The index expurgatorius of Martial

Description

Martial wrote 1,561 epigrams and Victorian editors printed perhaps two-thirds of them; the rest were cut, paraphrased into Latin footnotes, or replaced by rows of asterisks. This 1868 volume gathers exactly what the translators had omitted and renders it plainly, with an address to the reader explaining why a poet should be read whole or not at all. It is a document of nineteenth-century censorship as much as of Roman verse — the surviving evidence of what a period could not bring itself to print, assembled by someone who thought the refusal absurd. This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1868 edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.