PLAYING IN THE LION'S JAWS: METATEXTUALITY IN MARTIAL'S ‘LION AND HARE’ CYCLE

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an analysis of the metatextual function of one of the most well-known elements of Martial's Epigrams, the ‘lion and hare’ cycle from Book 1. This cycle, in which a hare is held precariously but safely in the jaws of a lion, has historically been read as representing the relationship between Domitian and poet. This paper aims to expand on this reading of the cycle while considering a largely unexplored point of view: the metatexual function of this cycle within Martial's larger epigrammatic project. I identify three major ways in which the cycle supports Martial's larger interests in exploring poetic anxieties and defending the genre of epigrammatic poetry. First of all, by figuring the lion and the hare as, respectively, the emperor and the poet, Martial presents and performs an exemplum modelling clemency in the reception of lascivious poetry. Second, as a sexual metaphor that points to the anxiety and insecurity of both predator and prey, the cycle anticipates a broader concern of the Epigrams: the instability of Roman hierarchical relations and the difficulty of maintaining balance within such relationships. Third, Martial's continued use of hare imagery in the later books of the Epigrams, both in culinary and in hunting contexts, suggests the continued consumption and enjoyment of the genre of epigram, particularly outside of the imperial city.

INTRODUCTION

This article aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the metatextual function of one of the most well-known elements of Martial's Epigrams, the ‘lion and hare’ cycle from Book 1. In this cycle, Martial describes a hare who is chased by a lion, and who, despite its fear, finds safe harbour in the lion's jaws.

This cycle has been variously analysed.¹ I am interested in providing what has long been lacking from scholarship on Martial's poetry: a comprehensive analysis of the ‘lion and hare’ cycle that builds on existing scholarly analyses, while also providing new close readings of key passages. While acknowledging Gunderson's recent persuasive analysis of this cycle, this article will ultimately approach the cycle from a different point of view.²

The suggestion has long been maintained that the cycle represents the relationship between the emperor and the poet, with the poet figured as the hare held precariously but safely in the jaws of the emperor–lion, an interpretation I will generally accept.³ What has been substantially overlooked, however, despite passing acknowledgement of the metatextual language in this cycle,⁴ is an explication of the metatextual function of this cycle. I argue that the metatextual function of this cycle is to prefigure and model in a ludic form some of the more serious poetic anxieties of the Epigrams overall, anxieties that surround reception and the defence of the genre of epigram. To begin, by figuring the lion and the hare as, respectively, the emperor and the poet, this cycle presents and performs an exemplum of clemency aimed at Domitian and modelling leniency in the reception of lascivious poetry. Second, as a sexual metaphor that points to the anxiety and insecurity of both predator and prey, the cycle anticipates a broader concern of the Epigrams: the instability within hierarchical relationships. Third, Martial's continued use of hare imagery in the later books of the Epigrams, both in culinary and in hunting contexts, underscores the continued consumption and enjoyment of the epigrammatic genre, particularly outside of the imperial city.

THE ‘LION AND HARE’ CYCLE AS AN EXEMPLVM

In 86 c.e., when Book 1 was published, imperial strategies of surveillance and censorship had mounted considerably; as imperial control became more explicit, political criticism became more implicit.⁵ The genre of Martial's poetry—both its triviality and its ludic nature—serves to ensure that his poetry is not interpreted as dangerously critical. Yet, the genre is also, throughout the Epigrams, linked to Martial's poetic anxieties.⁶

Analysing Martial's poetic and political anxieties, Gunderson reads this cycle as insisting upon submission to the state of anxiety necessitated by autocracy. As he phrases it, ‘[r]abbit politics are a politics of despair: you have swapped your meaningful death in exchange for your tiny life.’⁷ In this line of argument, survival is tied to political submission. And indeed, it is important to acknowledge the submission of the hare. However, there is another layer to the concept of survival in this cycle: just as, in moments of censorship, creation can be revolutionary, so in moments of potential violence, survival can be revolutionary. In this case, survival allows the hare to continue to play (and vice versa), and survival allows Martial to continue to compose poetry. Poetry becomes Martial's means of political action. Gunderson argues that ‘whatever political resistance might be detected’ in the intricacy of Martial's poetry comes at the cost of ‘publicly accountable discourse’.⁸ However, this interpretation denies the possibility that the act of writing poetry itself could serve as ‘publicly accountable discourse’, or even actionable resistance. This can be the case even if the poetry merely draws attention to tensions or hypocrisies or, as I argue here, models exempla of clemency.⁹

As to, in Gunderson's words, Martial's ‘tiny life’, Ahl has previously levelled the argument that the hare is protected by his small size in relation to the lion, which points to the kind of protection Martial, as an epigrammatist, is afforded in relation to the emperor.¹⁰ While Ahl uses this model primarily to investigate dynamics in Statius’ Siluae, these dynamics can be further unpacked in Martial's poetry as well. By doing so, we can see that the ‘lion and hare’ cycle not only points to the protection provided by Martial's poetic triviality but also provides a model for ideal poetic reception. In other words, this cycle is in part an attempt to bring about the type of reception Martial wishes his poetry to receive: Book 1, in particular the ‘lion and hare’ cycle, serves an exegetic or exemplary function.

This reading builds on a framework established by Bartsch in Actors in the Audience.¹¹ Although Martial was not in a position that would have provided him with the means or opportunity to write a strongly didactic work addressed to the emperor, and thus his poetry was not intended to advise, this does not mean it could not work to persuade. Martial is using the cycle prescriptively by means of an encomiastic model. According to Bartsch, such an aspirational strategy was later developed by Pliny in his Panegyricus. By associating Trajan with Jupiter and Republican values, and by crafting careful formulas of sincerity and praise, Pliny uses panegyric to model behaviour for the emperor, demonstrating the emperor's role as an exemplum for the citizen. While these texts are working within two very distinct traditions, and while the ludic nature of Martial's poetry did not necessitate the same careful rhetorical padding as the Panegyricus, Bartsch's interpretation of Pliny provides a framework for understanding how a text can function, even in the face of intrinsic contradictions, to both praise and persuade.

Indeed, Martial provides a blueprint for poetic reception from the beginning of the Epigrams. In the Preface to Book 1, he notes that his poems ‘play while preserving respect for even the lowest of individuals’¹² (cum salua infimarum quoque personarum reuerentia ludant, 2–3).¹³ He goes on to advise: ‘let the spiteful interpreter keep away from the candour of my jokes and not write my epigrams [for me]’ (absit a iocorum nostrorum simplicitate malignus interpres nec epigrammata mea scribat, 6–8). This is a caution against misinterpreting his jokes as a reflection of his morality, and his defence is that sic scribit Catullus (‘so Catullus writes’, 1 pr. 10–11). Then, in Epigr. 1.4, Martial asserts that it is not shameful (nec pudet, 4) for an emperor to serve as ‘subject matter’ (materiam, 4) for dictis, a word that covers both ‘witticisms’ and ‘precepts’ (OLD s.v. dictum 1b, d).¹⁴ He follows up with a reminder to the emperor that lusus, ‘play’, can be permissible by censura—a word that implies Martial's anxiety regarding both potentially negative critical appraisal and imperial censorship (7). In insisting that his poems are lasciua, ‘playful’ or ‘salacious’, while his life is proba, ‘morally upright’, he models, as Sullivan points out, Ov. Tr. 2.353–4: uita uerecunda est, Musa iocosa mea est (‘my life is respectful, my Muse is playful’).¹⁵ Sullivan sees Martial's allusion to Ovid as the recital of a ‘literary topos’, with none of the ‘urgency felt in the Ovidian context’.¹⁶ Yet the allusion is not empty of significance. In quoting Ovid, Martial is also reconstructing and distilling something of Ovid's purpose. Like Ovid in the Tristia, Martial constructs a schema for assessment by which he hopes his poems will be judged. But while Ovid insists that his poetry did not teach immorality (2.347–8), Martial will go on to model not morality generally but clemency specifically, in reaction to play. For what the hare does in these epigrams, specifically in 1.6, is play (ludit, 4) in the jaws of the lions; and what the lion does is display clementia in sparing the anxious hare.

The mercy of the lions is derived from their association with Domitian. In 1.14, the lion can spare its prey (parcere praedae, 5), because ‘it is said to be yours’ (that is, Domitian's; tuus dicitur, 6); and in 1.104, ‘this clemency is not contrived by art; rather, the lions know whom they serve’ (haec clementia non paratur arte, sed norunt cui seruiant leones, 21–2).¹⁷ Martial indicates that the lions’ awareness of their relationship to the emperor instigates their behaviour. Domitian's clemency is unquestioned, and presumably the lions release their prey because this is what Domitian would desire. Yet, in 1.22, a central ‘lion and hare’ poem, we see that, despite the clemency derived from their association with Domitian in 1.104, the lions have the capacity to change their behaviour.¹⁸ Martial states that the lions ‘have not learned to crush such small beasts’ (frangere tam paruas non didicere feras, 2). The possibility that the lions could learn is implied by the very contingent nature of their clemency. In 1.104, the clemency of the lions was dependent upon their awareness of their position relative to the emperor rather than upon their innate nature: they exhibit clemency because they ‘are aware’ (norunt, 22) of serving Domitian.¹⁹ Similarly, in 1.22, the lions do not attack because of the insignificance of the prey's ‘meagre blood’ (tenui sanguine, 4) relative to their ‘great thirst’ (tanta sitis, 4), and specifically because they ‘have not learned’ (non didicere, 2) how to attack prey of this insignificance.²⁰ What is left unsaid is a set of possibilities: the prey could become more noticeable, or the lions could learn to attack even insignificant prey.

Indeed, it is this potential for violence that renders the hare continually anxious in the other poems in the cycle. While Martial insists upon the safety of the hare (1.22.1–2, 1.48.5–6, 1.51, 1.60) and upon the clemency of the lion (1.104), these points are undermined by the fear and tension resulting from the potential danger. The hare is continually described as in flight, even in the face of Martial's assurances of its safety. It flees the savage jaws in 1.22 (saeua fugis … ora, 1); in 1.48 it ‘goes in flight and comes back’ (fugax itque reditque, 2), and ultimately it ‘starts off from its enemy’ (uelocior exit ab hoste, 3); in 1.51 it flees from the lion's teeth (fugis hos dentes, 2); and it ‘tires out’ the lion in 1.60 as well as in 1.104 (fatigas, 1.60.5; fatigat, 1.104.14). There is, then, ambivalent tension inherent in the image of the hare ‘playing safely’ within the ‘giant jaws’ of the lion (tutus et ingenti ludit in ore lepus, 1.6.4).

To return to 1.22, this poem not only hints at the lions’ ability to learn to act against their own clementia and crush the hare, it also brings into focus the exemplary function of the cycle. Consider the line ‘let the Dacian boy not fear Caesar's arms’ (non timeat Dacus Caesaris arma puer, 6). Here the suggestion is that, like the lion, the emperor spares those much weaker than himself or below his notice. Martial uses the example of the Dacian boy, a reference, presumably, to the spoils of Domitian's first Dacian expedition (85–6 c.e.). By tying the cycle to a specific model for the behaviour of the emperor, he presents an equivalence between the emperor and the lion that would highlight for any reader, including the emperor himself, the emperor's character, as well as the clemency, or lack of it, he had demonstrated. The inevitable conclusion suggests that, if the lions, who derive their clemency from their association with Domitian, might learn to crush small prey, then presumably Domitian might do so as well.

Within this cycle, then, Martial is displaying the enduring fear felt by the hare while also demonstrating how the lion can enact proper clementia; at the same time, he manages to maintain plausible deniability that his goal is prescriptive by asserting the inevitable safety of the hare. In his repetition of the topos, aligned to the programmatic precepts of the Preface and of the first few poems, and in his nuanced approach to balancing the fear and security of the hare with the clemency of the lion, we can see that Martial's purpose with the cycle is more complicated than commending Domitian's clementia, or than performing his own poetic submission; the lion's behaviour serves as an exemplum of ideal clemency when confronted with poetic play.²¹

THE ‘LION AND HARE’ CYCLE AS SEXUAL METAPHOR

As noted, in the prologue and the opening poems, Martial prepares his readers, including the emperor (1.4), for the lasciviousness of his poetry. In the Preface, he uses the metaphor of the theatre during the licentious Floralia to represent his books, and he goes on to wonder why—if the censorious Cato is aware of its free speech and merry games (festosque lusus et licentiam, 19)—he would enter into the ‘theatre’ (theatrum, 20). By using the theatre as a guiding metaphor, he is, on the one hand, imagining his book as an isolated festal space in which the typical rules of comportment and speech are suspended. This is a space which naturally, almost by religious rite, exempts him from blame for any bawdiness. On the other hand, he is also setting up his epigrams as the poetic equivalent for the imperial spectacles of the Colosseum. In their role as spectacle upon the epigrammatic stage, the ‘lion and hare’ poems are not only representative of the relationship between the poet and the emperor but also programmatic for the ludic project of the Epigrams as a whole. This is particularly true if we accept Gunderson's suggestion of underlying sexual play in the cycle. Referring to the cycle as ‘mouth-play’, he notes that the structure of 1.14 suggests and anticipates the expected punchline: ‘he's a cocksucker’.²² The replacement of this punchline with its ‘symmetrical equivalent’ in the form of Domitianic praise is, to Gunderson, part of the display of Martial's poetic submission to the emperor. If we consider, in light of the prevalence of the image of the hare in the lion's mouth,²³ the cycle as a metaphor for oral, or even vaginal,²⁴ sex, the ludic nature of these poems paired with their implication of violence prefaces the cynical sexuality of the rest of the Epigrams. In addition, the theme of predation can be expanded to apply to broader dynamics the Epigrams explores, including the fragile relationship between emperor and poet.

We can see this theme of sexualized predation expanded in 1.6, in particular, which is a nexus for some of the most important issues of the Epigrams as a whole:

aetherias aquila puerum portante per auras

inlaesum timidis unguibus haesit onus:

nunc sua Caesareos exorat praeda leones

tutus et ingenti ludit in ore lepus.

5 quae maiora putas miracula? summus utrisque

auctor adest: haec sunt Caesaris, illa Iouis.

While the eagle was carrying the boy through the heavenly air,

the burden, unhurt, clung to his fearful talons:

now the hare, their own prey, prevails upon the lions of Caesar

and safely plays in the giant jaws.

5 What miracles do you think the greater? Which author stands

most supreme? These ones belong to Caesar, those to Jove.

This poem prefigures three of the major functions of the Epigrams: its metatexual function (negotiating issues surrounding poetry, reception and patronage), its ludic function (providing entertainment and displaying Martial's virtuosity) and its socio-political function (commenting on the conditions of life in Rome under particular regimes). By citing the story of Ganymede and Jove, Martial suggests an instance of sexual play in the image of the lion and the hare. Yet the sexual and ludic functions are not divorced from the social, the political and the poetic. As Garthwaite points out, in Book 9, Martial juxtaposes poems of praise to Earinus (9.11–13, 16, 17, 36) alongside poems lauding Domitian's laws against castration (9.5, 9.7), and also compares Earinus to Ganymede (9.16, 9.36).²⁵ Thus, the figure of Ganymede highlights Domitian's hypocrisy in outlawing castration while concurrently maintaining in his household a beloved eunuch, Earinus.²⁶ Likewise, in 1.6, Martial juxtaposes the image of two predators with their freshly caught prey. In both cases, however, the existential safety of the prey (praeda, 3) is emphasized: Ganymede is held unhurt (inlaesum, 2) and the hare plays safely (tutus … ludit, 4) in the lion's jaws. Yet the sense of anxiety remains: in the case of the eagle, the fear is focalized through the predator, who holds Ganymede in ‘fearful talons’ (timidis unguibus, 2); in the case of the hare, it ‘prevails upon’ or ‘entreats’ (exorat, 3) the lions, and thus gains its safety.

Both the ‘lion and hare’ cycle and the Ganymede myth inherently suggest the anxiety of the predator-and-prey relationship, and the balance this relationship requires. The prey needs to beg for its life; the predator must be careful to keep the prey alive while still keeping it under its control. Whether or not we are convinced that the lion and the hare present an explicitly sexual image, its juxtaposition alongside the story of Ganymede suggests a parallel hierarchical dynamic, since Roman sexual relationships were always theoretically hierarchical.

In 1.6, this dynamic is complicated further through the addition of a divine element. Martial sets up the hierarchy between hare/poet/prey and lion/emperor/predator, and destabilizes it with the addition of Jupiter. Although Jupiter should be presumed to top this hierarchy, here Martial asks whether Domitian or Jupiter performed the greater act, writing quae maiora putas miracula (‘which miracles do you think the greater?’, 6). The implication that Domitian's miracles were greater than Jupiter's is not explicit here, but this poem does foreshadow a motif in Martial's later books, particularly in Book 9, of suggesting the greatness of Domitian relative to Jupiter.²⁷ In addition, this poem introduces a poetic angle to this destabilization. By indicating that both Domitian and Jupiter are auctores of the miracula (5–6), Martial subtly suggests his own function as the auctor, and thus draws an equivalence between the poet and both the emperor and the god. Nevertheless, there is no triumph in this equivalence. Instability is suggested in the uncertain attribution of miracles to Jupiter; in the function of the god, the emperor and the poet as auctores; and in the anxiety experienced by both the god-as-predator and the poet-as-prey. For Martial, each role in his established hierarchies—god, emperor and poet; predator and prey—is ultimately insecure.

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE CYCLE

In considering the ‘lion and hare’ cycle, one final investigation is important—namely, examining its afterlife in the later books of the Epigrams. I do not suggest that every mention of hares in later books must point back to this cycle. But the use of hares in future books provides some illumination on Martial's broader metatextual interests.

Overwhelmingly and unsurprisingly, in the later books of the Epigrams, the hare is food. Martial's treatment of the hare as food tells us something about his own perception of the reception of epigram. The hare, a food commonly served at banquets (3.13, 3.94, 7.20), is derived from the idyllic country: in 3.47 the hare is hunted in an unspecified rural environment and brought to a man's own unproductive country seat; in 4.66, it belongs to a countryside reminiscent of the Golden Age, wherein hares, along with other resources, are given freely by the land; in 10.37, the countryside hares are caught in Martial's own birthplace, Bilbilis, which is favourably compared to Rome. Furthermore, to Martial, the hare is a pleasing food (3.77), and even a delicacy. In 7.78, for example, it serves as one of the fine indulgences the subject of the epigram regularly sends as gifts. Although it was published before the Epigrams, the Xenia is also illuminating: in 13.92, Martial declares that ‘the hare is the prime delicacy amongst four-legged animals’ (inter quadripedes mattea prima lepus, 2). But, although it can be a delicacy, like epigram,²⁸ it is also a trifle: in 6.75, for example, Martial calls hare a buccella, a ‘little mouthful’ (3). That culinary language can, even in other contexts, serve a metatextual function is also clear. In 10.59, Martial uses the term mattea (‘delicacy’) to describe epigrams of his that are particularly short and which a picky reader of his prefers above all his other poems.

Along these lines, returning briefly to Book 1: in 1.44, a reader, Stella, complains about the repetition of the ‘lion and hare’ motif in Martial's ‘greater and lesser works’ (maior … charta minorque, 2). Martial counters by noting that he would be glad to get twice the hare. Epigram, as suggested in this poem and others, is a genre of both the ‘great’ and the ‘small’. In this poem this is given a literal sense: Martial has written both long and short poems or books.²⁹ Yet this poem points to a broader theme in the ‘lion and hare’ poems: the tensions between ‘trivial’ and ‘important’. On the one hand, as we have seen, the hare, the epigrammatist and epigram itself are all minor. Yet, as suggested here, the hare, and epigram, can also be ‘too much’ (nimium, 3) if presented twice. This is expanded on in the next poem, 1.45, in which Martial points out that, to prevent the smallness of his books detracting from his poetic effort (edita ne breuibus pereat mihi cura libellis, 1.45.1), he engages in games of Homeric reply-and-answer (dicatur potius Τὸν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος, 1.45.2). As Fitzgerald explains, ‘Martial is “padding” his oeuvre’ with responses and repetitions.³⁰ This is the very play that defines and adds tensions to the relationship between the lion and the hare (as discussed on page 4), and provides the potential for a tolerant relationship between epigrammatist and emperor.³¹ So epigram, through the invitation to engage interlocutors, and through Martial's engagement in repetition, is enriched and becomes not only trivial but also substantial, a transformation underscored through the Homeric formula.³² If we return to the idea of the hare as food, we can see the same principle at work. As in 1.44, the hare may be a small delicacy, but, if offered too readily, it can become great, even excessive.

When we consider Martial's decision to choose the hare as the prey animal for this cycle, we see that his attitude towards the hare as food, rather than only as an animal of prey, is indicative of his position on his own poetry. It seems that the clever, evasive hare of the ‘lion and hare’ cycle tells us something about the epigrammatist: his anxieties and his poetic ambitions. The culinary hare tells us something, however, about the poetry itself: that it has a place in the retiring country but is also common enough at the convivial parties of the city; that it is trivial but also great. This indicates that his choice of the hare in his cycle was deliberate and considered: the hare suggests that his poetry, if significant and pleasing enough—both in his native countryside and at the Roman city—may survive beyond its relationship with the emperor–lion for further consumption.

By Book 12, Martial distances himself from Rome by moving back to his native Spain.³³ In this book, published four or five years after the death of Domitian, we have a full glimpse of the afterlife of this cycle. In this final book, at 12.14, we see the most detailed hare hunt since Book 1:

parcius utaris, moneo, rapiente ueredo,

Prisce, nec in lepores tam uiolentus eas.

saepe satisfecit praedae uenator, et acri

5 decidit excussus, nec rediturus equo.

insidias et campus habet: nec fossa nec agger

nec sint saxa licet, fallere plana solent.

non derit qui tanta tibi spectacula praestet,

inuidia fati sed leuiore cadat.

10 si te delectant animosa pericula, Tuscis

—tutior est uirtus—insidiemur apris.

quid te frena iuuant temeraria? saepius illis,

Prisce, datum est equitem rumpere, quam leporem.

Priscus, enjoy more sparingly, I warn you, your swift steed,

and do not rush so vehemently towards the hares.

Often the hunter has given satisfaction to the prey, and has fallen,

shaken from his horse, not to get up again.

5 Even the field has traps: even with no ditch or mound

or rocks, the ground can deceive.

There will not be lacking someone to display such great spectacles to you,

but he would fall with a lighter grudge against fate.

If spirited dangers please you, let us set snares

10 —for in this is valour safer—for Tuscan boars.

Why do rash bridles please you?

They are more prone to run to pieces the rider, Priscus, than the hare.

Here, Martial advises his friend Priscus to avoid hare hunts, particularly when riding dangerously fast. This poem recalls a prior poem, 1.49, wherein Licinianus enjoys the country, and ‘runs to pieces’ (rumpes, 25) the hare with his ‘brave steed’ (forti … equo, 25). Rimell argues that, in 1.49, the hare's death indicates the instability of epigram (as she argues, pastoral epigram) outside of Rome and the Colosseum.³⁴ Following Rimell's line of reasoning, we can read the hare as a generic marker outside of the cycle itself, and even outside of Book 1.

It is 12.14 that provides the most compelling case. In this poem, Martial rewrites the narrative of 1.49: in 12.14 the steed's bravery (forti, 25) of 1.49 has turned into rashness (acri, 3; temeraria, 11), and it is thus the rider who is run to pieces (rumpere, 12.14.12) rather than the hare (rumpes, 1.49.25). In Book 1, the result is that the epigrammatic hare is hunted down. But by Book 12, in 12.14, we see the deaths of those pursuing the hare. This is not an argument that Martial has triumphed over Domitian after his death or over any other emperor—after all, the lion is not mentioned in this poem. It is notable, though, that the lion is not present. If there is any triumph for Martial's hare, it is through the hare's continued survival—and thus the continued survival of Martial's epigrams—however trivial, in the face of the absence of the imperial lion.³⁵

CONCLUSION

As a concluding point, it is worth noting that Martial's earlier collection of epigrams, the De spectaculis, serves as something like Pliny's Naturalis historia: an assemblage of wonders from all over the empire, displayed before Roman eyes, and under Roman control. In the Epigrams, however, Martial references the spectacles in the arena more sparingly: the ‘lion and hare’ poems are the central spectacle on display in the Epigrams.³⁶ By encapsulating and displaying this cycle on the stage of the arena, Martial is displaying, as a kind of spectacle, the metatextual and political issues that he sees as central to this cycle. He is making them visible to the eyes of all his readers, holding up to the public his own poetic anxieties, his own political commentary and his own hopes for the continued relevance of his own poetry.