This thesis explores how the reader is invited to read the books of Martial’s Epigrams, arguing that the epigrammatist has arranged the poems in his libelli in a specific order that rewards a sequential reading of the text from start to finish. Instead of viewing Martial as an anthologist who collated a series of occasional poems for their later publication, the thesis demonstrates that the poet showed awareness of his epigrams’ position within a larger ‘contexture’, and that he primes the reader throughout the Epigrams to envisage the books as thematically unified wholes. By viewing the Epigrams as a text to be read from beginning to end, rather than a text to be excerpted and anthologised, one can read each epigram in the wider context of its book, and better appreciate that book’s structural unity. Chapter one introduces the issues at stake in how one reads a book of epigrams, and provides the thesis’ methodological approach. Special attention is paid to the phenomenology of reading as a hermeneutic act, drawing together approaches to the Epigrams from classical scholarship as well as from reception and comic book theories to detail the method of ‘cumulative reading’ employed in the thesis. The second chapter then examines how Martial characterises the lector studiosus in his text, and how this depicted reader acts as a model for the actual reader to follow in their own sequential reading of the Epigrams. Chapter three focuses on Epigrams 7, demonstrating that the opening poems of the book establish the emperor Domitian as a thematic centrepiece around whom the rest of the book’s themes cluster. The fourth chapter also examines book 7, demonstrating how two different uses of watery motifs develop their individual thematic unity across the book, while also linking themselves back to the book’s opening imperial cycle to craft an overarching structural unity for the libellus. Chapter five then gives an overview of the larger structure of the Epigrams, arguing that the paratextual prose prefaces in books 1, 2, 8, 9, and 12 reinforce the individuality of the books they precede as well as establishing their own place within the wider corpus. Overall, this thesis puts the epigrammatic libellus back into the context of late first century AD book culture, emphasising that Martial paid attention not only to his epigrams’ position within their own books, but also their place within the wider corpus.

A l’heure où l’ « archéologie du livre » est une thématique prisée par les historiens et philologues médiévistes, ce travail de doctorat en archéologie grecque entend proposer une étude du livre antique à travers l’exemple de l’Iliade. Pour cela, il commence par interroger les différents regards successivement portés sur le livre en tant qu’objet de recherche, d’abord comme simple support, dont la matérialité est largement ignorée par les philologues au profit du seul message qu’il transmet, puis comme objet historique dont la matérialité est progressivement prise en compte par les collectionneurs, bibliophiles et enfin archéologues. Cette première partie, historiographique et épistémologique débouche sur une étude historique et sociale des conditions de la transmission et de la réception de l’Iliade dans le monde antique, qui permet de mettre en évidence la spécificité du manuscrit homérique dans la civilisation gréco-romaine et l’apport des sources testimoniales sur ce point. À la lumière de ces deux temps de réflexion complémentaires, l’analyse technique du livre antique, enfin, propose un bilan critique des connaissances actuelles sur la fabrication, l’utilisation et le rangement du livre de papyrus dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. / At a time where the “archaeology of the book” is a highly-valued theme among historians and medieval philologists, this PhD in Greek Archaeology intends to offer a study of the antique book through the example of the Iliad. To this end, we will start by interrogating the various perspectives successively used to consider the book as a research object, first as a simple medium, whose materiality is largely ignored by philologists in favour of the sole message it delivers, then as an object of history, whose materiality is gradually taken into account by collectors, bibliophiles and archaeologists. This first part, historiographic and epistemological, ends with a historic and social study of the conditions of the transmission and reception of the Iliad in the antique world, which helps us bring to light the specificity of the Homeric manuscript in the Graeco-Roman civilisation and the input of testimonial sources on that subject. In the light of these two complementary reflection points / times, the technical analysis of the antique book, lastly, offers a critical assessment of the current knowledge on fabrication, use and stocking of the papyrus book in the Graeco-Roman Antiquity.