Abstract
This chapter explores Martial’s elicitation of disgust as a device used seemingly to lambast those portrayed as sexual deviants and the sexually undesirable characters of his epigrams. Evangelou argues that the epigrammatist is not interested so much in correcting the behaviour of his fellow-citizens by criticising their sexual acts and desires, but rather in exploiting stock characters who become easy targets of his invective. The ridicule of these characters provokes the audience’s laughter by inviting it to experience a sense of physical and moral superiority to them and thus to laugh at their shortcomings. The discussion focuses primarily on Maximina, Philaenis and Postumus, three morally reprehensible characters who are depicted as laughable chiefly because of the incongruity between what they believe about themselves and how they are actually perceived by society in the 1st century BC Rome.
