Forms of Martial's Reception in the Aenigmata Symposii

This chapter tries to demonstrate how in his Aenigmata Symposius, while playing with Martial’s format of the Saturnalian epigrammatic collection, pursues a different poetic design in which the inlaying of pagan and Christian allusions is crucial: the Xenia and Apophoreta, probably read in an encyclopedic key, become paradigms of a structure in which to put contents pervaded by a new sensitivity. The skillful rewriting of the model also emerges from the opening cycle of riddles on writing equipment and from the interaction between the titles and the respective poems.