Et Latet et Lucet: Ovidian Intertextuality and the Aesthetics of Luxury in Martial’s Poetry*

I. AN ECPHRASTIC EYE: OVID, MARTIAL, AUSONIUS

In the Roman debate on luxury, Ovid’s voice sounds quite provokingly dissonant when compared to the moralistic-archaizing guidelines of the Augustan regime. Despite the climate of ethical and cultural restoration promoted by the prince, Ovid challenges the political myths of his propaganda (Ars 3.121–22, 127–28):

Prisca iuvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum     gratulor; haec aetas moribus apta meis.

Sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos     rusticitas, priscis illa superstes avis.

Let ancient times please others: I am glad to have been     born now; this age suits my temperament.

But because refinement is with us, rusticity, which     survived until our grandsires, has not lasted to our days.

Ovid also treats the cultural myth of the golden age—especially celebrated by Virgil and, during the Augustan era, politically charged—with offhand, almost brash irony (Ars 2.277–28):

aurea sunt vere nunc saecula: plurimus auro     venit honos: auro conciliatur amor.

Now truly is the golden age: for gold     high honour is purchased, by gold is love gained.

The obsessive moralistic condemnation of the fames auri (“hunger for gold”; echoing from Virgil Aen. 3.57 down to Pliny Nat. 33.72 and beyond) is here stripped of all its harshness, and the novel association of luxury and love is effortlessly absorbed into an unequivocal celebration of modernity and of Augustan society as the theater of a refined lifestyle finally consonant with the cosmopolitan prospects opened up by the principate’s conquests.¹ Analogously, in the introduction to the Medicamina, the most audacious manifesto of ethical modernism in all of Latin literature, the encomium of the cultus, “refinement” (3ff.), openly lampoons the antiquated cultural models proposed by Augustan ideology (such as that of the matron engaged in the laborious chores of peasant life) and the demonization of wealth and ease.²

Only with this restriction (at least in his work before his exile, Ovid clearly dissociates himself from the moralistic archaizing of Augustan ideology) can one accept the claim that “prior to Statius, nearly all of our textual evidence concerning material goods derives from a clearly marked tradition of moralizing that applied negative values to material objects, condemning visible manifestations of economic prosperity as symbols of declining moral standards in society.”³ And, if, as the same scholar maintains, “Statius’ voice represents an abrupt divergence from this tradition” (76), in reality, the last great Augustan poet had already paved the way to an appreciation of modernity and its comforts, in addition to portraying a lifestyle inspired by aesthetic principles and values as a dominant tenet of elite social life in his day. This particular aspect of ancient Ovidianism—the impact of the refined taste promoted by his poetry and the aesthetic models it proposed for Julio-Claudian and especially Flavian culture—is what I wish to focus on here in an attempt to grasp the importance of the social dynamism and intellectual and literary power of the phenomenon.

One of the authors documenting the “culture of display” that was a distinguishing trait of the first century of the empire is Martial. His poetry is a valuable record of the material culture of the period, and—despite the image of this poet as too one-sidedly linked to a desire for an unsophisticated life of rustic simplicity—many of his epigrams contain descriptions of the décor and furnishings of villas and gardens, or of refined art objects and luxury items.⁴ See, for example, the description of an amber containing an embedded small insect (4.32):

Et latet et lucet Phaethontide condita gutta,     ut videatur apis nectare clusa suo.Dignum tantorum pretium tulit illa laborum:     credibile est ipsam sic voluisse mori.

Shut in Phaethon’s drop, a bee both hides and shines, so that she seems imprisoned in her own nectar. She has a worthy reward for all her sufferings. One might believe that she herself willed so to die.⁵

The epigram is a tour de force of concentration and refinement—almost the poetic equivalent...