BOOK REVIEWS Martial: The World of the Epigram. By WILLIAM FITZGERALD. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 258. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN 978–0–226–25253–7. William Fitzgerald’s (F.) Martial: The World of Epigram, the first significant book-length study of Martial’s poetic oeuvre as a whole since J.P. Sullivan,1 offers a variety of approaches to reading the Epigrammata and the Liber Spectaculorum that will challenge and interest a broad readership, both specialist and non-specialist,2 and will benefit anyone willing to engage with the book critically. The title is a bit misleading: the bulk of the work—more or less a set of essays written around Martial’s oeuvre—is connected to a somewhat variable notion of the audiences and readers of Martial’s poems. In that sense, F. does capture a portion of the “world of epigram” in a new way, setting Martial squarely within his urban context as a creator of spectacle and an author surrounded by readers.3 F. pushes the study of Martial’s epigrams into theoretical ground already trod by classicists in other genres (e.g., in Chapter 2), and at a number of points a clearer and more complete exposition of previous work in ancient cultural poetics involving questions of spectacle and audience—if only in the notes—might have been appropriate and useful, at least to set the context for F.’s own work. Non-specialists will be bewildered at times and in some cases may not understand the significance of what F. tries to do in, e.g., Chapters 3 and 4. They may also be disadvantaged in respect to important background for Martial. Thus, for example, F. tends to connect poems across Books, often without acknowledging the time between the Books’ production or discussing frankly what little we know or surmise about the publication dates of individual Books and groups of Books.4 Because of this extended period of production and the complexity of determining 1 Martial: The Unexpected Classic (Cambridge, 1991). S. Lorenz, Erotik und Panegyrik : Martials epigrammatische Kaiser (Tübingen, 2002) is more limited in scope, if not significance. 2 Judging from the material in Ch. 1, “Martial and the World of Epigram” and the Excursus, “The Epigram at Rome,” which both seem intended for non-specialists. 3 A social urban context, that is, quite unlike the urban context described in E.R. Almeida, Terrarum dea gentiumque: Marziale e Roma: un poeta e la sua città (Roma, 2003). 4 The communis opinio, which stretches back to A. Dau, De M. Valerii Martialis libellorum ratione temporibusque (Diss. Rostock, 1887) and continues through N. Holzberg, Martial und das Antike Epigramm (Darmstadt, 2002), presents an ordered sequence of publication, with a defined number of re-editions of collections of Books; see M. Citroni , “Pubblicazzione e diediche dei libri in Marziale,” Maia 40 (1988) 3–39. But there are significant ordering problems within and outside of Books. For example, on pp. 74–7 F. presents Ep. 1.1, 2 and 3 as the reader’s first experience of Martial’s epigrams, treating them in order. No mention is made in situ of the complexity of the MS tradition surrounding these epigrams even though the initial publication of 1.1–2 and 1.3 might be separated by as many as seven years and/or displaced from a position extra ordinem paginarum given them in a re-edition or revision of a collection of books (perhaps , following Sullivan (1991) 15 n. 31, the edition of Books 1–7) around 93. 364 BOOK REVIEWS the text of a Book of epigrams, it is challenging to suggest (as F. does on p. 20) that Martial across 12 Books of epigrams adopts a consistent strategy in representing “city as readership.” In fact, the echoes between Books are more likely a result of the recycling of “good product” (an approach to poetic production F. discusses in Chapter 5 “The Society of the Book”) or the overuse of common themes.5 Connecting poems as intertextual references across Books without drawing the modern reader’s awareness to the problems may mislead the non-specialist. But these issues may be...