In each chapter of this book, we have touched on the importance of the conception of space to Martial's poetic-global vision. These ‘little’ poems, and ‘little’ books (libelli) often boast of only occupying tiny spaces – which is presented partly as neo-Callimachean skill, and partly as a socially determined necessity that turns Callimachean aesthetics on its head: Martial's books are no less likely to present themselves as shoddy, unpolished scraps than as finely spun or filigreed creations. Moreover, spatially aware poetics appear to emerge from, and merge with, the ‘realities’ of the poet's existence and of life on the streets of Rome: pinched poems are composed in snippets of time, in cramped apartments, in a suffocating metropolis packed to bursting point with people – most willing to trample over one another to get what they want and go where they want to go. The Epigrams are born out of this vision of the Flavian city and its vicious, intense sociality; the books of upwards of 89 poems each are continually enacting, and become inseparable from, the buzz and webs of interaction that constitute modern Rome. I have also suggested that the playful and original way in which Martial tests out the relationship between poetry and city, private and public, imagination and the ‘real’ constantly invokes the paradoxes at the core of his aesthetic.