'To Mold Clay, Fashion Men From It'

Certain writers lay claim to a piece of geography. Think of Cavafy’s Alexandria and William Kennedy’s Albany. Outsiders may visit but the deed is ironclad. When I hear something in the news about the Caucasus, that often-contested band of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, I think of Tolstoy. In 1851, he fled to the Caucasus to escape gambling debts and joined the Russian army. During the Crimean War he served as an artillery officer and took part in the Siege of Sevastopol. Tolstoy turned the experience into grist for literature in such works as the 1863 novel The Cossacks and the 1872 novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.” His finest use of the setting comes in one of his masterpieces, Hadji Murad (1904). 

The first-century Roman poet Martial got there long before Tolstoy. In his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books), R.L. Barth tells me the epigram “IX.45 is perhaps my favorite.” The poet addresses his friend Marcellinus, who is being sent to the Caucasus as part of the Roman army. For the next six-hundred years, Rome would battle for control of the region with the Sasanian Empire. IX.45:

 

“Marcellinus, when you set forth

To soldier in the frigid North

Beneath the Getic constellations,

Think how close those duty stations

Approach the famed Promethean rock

And fabled mountains! Taking stock

Of these—the hero’s confidants

Who heard his cries—you’ll say at once,

‘Prometheus was harder!’ Add:

‘Who had—and without going mad—

Endured such suffering was fit

To mold clay, fashion men from it.’”

 

Bob writes: “I think it’s an absolutely first-rate poem. I’ve been thinking about this since the other night when I reread Turner’s essay on Martial, where he pronounced it ‘one of the best poems in ancient literature.’ I’m sure that was not Turner being provocatively perverse. It really is a remarkable poem.”

 

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle was sent daily to eat his liver. Each night  it would grow back and the eagle would return the next day to feast on it yet again. Bob, writing as a poet, translator and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, tells me:

 

“Other than the coincidence of the landscape, I think at least part of the reason for alluding to the great suffering and endurance of Prometheus is to warn or prepare his young friend Marcellinus for what he can expect in his tour of duty. He was obviously someone about whom Martial cared deeply, devoting three poems to him. When Martial devotes multiple poems to friends, they are usually friends in Rome itself and more or less of his generation."