
sphériques orthogonales au plan limite. Certains de ces groupes
kleinéens conduisent à considérer des courbes étranges, surtout
pour l’époque, ayant des tangentes mais n’ayant pas de courbure;
ce sont elles qui, dans une certaine mesure, jouent pour les
fonctions kleinéennes le même rôle que jouait la circonférence pour
les fonctions fuchsiennes.
Les Mémoires précédents mettaient, à moins de trente ans,
Poincaré hors de pair. Sa carrière scientifique ne faisait cependant
que commencer. D’autres travaux d'Analyse pure vont, dans les
années suivantes, asseoir définitivement sa renommée. Il généralise
en 1884, dans un court article, le théorème d’uniformisation des
fonctions algébriques d’une variable, en faisant voir que, si y est une
fonction analytique quelconque de , on peut exprimera et par des
fonctions analytiques d’une variable, uniformes dans tout leur
domaine d’existence. C’est dans ce Mémoire qu’on voit apparaître
pour la première fois les surfaces de Riemann ayant un nombre infini
de feuillets. Poincaré y est revenu récemment pour compléter
quelques points: la question revient, au fond, à établir la possibilité
d’une représentation conforme d’une surface de Riemann
simplement connexe ayant un nombre infini de feuillets, soit sur un
cercle, soit sur un plan entier. L’uniformisation des courbes
algébriques, établie d’abord par Poincaré dans sa théorie des
fonctions fuchsiennes, n’est plus alors qu’un cas particulier d’une loi
très générale. Théoriquement au moins, l’étude des fonctions
analytiques multiformes d’une variable se trouve ramenée à l’étude
des fonctions uniformes.
C’est un des grands titres de gloire de Cauchy d’avoir créé la
théorie des fonctions de variables complexes et d’avoir ainsi ouvert
un domaine immense à l’Analyse mathématique. Cauchy avait
considéré les intégrales simples, mais l’extension aux intégrales
doubles de son théorème fondamental relatif aux intégrales prises le
long d’un contour présentait de très sérieuses difficultés. Poincaré
est parvenu à les surmonter. Il définit d’abord avec précision ce
qu’on doit entendre par l’intégrale double d’une
fonction analytique de deux variables complexes et ,
prise sur un continuum à deux dimensions situé dans l’espace à
quatre dimensions correspondant aux deux variables complexes, et
il établit que, si le continuum d’intégration est fermé et si l’on peut le
déformer sans rencontrer des singularités de , l’intégrale double
garde la même valeur. Ce résultat, capital dans la théorie des
fonctions de deux variables, a posé un grand nombre de questions.
Si est une fonction rationnelle, il y a lieu d’envisager les résidus
de l’intégrale double; si est une fonction algébrique de et , on a
été ultérieurement conduit à considérer les périodes de l’intégrale
double. Il nous faut encore citer, dans le domaine des fonctions
analytiques de deux variables, le théorème d’après lequel toute
fonction uniforme de deux variables présentant partout à distance
finie le caractère d’une fonction rationnelle peut se mettre sous la
forme d’un quotient de deux fonctions entières. La démonstration en
est très délicate; l’auteur sait y manier habilement les quatre
équations différentielles auxquelles satisfait la partie réelle d’une
fonction analytique, dont la seule considération eût arrêté un
chercheur moins puissant.
C’est dans une période de cinq à six ans (1880-1886) que
Poincaré a publié les travaux dont nous venons de parler. Jamais il
ne fit preuve d’un plus grand esprit d’invention, jamais n’apparurent
mieux ses dons de voyant. Sa merveilleuse intuition sautait par-
dessus des difficultés qui auraient troublé des esprits obligés
d’avancer pas à pas. De son regard pénétrant, il voit les points où il
faut donner l’assaut et il arrive d’un bond au cœur de la place
attaquée. Aussi a-t-on parfois l’impression qu’il y a dans le
développement de sa pensée quelque chose de heurté, comme si le
voile cachant la vérité se déchirait brusquement devant lui. Il y a,
dans ses Mémoires, rapidement écrits d’assez nombreuses erreurs
de détail, mais sans importance, sauf de rares exceptions, sur les
résultats essentiels. Poincaré était de ces rares savants pour qui
n’est pas faite la devise Pauca, sed matura, et les mathématiciens
trouveront longtemps des mines à exploiter dans les idées qu’il jetait
à la hâte.
II.
Nous sommes loin d’avoir fait allusion à tous les travaux
importants de Poincaré dans la théorie des fonctions analytiques;
rappelons seulement d’un mot ses études sur les fonctions entières
et ses recherches concernant les développements asymptotiques
des intégrales des équations différentielles linéaires sur les droites
aboutissant à un point singulier irrégulier au sens de Fuchs. En
même temps qu’il continuait ses travaux précédents, Poincaré
poursuivait des recherches pouvant trouver une application
immédiate à des questions de Géométrie et de Mécanique. Il a
consacré de nombreux Mémoires à l’étude des courbes définies par
des équations différentielles, c’est-à-dire à l’étude des équations
différentielles dans le champ réel. Le premier Mémoire montre
nettement le point de vue auquel il va se placer; il s’agit de se rendre
compte de l’allure générale des courbes intégrales (ou
caractéristiques). Ainsi soit l’équation où et sont
des polynômes en et ; on va d’ailleurs remplacer le plan ( )
par une sphère qui lui correspond homographiquement. Après la
discussion des divers points singuliers (foyers, cols, nœuds, centres
exceptionnellement) vient la distinction entre les caractéristiques
dont la continuation se trouve arrêtée par un nœud et celles qui, à
partir d’un certain moment, ne passent plus par un nœud. Au sujet
de ces dernières, Poincaré établit qu’elles sont, ou bien des cycles
(courbes fermées), ou bien des courbes asymptotes à un cycle limite
(qui peut se réduire à un foyer). Il faut alors fixer approximativement
la position des cycles limites; c’est là une question très délicate,
qu’on ne peut espérer résoudre que si les cycles limites sont en
nombre fini.
La question est plus difficile encore pour les équations du premier
ordre et de degré supérieur. Il peut arriver ici, contrairement au cas
précédent, qu’une caractéristique puisse se rapprocher, autant qu’on
voudra, d’un point arbitraire dans une aire convenable. De plus, et
cela est capital, le genre riemannien d’une certaine surface fermée
attachée à l’équation différentielle intervient dans la discussion des
caractéristiques. Ce n’est pas un des moindres mérites de Poincaré
d’avoir montré le rôle de l’Analysis situs dans ces questions; depuis
cette époque, il ne cessa d’ailleurs de s’intéresser aux problèmes de
la Géométrie de situation, qui exigent une si grande tension d’esprit
dans le cas des multiplicités à plus de trois dimensions, et sur
lesquels il écrivit de profonds mémoires, d’une lecture difficile.
Plus complexe encore est le cas des équations d’ordre supérieur
au premier; les Mémoires consacrés aux équations du second ordre
sont pleins d’idées suggestives et mettent en évidence les éléments
fondamentaux du problème. L’étude des points singuliers ne suffit
plus; il est nécessaire d’introduire une notion nouvelle. Soit une
courbe fermée quelconque et un domaine comprenant tous les
points voisins de cette courbe; il faut étudier la forme générale des
caractéristiques à l’intérieur de ce domaine, et les problèmes si
délicats relatifs à la stabilité se présentent d’eux-mêmes. Tout était à
créer dans ces études, alors toutes nouvelles, où Poincaré a été un
précurseur et qui ne seront pas de sitôt épuisées.
Poincaré ne cessait de penser aux applications de ses résultats à
la Mécanique céleste et d’une manière générale à la Mécanique
analytique. Comme par une ironie singulière d’un dieu malin
poursuivant les mathématiciens qui veulent appliquer leurs études
aux phénomènes naturels, la forme des équations de la Mécanique
analytique correspond aux cas où la discussion est la plus délicate.
Le fruit de ces longues méditations fut l’apparition d’un Ouvrage en
trois volumes: Les méthodes nouvelles de la Mécanique céleste.
L’effort analytique dont témoignent ces volumes ne saurait être trop
loué; les méthodes mises en œuvre sont en elles-mêmes
extrêmement importantes pour l’Analyse, et peuvent être utilisées
pour d’autres questions. Sans doute, le problème de Mécanique
céleste qu’avait d’abord en vue Poincaré, je veux dire le problème
des corps, n’a pas été résolu malgré l’immense labeur dépensé.
Mais il importe peu; les méthodes introduites en Mécanique
analytique sont plus précieuses que la solution même de ce
problème et contribueront un jour à sa solution[1].
Les résultats négatifs contenus dans le grand Ouvrage de
Poincaré attirent tout d’abord l’attention. L’auteur établit que le
problème des trois corps n’admet pas d’autre intégrale première
uniforme que les intégrales des forces vives et des aires. Quelle
puissance de déduction dans la démonstration de ce théorème très
caché, où se trouvent utilisés l’existence des solutions périodiques et
le fait que les exposants caractéristiques ne sont pas tous nuis. Il en
est de même pour la démonstration de la divergence, au point de
vue purement mathématique, des séries employées par les
astronomes en Mécanique céleste quand on suppose les conditions
initiales arbitraires; cela n’empêche pas d’ailleurs leur utilisation
courante en Astronomie, où il arrive que les termes employés
commencent par décroître. Ces résultats toutefois ne sont pas
établis par Poincaré dans toute leur généralité. Ainsi, dans le cas de
trois corps, les masses de ceux-ci ne sont pas quelconques; l’une
étant , les masses des deux autres sont de la forme et ,
étant une constante suffisamment petite. Il n’est guère douteux
que les conclusions valent, quelles que soient les masses, et dans le
Mémoire qu’il écrivit peu de temps avant sa mort dans les Rendiconti
del Circolo Matematico di Palermo, Poincaré a indiqué une voie à
suivre pour arriver au résultat.
C’est clans les mêmes conditions, c’est-à-dire en supposant dans
les équations la présence d’un paramètre très petit , que se place
Poincaré en étudiant certaines solutions particulières remarquables
des équations de la Mécanique analytique, et en particulier du
problème des trois corps. De solutions périodiques connues pour
, on peut déduire par continuité l’existence de solutions de
même nature pour très petit. Par cette voie est établie dans des
cas très variés l’existence de solutions périodiques pour le problème
des trois corps. Cette étude des solutions périodiques est un chef-
d’œuvre. Nous sommes loin avec elles des deux cas particuliers
considérés par Lagrange, où les trois corps restent au sommet d’un
triangle équilatéral et où les trois points restent en ligne droite. Outre
les solutions périodiques, Poincaré établit aussi l’existence de
solutions asymptotiques aux solutions périodiques, et de solutions
doublement asymptotiques à ces solutions (c’est-à-dire
asymptotiques pour et ). La démonstration
relative à ces dernières était extrêmement difficile et, de tous les
théorèmes dont il enrichit la Mécanique analytique, aucun ne coûta
un aussi grand effort à Poincaré qui dut se borner ici au cas très
particulier qu’il appelait le problème restreint. On peut espérer que
les solutions périodiques pourront être employées comme première
approximation dans les calculs de la Mécanique céleste, mais il
serait prématuré de se prononcer à ce sujet.
Le Tome III des Nouvelles méthodes de la Mécanique céleste
renferme les parties les plus profondes de l’Ouvrage. On avait
rencontré incidemment des invariants intégraux, Liouville par
exemple en Mécanique analytique, et Helmholtz dans la théorie des
tourbillons; mais la théorie générale de ces invariants est une
création originale de Poincaré, ainsi que les belles applications qu’il
en fait à l’étude de la stabilité. Dans des problèmes très étendus de
Mécanique analytique, il est conduit à démontrer qu’il y a stabilité à
la Poisson, c’est-à-dire que, parti d’une position, le système dans la
suite du mouvement vient à repasser, sinon par la même position, du
moins par une position infiniment rapprochée de la première. Il est
curieux de remarquer que, dans cette question, l’idée initiale de la
démonstration est la même que celle utilisée bien des années
auparavant clans l’étude de la convergence des séries
thêtafuchsiennes. Le théorème général sur la stabilité à la Poisson
n’est valable que sous certaines conditions qui, en particulier, ne
sont pas remplies dans le cas du problème des corps. Dans ce
dernier cas, Poincaré est conduit à envisager le prolongement
analytique des solutions après un choc[2], et il établit que, sauf pour
des solutions exceptionnelles, il y aura stabilité à la Poisson pour la
trajectoire ou son prolongement analytique.
Qu’on me permette ici une remarque. Dans des questions
relatives à la réversibilité, Poincaré et d’autres après lui s’appuient
sur ce théorème général que, dans les mouvements hamiltoniens, il
y a stabilité à la Poisson, au sens où nous venons de l’employer. Il
ne faut pas oublier qu’il peut y avoir une infinité de solutions où se
présentent des circonstances analogues au choc, c’est-à-dire des
discontinuités dans certaines fonctions figurant dans les équations,
et pour lesquelles par conséquent il n’y aura stabilité à la Poisson
qu’en supposant le mouvement prolongé analytiquement. Ces
solutions, qui deviennent d’autant plus fréquentes que le nombre des
degrés de liberté est plus grand, ne risquent-elles pas de rendre
illusoires les arguments invoqués dans les questions concernant la
réversibilité?
Les recherches de Poincaré sur la figure des corps célestes
témoignent d’une singulière force d’analyse. Il s’agissait d’étudier
certaines figures d’équilibre d’une masse fluide homogène dont les
éléments s’attirent mutuellement suivant la loi de Newton et qui
tourne uniformément autour de cet axe. Il est connu depuis
longtemps que, si la vitesse angulaire ne dépasse pas une
certaine limite, la figure d’équilibre peut être ellipsoïdale; il y a deux
vitesses angulaires , et ( ), telles que, pour ,
on a les deux ellipsoïdes de révolution de Maclaurin et, pour
, on a en outre une ellipsoïde à trois axes inégaux de Jacobi.
L’ensemble des ellipsoïdes de Maclaurin constitue deux séries de
figures d’équilibre variant avec la vitesse angulaire, l’ensemble des
ellipsoïdes de Jacobi en constitue deux autres. Si l’on considère une
de ces figures ellipsoïdales d’équilibre avec la vitesse angulaire
correspondante , et si l’on donne à un petit accroissement , on
peut se demander si, pour la vitesse angulaire , il existe des
ligures d’équilibre, autre que les ellipsoïdes, qui, en variant d’une
manière continue avec , se confondent pour avec l’ellipsoïde
. C’est le problème que se posait Poincaré en 1885, ce qui l’a
conduit à une infinité de nouvelles figures d’équilibre; à la vérité, il se
borne dans cette recherche à la première approximation, et il ne
conclut l’existence effective des nouvelles figures qu’en étendant
d’une manière peut-être contestable, au cas des fluides, des
remarques très ingénieuses sur les équilibres de bifurcation
démontrées seulement pour des systèmes dont la position ne
dépend que d’un nombre fini de paramètres. Les nouvelles figures
sont toutes instables, sauf peut-être une célèbre figure piriforme
correspondant à la vitesse angulaire la plus petite qui donne des
ellipsoïdes de Jacobi stables. Il semble bien, d’après les dernières
recherches de M. Liapounoff qui a étudié de son côté avec une
grande rigueur les problèmes précédents par d’autres méthodes,
que la figure piriforme est instable. Les figures piriformes ont-elles
joué un rôle cosmogonique? C’était l’avis de Sir Georges Darwin.
Dans le refroidissement lent, il est possible que la figure piriforme se
creuse tout d’un coup et qu’il y ait une séparation du corps en deux:
telle aurait été, dans cette vue, la Lune sortant de la Terre. Il ne faut
pas d’ailleurs oublier, dans les applications à la Cosmogonie, que
dans ce qui précède il s’agissait de substance homogène, ce qui
risque d’éloigner beaucoup de la réalité.
Aucune partie de l’Astronomie prise dans son acception la plus
étendue n’est restée étrangère à Poincaré. Un de ses derniers cours
fut consacré aux Hypothèses cosmogoniques. Toutes les
hypothèses faites depuis Kant et Laplace sur la formation du
système solaire y sont discutées d’une façon très serrée, mais
Poincaré ne se borne pas à notre système et étend son regard
perçant jusqu’aux étoiles et aux nébuleuses. Avec quelle critique
pénétrante il discute les vues d’Arrhénius sur la possibilité qu’a
l’Univers d’échapper à la mort thermique que semble lui réserver le
principe de Carnot, et que de vues pleines d’une imagination
grandiose dans le Chapitre où la voie lactée est comparée à la
matière radiante de Crookes. Aucun livre ne saurait donner une plus
haute idée de la poésie de la Science.
III.
De la Mécanique céleste à la Physique mathématique, la transition
est facile. La Physique mathématique offre au mathématicien de
nombreux sujets d’étude, soit qu’il se propose de faire un examen
critique des principes des théories, soit que, sans discuter ceux-ci, il
se contente de chercher les solutions des problèmes précis
auxquels a conduit le développement de ces théories. Dans ce
dernier cas, la question revient le plus souvent, dans l’état actuel de
la Science, à l’intégration d’équations aux dérivées partielles avec
certaines conditions aux limites. Sur la Physique mathématique ainsi
entendue, qui n’est en fait qu’un Chapitre de l’Analyse, Poincaré a
écrit des Mémoires justement renommés. Que d’idées nouvelles
sont jetées dans ses recherches sur les fonctions harmoniques; sa
méthode du balayage est encore aujourd’hui très précieuse dans le
cas où la surface a des singularités, malgré les points de vue
introduits récemment dans ces questions par la théorie des
équations intégrales. Le Mémoire sur la méthode de Neumann
montre que cette méthode peut encore être appliquée quand la
surface n’est pas convexe, et renferme des vues originales sur des
fonctions, dites fondamentales, généralisant, sur une surface fermée
quelconque, les fonctions de Laplace relatives à la sphère. Le travail
sur les équations de la Physique mathématique paru en 1894
restera particulièrement mémorable; il y est établi pour la première
fois que, pour une équation aux dérivées partielles se présentant
dans la théorie de la vibration des membranes et renfermant
linéairement un paramètre arbitraire, l’intégrale prenant des valeurs
données sur un contour est une fonction méromorphe de ce
paramètre, et de là est résultée une démonstration mathématique
rigoureuse de l’existence des harmoniques en nombre infini d’une
membrane vibrante.
Je voudrais me borner, mais comment passer sous silence les
études de Poincaré sur les marées. Laplace avait abordé, comme on
sait, dans sa Mécanique céleste le problème des marées au point de
vue dynamique, mais l’intégration des équations obtenues en
introduisant les conditions complexes de la configuration des mers
était alors bien au-dessus des forces de l’analyse. Malgré
d’admirables travaux de la plus haute importance au point de vue
pratique, la théorie mathématique des marées n’avait fait aucun
progrès, mais les récentes études sur la théorie des équations aux
dérivées partielles et ses rapports avec les équations intégrales
fournissait de nouvelles armes, dont Poincaré s’empare avec sa
maîtrise habituelle; il put établir que le problème des marées se
ramène à une équation de Fredholm ou à un système de deux
équations de Fredholm, suivant qu’on néglige ou non ce qu’on
appelle l’attraction du bourrelet. Théoriquement le problème des
marées était résolu. Sans doute, pour tirer parti du résultat de
Poincaré, il faudra, outre la configuration des côtes, connaître
partout la profondeur des mers, et les calculs, auxquels conduit la
méthode, seront d’une effroyable complication. C’est souvent le
triste destin des mathématiciens que, quand ils sont arrivés après de
longs efforts à la solution rigoureuse d’un problème offert par la
Mécanique ou la Physique, cette solution est si compliquée qu’elle
est pratiquement inutilisable. Ils ont raison cependant de ne pas se
décourager, car, outre que l'idée de complication est très relative, on
peut espérer tirer de la seule forme d’une solution complète des lois
générales que serait impuissante à donner une solution approchée.
Dans le livre de Poincaré sur les marées, les analystes peuvent
trouver de difficiles sujets de recherches.
Citons encore ici, à cause de leur caractère surtout analytique, les
beaux Mémoires des Acta Mathematica où Poincaré a donné, en
partie au moins, l’explication des curieux phénomènes observés par
M. Gouy sur la diffraction éloignée, en entendant par là les
phénomènes optiques dans lesquels la déviation des rayons
diffractés est considérable.
IV.
Poincaré ne traita pas seulement de la Physique mathématique en
analyste. On est émerveillé devant les vingt Volumes reproduisant
son enseignement pendant qu’il occupa la chaire de Physique
mathématique à la Sorbonne. Sur les sujets les plus variés,
élasticité, hydrodynamique, théorie de la chaleur, thermodynamique,
capillarité, optique, électricité, il apparaît comme un dominateur;
c’est un jeu pour lui de mettre à nu les mécanismes analytiques qui,
sous des manteaux divers, se retrouvent souvent en Physique
mathématique, et son esprit critique aime à signaler les difficultés et
les contradictions. Ainsi, en Elasticité, tandis qu’on parlait
couramment des vingt et un coefficients d’élasticité, Poincaré montre
qu’on doit en compter vingt-sept, en général, c’est-à-dire quand les
forces extérieures ne sont pas nulles dans l’état d’équilibre naturel.
En Optique, une expérience remarquable de Wiener sur
l’interférence de deux rayons rectangulaires avait amené à conclure,
comme le supposait Fresnel, que la vibration lumineuse se fait
perpendiculairement au plan de polarisation. Pour Poincaré, il n’y a
rien à tirer de cette expérience, quant à la direction des vibrations.
La conclusion ci-dessus est légitime si l’on admet que l’intensité de
l’action chimique de la lumière est proportionnelle à la force vive
moyenne de l’éther; mais on doit, au contraire, regarder avec
Neumann que la vibration est dans le plan de polarisation si cette
intensité est proportionnelle à l’énergie potentielle moyenne de
l’éther.
Des expériences nouvelles d’un grand intérêt sont-elles faites,
Poincaré les discute immédiatement dans son enseignement,
proposant ses explications et incitant les expérimentateurs à de
nouvelles recherches; tel fut le cas des expériences de Hertz, où il
insista sur le rôle de l’amortissement dans l’excitateur et le
résonateur, que mirent ensuite en évidence divers physiciens.

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The Art of Complicity in Martial and

Statius: Martial's Epigrams, Statius'

The Art of Complicity

iii. Nerva dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) 176

3. Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity 189

Appendix: From Nero to Trajan: Lives and Times 377

The students in my over-­broad Complicity seminar put up with a lot.

8 Henderson, 2001:76 on Book 3 of Pliny’s Epistles: “Altogether, these in-­brief profiles of

are exploring instead the emergence of politico-­aesthetic objects posi-

We will be complicit with the agenda handed to us by the text, an

23 Žižek, 1989:29. 24 Žižek, 1989:29.

33 See again Lacan, 2014:89 on “not without.”

42 See Geyssen, 1996:87.

to be shocked and appalled at the fawning and flattery of another.52 But

52 See Kreuz, 2016:50–51.

55 Coleman, 1988:xxv. 56 Newlands, 2002:283.

62 See Coleman, 1988:15.

67 Lorenz, 2002:19: “Durch die Unverhältnismäßigkeit des intertextuellen Vergleichs wird

71 See Lorenz, 2002:109. 72 See Lorenz, 2002:1–2. 73 Lorenz, 2002:2.

context, a context that needs to be properly acknowledged in the course of

75 On late antique panegyrical theory and practice see Gunderson, 2020b.

76 Gunderson, 1996. 77 Gunderson, 2000a.

A. “But now I know that you really are

30 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature

A more revelatory way of talking about the connections between the

“But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 31

32 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature

In the epigrams we have an ostentatious slide between reality and

“But now I know that you really are going to Rome” 33

34 Martial’s Epigrams as Domitianic Literature

Title: L'œuvre de Henri Poincaré

Author: Emile Picard

Release date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71820]

Original publication: Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1913

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK L'ŒUVRE DE

MEMBRE DE L’INSTITUT ET DU BUREAU DES LONGITUDES.

une circonférence en une circonférence ou, ce qui revient au même,

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iii. Nerva dials back the principate (Epigrams 11.4–5) 176

3. Statian Metapoetics: The High Art of Complicity 189

Appendix: From Nero to Trajan: Lives and Times 377

The students in my over-broad Complicity seminar put up with a lot.

8 Henderson, 2001:76 on Book 3 of Pliny’s Epistles: “Altogether, these in-brief profiles of

are exploring instead the emergence of politico-aesthetic objects posi-