I Am in Every Pocket, Every Hand: Twitter and Martial

Twitter has been accused, on a number of occasions, of making its users ‘stupid,’ of encouraging people to limit their vocabulary and range of expression, of celebrating mediocrity and prizing egotism. These accusations tend to revolve around the brevity of tweets — with an imposed character limit of 140 — and therefore their need to be quotable. Reducing everything to easily-repeatable soundbites, some argue, is weakening our ability to engage in serious or analytical discourse. Indeed, many link the phenomenon to consumerism, arguing that Twitter is in essence a commodification of ideas, a way of turning everything into jingles. (The implied contrast is with a pre-social media world in which social interaction was ‘authentic.’)

Even one of the founders of the site, Jack Dorsey, seems to agree that Twitter doesn’t encourage substantive conversation. When discussing how the site came to be named, he once said,

…we came across the word ‘twitter,’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.’ And that’s exactly what the product was.

Real-life usage statistics back up Dorsey’s claim that Twitter is first and foremost a purveyor of ‘inconsequential information.’ According to analysis done by the think tank Pear Analytics in 2009, 85% of Twitter posts consist of ‘conversation,’ ‘meaningless babble,’ or ‘self-promotion,’ with the remainder being news items or links to external sources.

But does brevity really translate to a lack of substance? Impassioned defenses of Twitter key into its role as a news outlet and an organizational platform (e.g., during the 2011 Arab Spring), and as the propagator of the hashtag, a new semiotic form. There have even been features on micropoetry, a form that takes its cue from the epigram in using the 140-character limit as a tool for spurring creativity.

Dorsey and his co-founder, Evan Williams, claim that the reason why nobody quite knows what to make of Twitter is that it’s an entirely unprecedented medium of communication:

With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything.

Although Dorsey and Williams may be correct in saying that nothing like Twitter existed in the world of social media — it is the only mainstream social media platform which has an enforced limit on all post lengths — its combination of brevity and ephemerality is far from unique. In fact, the appeal and success of Twitter can perhaps be best understood through comparison with a very old literary form: the ancient epigram.

Epigrams, originally a type of funerary inscription, became a Greek literary form in the 5th century BCE. The Greek epigram had a broad literary flavor, often consisting of short lyrical or descriptive pieces. The modern term ‘epigram’ does not capture this breadth; in fact, the sense in which modern writers use the term, as a short piece of witty or satirical writing, is based on the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial (Marius Valerius Martialis). In Martial’s hands, epigrams became a tool of sharp literary and social criticism.

The essential feature of the form, then, is not necessarily its wit, but its brevity. Walter Ker, editor of the 1919 Loeb edition of Martial’s epigrams, defines the epigram using broad terms:

[An epigram is a] short poem dealing with some person, thing, or incident which the writer thinks worthy of observation and record, and by which he seeks to attract attention in the same way as a passer-by would be attracted by an inscription on a physical object.

At first, a 140-character tweet and a poem inscribed in stone may seem incongruous in comparison. But the definition of an epigram struck me as being oddly applicable to a tweet, if we replace ‘poem’ with ‘remark.’

Epigrams generally consist of two or four lines, written mostly in either elegiac couplets or Phalaecean hendecasyllables. These are heavily regulated metrical forms — that is to say, there is a limit on which words can fit in which place in the line. This is particularly pertinent to Latin, which has a different syllable composition than Greek; when using forms initially developed in Greek, Latin poets often found themselves unable to fit the words they wanted (the most famous, and most unfortunate example of this, being the case of Tuticanus). The form of the epigram was limiting not just in its brevity, but in its meter.

Partly on account of these limitations, and partly on account of its humble origins, the epigram has been considered far less reputable than ‘serious’ forms such as epic and lyric. Victoria Rimmell describes the epigram as “throwaway” and “bargain-basement” in her book Martial’s Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Empire. Martial himself acknowledges this, asking “What could be humbler [than the epigram]?” (Quid minus esse potest?, 12.94).

Why, we might ask, did Martial write epigrams — more than 1500 of them, in fact — if he believed them to be so humble? Born around 40 CE in Bilbilis in modern-day Spain, Marius Valerius Martialis moved to Rome as a young man in the last days of Nero’s reign. He was, at various points, friends with Quintilian, Lucan, Pliny the Younger, Juvenal and the Seneca family, an impressive literary roll call for any aspiring poet. Although we know little about the details of his family life, Martial clearly liked Rome: he ended up living in the center of the city until just before his death, in 104 or thereabouts.

Rome itself permeates Martial’s works. It is not just for their lack of metrical grandiosity that Martial’s epigrams are described as ‘throwaway.’ He made a point of writing about everyday matters, including sex, money, friendship, and enmity. He is known for his frank descriptions of the shortfalls of Roman housing, the (even more extensive) shortfalls of other poets, and his detailed documentation of his own various sexual conquests. Martial is well aware of the ephemerality of his topics; his contemporaries, even those who are otherwise fond of him, criticize him for it. When he died, Pliny the Younger made the following remark (Letters 3.21):

I hear that Valerius Martialis is dead, and I am sorry. He was a man of genius, of subtle, quick intelligence, and one who in his writings showed the greatest amount of wit and pungency, and no less of fairness. . . . But his poems will not long survive their author, at least I think not, though he wrote them in the expectation of their doing so.

Pliny’s concern is with Martial’s mundane subject matter — his focus on everyday matters such as social relations, sex, urban life. Pliny recognizes the value of Martial’s writings, but he is not convinced that they can be taken outside their context and endure like other works of Latin literature (and, perhaps ironically, as Pliny hoped his own letters might). Ephemerality is, of course, another of the main criticisms that opponents of Twitter raise — what, in a constant stream of everyday noise and bustle, can we possibly hope will last?

I decided to take the categories from the Pear Analytics report on Twitter and apply them to Martial’s poetry. I analyzed 100 of his epigrams of two lines or fewer — the result was that, while the proportion of epigrams addressed to named individuals was higher than that of equivalent tweets, these and general babble made up by far the highest proportion of subject. There were, in Martial, also occasional pieces of flagrant self-aggrandizing (i.e. favorable comparisons of his work with that of other poets) and occasional references to news items, all features of the modern Twitter feed.

According, therefore, to the methodology of Pear Analytics, Martial’s use of the epigram corresponds exactly with the ideal of Williams and Dorsey of a medium for expressing ‘short bursts’ of mostly ‘inconsequential information.’

There are quite clearly parallels in form and content between epigrams, particularly those of Martial, and tweets. However, in order to use epigrams as a tool for thinking about Twitter in any more nuanced a way, we must consider some of the functional aspects of the two forms.

My Rome praises, loves, sings my little books.
I am in every hand, every pocket.
Look, somebody turns red, turns pale, yawns, is disgusted.
This I want. Now my poems please me.
(Epigrams 6.60)

Coming in at 181 characters (in Latin), this epigram is a meta-literary reflection on the form itself. We can pull out a few features: first, Martial is conscious of his audience (“my Rome”), and how they react (with embarrassment, anger, boredom, disgust). Indeed, his self-consciousness goes so far that his act of creation as a poet is only really complete, only really worthy, (“now my poems please me”) when his audience react directly to the poems (“prais[ing], lov[ing], sing[ing]” them). Martial is satisfied with his writing only when he sees the reaction that he gets, even (particularly?) if it is a negative reaction. The idea of being in “every hand, every pocket” prefigures, perhaps, the universality and public visibility of the smartphone. Martial’s persona is literally there in the forum watching people reading his work — just as the user on Twitter can see their post being shared and discussed in real time in the virtual forum.

Two of Twitter’s most notable features are the ability to retweet (RT) the material of other users, and to address (using @) tweets to other users. RT and @ are both also important features of Martial’s work.

Martial, like a Twitter user, directs many of his epigrams @ a specific person, attaching their name in the permanent record to the content of the tweet — perhaps a sort of copyright mechanism, as well as an efficient way to publicly deliver an insult. A large number of Martial’s epigrams begin with the name of an addressee: these include Sextillus (an enemy), Maternus (a friend), Mamurianus (a poor man), Bassa (a lesbian), and Hedylus (a partner). Although direct address is a common feature of ancient poetic forms, the epigram, like the tweet, lends itself particularly well to the thinly veiled sideswipe (1.96):

If it’s not a bother and an annoyance to you, poem,
please say a few words in the ear of Maternus
so that he alone hears them …
He will ask why I suspect this male of being soft.
We bathe together: he never looks up,
but stares with devouring eyes at the athletes,
and looks at their dicks with drooling lips.
You ask who this is? The name escapes me.

Martial pretends to be discussing a private matter, while publicly revealing intimate details about his subject — clearly the words are not meant only for the ears of Maternus, despite Martial’s claim otherwise. The omission of the subject’s name shows that it is meant to be obvious to anybody who knows Maternus and Martial who the poem is about. We, the modern readers, are left out of the inside joke. Similarly, when a Twitter user posts a public attack on somebody without naming that person, they are playing the same game — unless the person they are attacking is famous, only those within their group will get the joke.

This distinction between private and public information, and how easily the former can become the latter, is one that recurs throughout Martial’s work and shows his ambivalence toward what we might call ‘retweets’ of his work. He is perhaps the first person to have a cohesive notion of intellectual property, and certainly the first to use the term plagiarius to refer to literary theft (1.52).

We have seen already, in 6.60, that Martial is aware of his own poems’ quotability. Additionally, a particularly interesting source of evidence for retweets of Martial’s epigrams are the anonymous graffiti of Pompeii. As with any graffiti, many of them consist of names, or short phrases; however, unlike modern graffiti, a large number of Pompeiian graffiti are in verse, including quotations from literature. The most frequently quoted source is Virgil — hardly surprising given his prevalence in the Roman school curriculum — but many other poets appear as well, including, of course, Martial.

Various scholars have speculated about why Martial might have felt the issue of plagiarism more acutely than his Augustan predecessors, and while the issue is a complex one, I think it is fair to say that the shorter and pithier the literary form, the easier it is to plagiarize. Thus, perhaps, unlike a writer of epic, who could claim that the originality and integrity of his work as a whole was not diminished by excerption, brevity and pith is the integrity of Martial’s work — to steal an epigram is to steal a work in its entirety.

There is a tone of commodification, of commerciality, to Martial’s complaint: he is aware of his own literary creations both as objects (which can be stolen) and as as commodities that gain him either monetary reward or social prestige. Martial can thus be another lens through which to view developing concerns in the Twittersphere about authorship and authenticity when it comes to tweets. For example, is an uncredited RT (retweet) a form of plagiarism? Does it matter?

Clearly, there are some senses in which the dissemination of material over Twitter and in epigrammatic format can never truly be compared. Twitter is a multi-million user platform, in which “short bursts of inconsequential information” can be instantaneously transmitted to all corners of the globe. It makes no claims to status as a literary format, and its users do not (generally) define themselves as poets. Martial’s epigrams, on the other hand, were published slowly, a little book at a time, over the course of his lifetime. They would have had a contemporary readership of hundreds, if he was lucky.

Twitter, too, is notable for the plurality of its voices: although 75% of tweets on the site are written by 5% of its users, this 5% nevertheless is made up of (at time of the statistic) 900,000 different individuals — about the same as the total population of Rome at its height. Clearly, if we had regular epigrams from all first century Romans, even if only the literate ones, most would not be as fun or as interesting as those of Martial.

Yet, even if they are only the work of one man, these humble everyday poems do give us, 2000 years later, one of the clearest views into real Roman life that we have from a literary source. Rimmell argues that Martial’s epigrams form a window into the plurality of reality in Rome like no other text:

Martial’s distinctive aesthetic, grounded in paradox and inconsistency, ensures that the humblest, most throwaway poetic form is best poised to capture first century empire in all its dazzling complexity.

Perhaps for us as well, Twitter — another ‘humble’ form full of ‘inconsequential information’ — is, like the epigram, uniquely suited to capturing the dazzling complexity of modern life.

One of the greatest powers of Twitter is the ability to link to other online media, to include images or videos, and to follow other users, creating a tailor-made continuous feed of information. The changes in technologies of publication and dissemination mean that even a Twitter account in Latin such as that of the Pope (@Pontifex_ln), is followed by nearly 400,000 people — more than the literate population of Imperial Rome even at its height.

Nevertheless, an examination of the Latin epigram — its brevity and humility, its pointed form of address, its strange balance of ephemerality and permanence, its self-conscious authors like Martial, and its disseminators and copiers like the graffiti artists —may give us a more nuanced view of Twitter which at least allows room for a longer-sighted, more complex, and more interesting argument about its perils and its merits.

While we might accept Dorsey’s claim that Twitter is mostly full of short bursts of inconsequential information, I believe we can nuance the view put forward by Williams — that Twitter does not replace anything. By thinking about epigrams, particularly the epigrams of Martial, we can see that brevity, strict regulation of form, and treatment of everyday subjects needn’t lead to ephemerality. Perhaps we should remember Pliny’s declaration that Martial would not be remembered…

#Martial