Epigrams I has taught us much about how Martial exploits the imagery and vocabulary of decay and contagion to frame his salty experiments in visualising (and getting his readers to visualise) the interaction of poems within a book. We have seen how Martial imagines his books as live acts and bodies, often greasy and soiled, full of worms that leave trails and eat holes. Yet this instability and closeness to rot is precisely how epigram swells over its limits and exceeds all expectations. In this post-Ovidian universe, the potential for creative, as well as painful, transformation is ever present: poems can change owners, and (in a curious intuition of late twentieth-century philosophies of reading) the presence of Martial's audience can fundamentally alter the text – whether by imposing restrictions (like Cato, hovering over Book 1), or by flaunting their freedom to slice up books and poems any way they choose. But more than this, Martial hints that his audience may even step into his books, or inhabit the same conceptual space as his bitchy, anthropomorphised poems: his turba (epigram's metonym for urbs) is made up of theatre-goers, animals, bands of slaves, crowds of worshippers, actors, scribes, schoolboys, but also of readers, epigrams and books.