Viuus per ora uirum, mas também per faciles buxos: sobreviver ao dilúvio do esquecimento segundo Marcial

Famous for the satirical portrayal of Flavian Rome, Martial’s Epigrams also reveal the painful and tragic fragility of human beings. Inbellis praeda (13, 94, 2) at the mercy of ferocious social injustice, accidents, crimes and diseases, mankind is still the object of the inuidia of the gods, personified by the iniqua Lachesis (10,53, 3), who reaches even the sons of the immortals (9, 86, 4 and 6). The inexorability of death and the obliteration of both the physical presence of the individual and his memory among the living was a hot topic in these unstable and violent times, resulting in the proliferation of mystery cults promising salvation. The perspectives on the Beyond and the immortality of the soul were varied, mixing popular religious traditions with literay elaborations, informed by antithetic philosophical schools, as with Virgil, Cicero and Seneca – authors alluded to by Martial with admiration –, Lucretius or Pliny the Elder. The poet of Bilbilis believes in a traditional Beyond: even though it includes Elysias domos (1, 94, 2), the dread of the nigras umbras and the hideous Cerberus predominates (5, 34, 3). Remembering the dead and mitigating the uulnus of the living, more painful in the deaths of young children, were imperatives fullfilled through several monimenta doloris. Certain of the destructive effect of the "deluge" of time, not only on fragile objects such as paintings, but even on stone monuments, Martial repeatedly emphasizes the immortality of his verses, as Ennius had already done with his uiuus per ora uirum; but suggests a second “Ark” of the soul and memory, consoling especially for humble figures like the young slave: a fusion with nature, though the plants born near the grave, symbols of the perpetual return – per faciles buxos (1,88, 5). Thus, he seems to evoke the numerous metamorphoses in plants, such as the hyacinth or the cypress, of humans that the gods intended to maintain in some way alive.