A Prosopography to Martial’s Epigrams is the first dictionary of all the characters and personal names found in the work of Marcus Valerius Martialis, containing nearly 1,000 comprehensive entries. Each of them compiles and analyses all the relevant information regarding the characters themselves, as well as the literary implications of their presence in Martial’s poems. Unlike other works of this kind, the book encompasses not only real people, whose positive existence is beyond doubt, but also fictional characters invented by the poet or inherited from the cultural and literary tradition. Its entries provide the passages of the epigrams where the respective characters appear; the general category to which they belong; the full name (in the case of historical characters); onomastic information, especially about frequency, meaning, and etymology; other literary or epigraphical sources; a prosopographical sketch; a discussion of relevant manuscript variants; and a bibliography. Much attention is paid to the literary portrayal of each character and the poetic usages of their names. This reference work is a much needed tool and is intended as a stimulus for further research.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T072388 London: printed by G. Stafford, for J. Deighton, 1794. 2v.; 8°