These collections were produced within the context of Saturnalia, the annual Roman winter festival and holiday in honour of the god Saturn. “During this festival, power relationships were turned upside down, a bit like during carnival. Children and slaves temporarily ruled households and there was much feasting and drinking”, Hunink recounts. The poor also received gifts from the rich. “They did this partly out of a sense of duty, given that the poor could not fall back on a social safety net. They could also use this opportunity to display their own prosperity with expensive gifts.”
From quinces to hazel dormice and from a thick woollen coat to a wrestler: in the Xenia and the Apophoreta, Martialis conjures up a wagon load of food and gifts and sketches a tableau vivant of Roman festival culture. “Still, you shouldn't read these poems as journalistic reports. Martialis was known for his exaggeration. He writes about a pair of slaves, but that was a colossal investment. Even the richest Romans would not give each other such an expensive gift.”
Spectacular cabaret
Even though historians and archaeologists could glean a long list of objects from these collections that elucidated daily life in the Roman Empire, the literary qualities of these collections were not always fully valued. “People thought that these were some sort of ready-made poems that you can give along with a gift, similar to Sinterklaas poems. They recognised Martialis by his mocking poetry, a kind of spectacular cabaret. But these thematic collections, in which suddenly ten poems about wine appeared, remained misunderstood and mostly unread.”
Hunink explains how Martialis moved from Spain to Rome as a youngster and it may well be that he was looking for a novel angle from which to build his reputation as a poet. “In his first collection, he took a similar approach by describing all manner of minutia of the games in the Colosseum. The Saturnalia was also a suitable theme to indulge his literary talents.”
Although the mockery and coarse jokes that typify his later work are absent, Hunink believes that Martialis' wit and edginess are already conspicuous in the Xenia and the Apophoreta. “Something has to happen in a poem if you want readers to stay engaged, and Martialis manages this again and again in his epigrams. A joke, a play on words or an interesting comparison, he manages to impress you every time.”
Graffiti from Pompeii
This all and more made Hunink’s translation job rather enjoyable. “Whenever a text is about something of note, the author has fire in their belly, and I can relate to it, translation becomes truly enjoyable. Then it doesn’t matter whether the texts are written by a well-known poet. For example, for an upcoming project, I will be working on graffiti from Pompeii. There, thousands of texts were scrawled on walls across the city and represent what moved people back then.”
In Martialis' work, epigrams about wines, literary works and slaves stood out. “I am a lover of fine wine and literature, so those poems fascinated me anyway. I especially found the epigrams about slaves interesting precisely because we can hardly imagine such values today. The last epigram, in which the feasts are over and normality resumes, moved me. I finished the translations shortly before the corona crisis. Not only did we have to go into lockdown then, but the good times I had while working on this translation also came to an end.”
Illustration: Jona Lendering.