Ah they and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr.

Riana Nevins, an associate professor in classics and ancient history at

Latrobe University.

This is episode C.C.X. V. I. I. I.

Marshall on the emperors.

Marshall was a Roman poet primarily writing during the reign of demission,

and while he's known for his commentary on Roman life, his

take downs, his insults and vulgarity, in this episode we look at how he toes the

careful line of praising the Emperor. That's right, we managed to record an entire

episode on Marshall without a language disclaimer. He's Rianna Evans.

Marshall was a Roman Spanish poet who was born around 40 CE. He's writing, well he probably

started writing under Nero but primarily everything we have published by him comes from the Flavian period.

So his earliest book is under the Emperor Titus in 80 CE.

And he's writing epigram, which is very short, snappy poems, can be as short as two lines, often

very jokey, sometimes very obscene, seem to give us insights into more daily life, you know, it's often being compared to satire,

which is a discrete genre in for Rome, so we can't call it satire as such, but it touches on what we would think of as satirical material.

And he often in his poems talks about dining and sex and everyday life,

but we should beware really about thinking this gives us that much insight into ordinary people because as a poet he came from the top tier of Rome and really this is an elite man's view of everyday life.

Yeah, so he wrote what he knew.

But how was it writing under the Flavian emperors?

Were they a particularly patient and receptive bunch when it came to authorship that could be seen as criticism?

...