Poets and epigram: Martial’s ‘epigrammatic canon’

Résumé

In Martial’s epigrams we find many individuals mentioned by name. Same of these we can identify with persons known from other sources, same we cannot. Among all these persons there is a significant number of poets. Therefore, Martial is an ideal author to think about “Le poète et l’épigramme”. It is known that Martial is a meta-poetic author, a “meta-poet par excellence”, as Markus Janka put it, and I would like to add that Martial is highly aware of the role played by literary history and poets within his epigrams. He uses the poets to construct.