Salvete,
I was reading Martial's epigramma III, 50, and when I reached the last lines...
... I laughed because I thought that Martial was telling Ligurinus to feed mackerels with his poems, which seemed to be a coherent joke, taking account of the rest of the text, in which Martial is invited to eat but is fed only large quantities of bad and annoying poetry.
Then, I read about that text elsewhere and all translations I saw imply that the poems should be used to wrap fish, just as, when I was a kid, fishmongers used newspapers to wrap fish (I don't think they still do that...).
However, as far as I know, Romans of that period wrote on papyrus (?). In addition, papyrus was probably imported from Egypt and hence probably expensive (?).
Did fishmongers really wrap mackerels in papyrus? Or is there something I'm missing?
I was reading Martial's epigramma III, 50, and when I reached the last lines...
Quod si non scombris scelerata poemata donas,
Cenabis solus iam, Ligurine, domi.
... I laughed because I thought that Martial was telling Ligurinus to feed mackerels with his poems, which seemed to be a coherent joke, taking account of the rest of the text, in which Martial is invited to eat but is fed only large quantities of bad and annoying poetry.
Then, I read about that text elsewhere and all translations I saw imply that the poems should be used to wrap fish, just as, when I was a kid, fishmongers used newspapers to wrap fish (I don't think they still do that...).
However, as far as I know, Romans of that period wrote on papyrus (?). In addition, papyrus was probably imported from Egypt and hence probably expensive (?).
Did fishmongers really wrap mackerels in papyrus? Or is there something I'm missing?