SOURCE: "Varied Strains in Martial" in Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Edward Kennard Rand, edited by Leslie Webber Jones, Books for Libraries Press, 1938, pp. 87-99.

[In this essay, Duff stresses—and commends—Martial's realism, which he regards as the primary impulse behind the poet's variety of tone, perspective, and subject matter. Duff sees further evidence of Martial's realistic viewpoint in the poet's acknowledgment of his artistic limitations.]

In an author like Martial who makes the true assertion that his writing smacks of mankind (hominem pagina nostra sapit), there must inevitably be a wide variety of persons and themes. This clever Spaniard of the first century A.D. had only to use his well-nigh unsurpassed faculty of keen observation in the cosmopolitan Rome where he spent thirty-four years of his life to find infinite material for the epigrams, largely but by no means entirely satiric, in which he proved his mastery. It is the range of human character portrayed in his poems that first and most obviously impresses a reader; for there is little in the Rome of his day that is not set in clear outline before the mind's eye.

Yet to concentrate on this aspect alone would give an imperfect view of his manysidedness. Some years ago in a paper¹ I isolated the tender sentiment which makes so lovable a strain in his nature: and more recently I have discussed his use of the epigram for satire.² Here I desire to range more widely over the multiplicity of elements which mixed in him, and throw out a few reminders about his realism, but also about the almost chameleon-like changes of a spirit which could combine cringing and coarseness, hatred and affection, admonition and aspiration; about fluctuations in his literary quality, his deftness in stylistic variation, the composite literary influences acting upon him, his different metres, and his various pronouncements on literature.

In 64 A.D., he came, a young well-educated man, from Spain to Rome with claims on the attention of his fellow-Spaniards, Seneca and Lucan, and although that connection was severed abruptly through their implication in the Pisonian plot against Nero, yet Martial succeeded in maintaining relations, not always as profitable as he would have liked, with many men of high social standing, while at the same time poverty made him acquainted with the lowest grades in the community. In Domitian's reign he could address, amuse, and overpraise the Emperor himself, while studying all ranks of his subjects for 'copy.' The result is a gallery of what in varying proportion to the length or the shortness of a poem may be called portraits, miniatures or mere thumbnail sketches, but all marked by a marvellous realism.

It is worth while noting how his figures re-create the society of the times. We meet the senator as well as the swaggerer in senatorial seats who has risen from servitude. So too with the knights—an ex-slave wears the equestrian ring (III, 29), and some people are only pretended knights (V, 35). Social usages lent themselves to comment: dinner-parties, dinner-hunters, mean hosts, legacy-hunters (captatores) were traditional subjects for satire. Thus we have the man who never dines at home unless he fails to hook an invitation (V, 47); the systematic diner-out ever hoping for better offers (V, 44) or inventing the latest news (IX, 35); the niggardly patron who has mushrooms served to him, while his guests receive none (I, 20), whereas host and guests in equity and etiquette ought to enjoy the same fare (III, 60); for it is hard at a meal to get perfumes and nothing else (III, 12). There is the terrible literary host whose recitatio from his works spoils a dinner (III, 45 and 50), or his fit fellow, the antiquarian bore, chattering about his silver goblets (VIII, 6). But guests also may misbehave by filching dainties (II, 37; VII, 20) or by noisy talkativeness.

The legacy-hunters, courting childless wealthy folk with presents, come in for scathing ridicule. The rich men, whom they secretly wish dead, may go on living, or, worse still, may die without making them heirs (IV, 56 and 61; V, 39; VI, 63; VIII, 27). The morning levée (salutatio), at which patrons received clients in the formal toga, is denounced as a physical burden, an expense, a waste of time (III, 36; V, 22; VII, 39); and the whole Roman day is summarised with inimitable neatness (IV, 8).

Widely various human types—more or less oddities inviting satire—are presented in profusion: the skinflint, parsimonious, although he has inherited two millions (I, 99: cf. I, 103), the acquaintance who gives advice instead of a loan (II, 30), the man who quotes 'Friends go shares' in Greek … but fails to put the maxim into practice (II, 43), or one who possesses a well-stocked wardrobe but no clothes for a shivering friend (II, 46), or another whose gifts grow shabbier each December (VIII, 71). There are fussy triflers (ardaliones) who know other people's business best (II, 7; IV, 78). There is the nuisance of a fellow who haunts shops, examining countless objets d 'art and late in the day departs with two small cups bought for a penny (IX, 59); and there is the pretentious dandy who is 'A 1 in cloaks' (alpha paenulatorum) but has to pawn his ring to get a dinner (II, 57).

The professions undergo castigation. We meet the advocate who gets and, no doubt, deserves trumpery presents at the Saturnalia (IV, 46), or the surly lawyer incapable of uttering a polite greeting ([hairel, V, 51), or your counsel who takes an unconscionable time to say next to nothing (VIII, 7), or the other who sagaciously blushes in preference to stating his client's case (VIII, 17). In an adaptation of a Greek epigram, an amusing picture is drawn of the pleader in a lawsuit about three she-goats who dragged in with vociferous rhetoric some great names in Roman history and who is at last implored by his client to come back to the three she-goats (VI, 19: cf. Anth. Pal. XI, 141). Medical men are no less a theme for jest than they were in Greek epigrams. So Martial laughs at Dr. Doublecourse (Diaulus) who exchanged the profession of healing for that of funeral undertaker—the same thing in the end! (I, 47), or the physician who brings a band of students to paw his patient, thereby infecting him with the fever he had not got before (V, 9), or the light-fingered doctor who, after stealing a winecup from his patient, pretends he has done it to keep him teetotal (IX, 96). A remonstrance by an invalid to another doctor declares that he has had one professional visit already and a continuance would make him seriously ill (VIII, 25). The climax comes with the man who died solely because he dreamt about his doctor—another Greek imitation (VI, 53; cf. Anth. Pal. XI, 257). Teachers are also subjected to mockery—the schoolmaster whose stridency and whacks before cockcrow prevent folk from sleeping (IX, 68), and the noisy rhetor who, if he does not crack columns, as in Juvenal's exaggeration, at least plagues the ears of others more than he does his own throat (IV, 41). Martial, in a flippant mood, questions the wisdom of his parents in getting him rhetorical instruction (IX, 73, 7-8). Elsewhere he caustically places such money-making arts (artes pecuniosas) as an auctioneer's business above a literary education (V, 56); but on those principles we should never have had the epigrams of Martial.

Women make frequent appearance—some attractive, some repulsive. The young bride, good and pretty (IV, 13) and the faithful Arria on the verge of accompanying her husband through the gates of death (I, 13) are offsets to the cruel mistress who beats her slave for one badly arranged curl (II, 66), the much-married woman about to wed her tenth husband (VI, 7), artificial beauties who are all make-up, toothless or nearly toothless crones, an ugly beldame careful to keep a retinue of still uglier creatures so as to shine by contrast, and many others, expert in loathsome vice. Some women were skilled enough in poisoning, as Juvenal reminds us, to be dangerous to a husband, or to lady friends, as was one whom Martial calls Lycoris (IV, 24). A different Lycoris becomes the theme of a frank avowal of altered affections:

Lycoris, once 'mong women you were queen:
 Now queen of women Glycera is to me.
You can't be she: she'll be what you have
  been.
  Time's work! I wanted you; but now—'tis
  she!
(VI, 40)

The common trades of Rome are touched on in their infinite variety, perhaps nowhere more realistically than in the terse catalogue of pedlars on a Roman street, including the hawker who barters pale sulphur matches for broken glass (1, 41).

But it is not only persons to whom Martial directs attention. Concrete things as well as characteristic features of the times demanded record from him. He has an eye for the beautiful, in natural landscape, and in art—the imposing baths of Claudius Etruscus (VI, 42), a winebowl that was a triumph of skill (VIII, 51), an old statuette of Hercules in bronze by Lysippus (IX, 43), or a pretty name like 'Earinos' (IX, 11). Now, he contrasts the nerve-racking din of Rome with rural peace (XII, 57); now, he praises the attractions of his native Spain. He introduces us to most of the prominent writers of the day, and, as we shall see, some of his satire is aimed at literary tendencies like archaizing. Even personal confessions and the author's preferences (a traditional feature in classical satire) tell us much about the characteristics of his age.

It is natural, and certainly most enjoyable and profitable, in surveying Martial's range, to draw instances chiefly from the twelve books which contain his most representative work, produced from 85 to 102 A.D. But one must not overlook his earlier extant writings; firstly, the book of Spectacula, as we entitle it, on the games celebrating the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre by Titus in 80 A.D.; and, secondly, the two collections (ca. 83-86 A.D.) of mottoes, mostly in couplets, for gifts to guests, Xenia and Apophoreta, now numbered, out of due order of composition, as Books XIII and XIV. The Liber i>Spectaculorum has been subjected to a meticulous investigation by Weinreich,³ and one result brought out is the background of mythological learning which at this period rather beset Martial, though it is striking how he shows independence of originals by a kind of Ovidian gift of variation in expression and motif. The theme of the 'Wonders of the World' in the introductory epigram on the Amphitheatre is an old one freshly handled by Martial. When he takes to writing three elegiac epigrams (Spect. 12, 13, 14) about the pregnant sow killed in the imperial hunt, he varies his treatment by using mythology in two of these and dropping it in the third. They are exercises in variation, just as in Book I, by devoting seven poems six( elegiac, one hendecasyllabic) to the incident of the hare spared by a lion, he proves his skill in ringing changes on a single theme. The ingenious rather than thrilling poems on different animals in the arena, including a pius elephas, which exhibit instinctive reverence for the Emperor's numen, bear a significance for Caesar-worship; and Weinreich left over for a pupil a comparison between the Caesar-cult of Statius and that of Martial.⁴ The Xenia might be called one long elaborate menu, for, with four exceptions, the mottoes deal with eatables and drinkables—vegetables, cheeses, savouries, fish, poultry, wines and so forth. The Apophoreta, 'things to be taken away,' are concerned, on the whole, with a different sort of gifts, expensive or cheap, such as writing-tablets, dice-box, tooth-pick, sunshade, cloak, table, ivory tusk; but, at the close, we come back to cereal dainties for a very early morning meal:

Rise! bakers now sell breakfast to the boys—
Dawn's chaunticleers all round crow out their
 noise.
(XIV, 223)

Mostly in elegiac distichs, with some hendecasyllabics, those two books have a value as showing at once Martial's range of subject and his advance from apprenticeship to skill in that condensed expression which made a factor in his epigrammatic power.

When we study his personality, we are struck with its prodigiously extensive range. Variety of spirit, variety of attitude, lend to his poems an aspect of medley so multifarious as almost to constitute a new kind of satura. We find copious indecency wilfully indulged in with the warning that much will shock propriety and with the conventional excuse that a poet can be clean though his verses be filthy. They are another aspect of his realism. Knowing well that lubricity would not please a staid emperor, he feels obliged to make a bowdlerized anthology for Norva. We suffer too a tedious surfeit in the adulation of Nerva's predecessor, Domitian, disfigured by far-fetched conceits, which, as a rule, are foreign to Martial's forthright and unrhetorical style. Here he pays for insincerity by an artificiality of ideas beyond the verge of absurdity. I give a single instance. In IX, 3 he goes the length of arguing that even the gods could never repay all that Domitian has done for them in the way of temple-building. They are bankrupt debtors, and he assembles Roman business terms (creditor, auctio, conturbare, decidere) to elaborate his point. If the deities were to sell off to meet their obligations, Atlas would go smash and Jupiter fail to raise a penny in the shilling (non erit uncia tota). Martial is not often so silly, and of such flatteries he explicitly repented under Nerva and Trajan (X, 72).

Other qualities attesting his composite nature are a brutal savagery of attack, mitigated, no doubt, by his censuring under disguised names, and, in contrast, that vein of tender sentiment to which we owe his beautiful poems of friendship and touching tributes of affection to the dead. The genuine accents of a warm heart ring through his verses to friends like Decianus and Julius Martialis no less than through his In memoriam poems, lamenting the death of the little slave-girl Erotion (V, 34 and 37; X, 61) or a young friend who will never come back from the East (VI, 85). Death in childhood or youth affects him, as it affected the Greek epigrammatists. But Martial's note is his own. He has a breadth of human sympathy which includes bond and free, as seen in his obituary lines on a slave hairdresser:

Here lies Pantagathus whose youthful years
Cut short have brought his master grief and
 tears.
His steel that clipped scarce touched each
  wandering hair
And trimmed the bearded cheek with deftest
 care.
Earth, be thou kind and light as fitteth thee:
Lighter than his skilled hand thou canst not
  be.
(VI, 52)

Allied to this vein of sentiment is his love for beautiful scenery, his raptures over the fine view of the city across the Tiber from the Janiculum, his enjoyment of farm-life on his little property out at Nomentum, his homesick longings for Spain, his distress over the landscape wrecked by the eruption of Vesuvius

       where but late mid vines
Green shadows played, and noble clusters
  filled
The brimming vats.

In that ruined country-side he sees, with poetic imagination, a lost sporting-ground for the fabled creatures of mythology:

On this same mount the satyrs yesteryear
Did foot their frolic dance;

and his reflections lead to the melancholy conclusion:

Now all lies whelmed in fire and ashes dread.
(IV, 44)⁵

Other poems reveal him in a mood of serious admonition, and here it should be noted that he objects to have his nugae and lusus dismissed as unconsidered trifles. Thus, he uses epigrams to proffer sound advice. In one he strikes the time-honoured philosophic note that to be 'free' you must have cheap tastes and despise luxury (II, 53); in another, he declares that big purchases argue a small mind (III, 62). He advocates a good use of time (e.g. IV, 54) and sighs with honest aspiration after the leisure essential for an author's work and guaranteed by patronage (I, 107; XI, 3, 6-10), a cardinal point, we shall see, in his literary creed.

Varying strains are further exemplified by the difference of literary quality in his epigrams. About this he is disarmingly frank—'some bits are good, some so-so, and more are bad,' he recognizes (1,16): 'that's how a book is made.' It is an implicit and defensive exposure of the hypocritical pretence that abusive criticism, by concentrating wholly on faults in a work, indicates honesty on the part of a critic. Indeed, Martial is still more emphatic in a later book. In VII, 90, fastening on the term inaequalis, which a critic had applied to his work, he contends that a book to be good must be uneven in quality: inaequalis, then, he takes as a compliment (laudat carmina nostra); for a dead level means dulness, and no one will charge Martial with that blemish, if his works be taken as a whole. A quite cursory examination confirms his avowal. He is not his best self either in his coarser or in his adulatory pieces; and he cannot always be equally successful in securing polish or point. Some of the dedicatory epigrams are frigid compared with Greek parallels, although there are others where his genius and response to Roman environment have brilliantly eclipsed his models.

The different strains in Martial may be in part set down to the variety of literary influences acting upon him—influences inherited consciously and unconsciously from Greece and Rome. The Roman predecessors to whom he specifies indebtedness are Catullus in Ciceronian times, Domitius Marsus and Albinovanus Pedo, two Augustans, and Lentulus Gaetulicus, put to death by Caligula. The latter is possibly the author of nine epigrams.… So insignificant are the fragments of Marsus and Pedo that their influence cannot be disentangled; Catullus, however, is not only quoted and parodied by Martial but is the chief pattern for his hendecasyllabic and choliambic poems. True, he shows metrical independence in restricting the first foot of his hendecasyllables to a spondee; but he owes much to the satiric spirit of Catullus⁶ in both of these metres and in elegiac verse. One hendecasyllabic piece, in a tone of withering contempt, might have been written by Catullus to Lesbia after their breach. It shows his method of free adaptation; for he echoes quot sunt quotque fuere from Catullus' lines to Cicero (XLIX, 2) and applies the name 'Catulla' to the woman whom he addresses:

Loveliest of women now or long ago,
Vilest of all who are or e'er have been,
Catulla, how I wish that you could grow
A woman not so lovely but more clean!
(VIII, 53)

In elegiacs, although influenced by Ovid, he does not accept rigorously the Ovidian disyllabic close of the pentameter, but resembles Catullus in endings like amicitiae and ingenio. For technique and phraseology Martial was also indebted to Virgil and Horace.⁷ One influence, however, he never specifies, presumably because it was obvious to his mind. This is the influence of Greek epigrams, long imitated by Latin poets. A generation before Cicero, poets in the circle of Q. Lutatius Catulus freely drew upon them as models.⁸ Many distinguished Greek epigrammatists, now represented in the Anthologia Palatina, had spent part of their lives in Rome; and it was the ordinary thing for literary men in the coterie of Martial's friend, the younger Pliny, to try their hand at such brief compositions in Latin.⁹ It will be conceded that Greek epigrammatic themes and conventions influenced Martial profoundly, although they did not rob him of a free power of adaptation; and some Greek epigrams such as those by Lukillos of the Neronian age, contain resemblances too striking to be dismissed as mere coincidences.¹⁰

Nor must his variety of metrical form be neglected. It is a variety appropriate to his miscellaneous content. Of his 1561 epigrams, 1235 are elegiac, 238 hendeca-syllabic, 77 choliambic: a few are iambic or hexametric. Pieces in hexameters alone are thus comparatively rare; but their importance for him in theory appears to be seldom appreciated. He makes a strong plea for the right to use them in light poetry. An objector in VI, 65 holds that epigrams should be not in continuous hexameters but in distichs. This criticism is intentionally placed immediately after a poem of thirty-two hexameter lines. Martial's defense is that this verse is both permissible and customary: his critic may read distichs only, if he prefers what is short: he may skip (transire) long epigrams, provided that Martial is allowed to write them! The significant point is that he virtually places himself, for the moment, alongside of his friend Juvenal, within the domain of satura, whose conventional form since the time of Lucilius had been the hexameter. But it was not the high-flown epic hexameter which either of them found to their taste: for Martial it was too much associated with a mythology that had wearied him, and Juvenal makes fun of its style in his description of the Privy Council which deliberated upon the monster-fish presented to Domitian (Satire IV: cf. consedere duces, VII, 115, borrowed from Ovid).

It remains to indicate his varied views on his own poetry and on literary questions. What he craved for himself was a niche beside Pedo, Marsus and Catullus (V, 5, 5-6). Of these the only rival to his fame in modern times is Catullus, and that for lyric rather than for epigrammatic power. Martial is conscious of his contemporary vogue: his juvenilia can still be had (I,113), and he mentions different booksellers who stock his poems (I, 2 and 117; IV, 72). Rome repeats his verses (VI, 60); but he is known far more widely than in the capital (toto notus in orbe Martialis I, 1, 2; cf. III, 95, 7-8; V, 13, 3). He is read or quoted on the Rhone (VII, 88), in Rhaetia (IX, 84), even in distant Britain (XI, 3). His hendecasyllables have brought him notoriety, though, he admits, not equal to that of a circus horse (X, 9): but certainly he is pointed out in the streets (monstramur digito IX, 97). He is convinced that his poetry, because it will live, can confer immortality on those mentioned in it (V, 10, 12)—why, then, condescend to mention a snarling detractor (V, 60)? And yet, as regards individuals, he insists that in his censures he avoids personalities VII(, 12, 3; IX, 95 B) and substitutes fictitious names.¹¹ The principle observed has been

To spare the sinner, but denounce the sin,
(X, 33, 10)

safeguarding, as he tells us in his valuable prose preface to Book I, the respect due even to persons of lowliest degree (salva infimarum quoque personarum reverentia). Thus, he declines to say who 'Postumus' is: and indeed Postumus must be partly a lay figure and parly a Horatian reminiscence when admonished for postponement of 'living' (V, 58). Nor is it likely that the same person is meant by the Postumus, half of whose kisses are still half too much (II, 10); or the over-scented Postumus (II, 12); or the Postumus whose dole as a patron is stingy (IV, 26); or Postumus, the rhetorical advocate who bellows out Roman historical instances in the lawsuit already mentioned (VI, 19). Martial's ioci are innocui, not meant to hurt (I, 4, 7; V, 15; VII, 12, 9); and they amuse, although they may not pay (I, 76). Naturally, then, he objects to finding scurrilous verses circulated under his name (VII, 72, 12-16; X, 3 and 33); for he is not vitriolic toward actual persons, however bitter in exposing the offender as a type. A poet to whom we owe poems of true friendship and sympathy could not be heartless: indeed, he marks the man without a heart as an object for commiseration (V, 28, 9). Yet this is not to suggest that his poems are compact of sentiment; for he is well aware that epigrams without 'salt' and 'gall' must be insipid (VII, 25). To his own poetry his attitude is, as we should expect, a varying one: sometimes he stresses the light nature of his nugae, sometimes he is anxious to proclaim that he harbours a serious purpose (IV, 49, 1-2). His claim may be conceded, even if he has no constructive system to propound; for an observer so acute and incisive cannot fail to produce a positive effect: his coarsest poems unmask the hideousness of vice and stimulate a revulsion of feeling toward moral health.

A pleasant strain of common sense runs through his literary pronouncements. Writing nice epigrams, he says, looks easy work—yes, but to write a whole book is hard (VII, 85). Conscious that the epigram is his specialty, he naively instances an able friend who would no more compete with him in that field than Virgil would compete with Horace in odes or Virgil with Varius in tragedy (VIII, 18). With equal frankness he mentions an admirer who likes his epigrams next to the satires of the now lost Turnus (VII, 97). Patronage he favours because it guarantees leisure for the creation of literature: it might not make Martial a Virgil, but it would at any rate make a Marsus of him (VIII, 56, 24). The same poem summarises this doctrine in one of his familiar lines: Sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones.

Writing, however, may be overdone. There is unwisdom in an author's publishing books too frequently—his came out almost annually. The risk is that readers may be satiated:

What hurts my books, dear Pudens, is the rout
Of constant issues wearing readers out.
Rare things delight: first apples charm the
  more:
By winter-roses men set ampler store.
So pride commends the wench that fleeces
  you:
An ever-open door keeps no youth true.
The single book by Persius wins more praise
Than all light Marsus' epic length of lays.
Think, when you read again a book by me,
That it's the only one: more choice 'twill be.
(IV, 29)

Some editors have doubted whether the levis Marsus of this poem can be the same as the one mentioned among his models. The line quam levis in tota Marsus Amazonide is the single extant allusion to his Amazonis, an epic apparently in more than one book on a war with the Amazons. It is likely that, had Martial meant a different Marsus, he would have made this clear; and levis may be used here not in the derogatory sense of 'trivial' but to suggest that Marsus' province was light poetry like Martial's nugae, and that it would have been better if Marsus had shared his distaste for epic.

Prompted either by common sense or by a more penetrating discernment, and conscious of the vital force within him, he states a great literary truth when he declares

To live, a book must have indwelling power.
(Victurus Genium debet habere liber: VI, 60, 10).

Such is the conviction that entitles him to anticipate literary immortality. He knows that his métier is to hold the mirror up to the facts of life. Once—it is in Book VIII—he hesitates whether he should go on writing: five books were surely enough, six or seven rather too much, and now an eighth is in progress. But a rebuke, which is also an encouragement, comes from Thalia, the Muse of light poetry. He has a mission from which she will not discharge him. 'Ingrate!' she exclaims, 'can you abandon your pleasant trifles? What else could Martial compose but nugae? Not tragic drama, surely? nor epic?'

Nay, dye your Roman booklets smart with wit,
That Life may read and own the portraits fit.
(VIII, 3, 9-10)

And so there comes in a later book his triumphant proclamation of his literary position. 'Why,' he asks, 'read mythological twaddle about Oedipus or Thyestes, Colchian witches like Medea, or monsters like Scylla?'

Read this which makes Life say 'It is my
  own.'
No Centaurs, Gorgons, Harpies here you'll
  find:
My pages have the smack of human-kind.
(X, 4, 8-10)

This return to the Terentian humani nil a me alienum puto reveals the basis of both the pleasant and the unpleasant in Martial. He concludes with the advice: 'if it is not your wish to recognize the manners of men or to know yourself, then take up the study of an Alexandrine mythological poet like Callimachus.'

Such is, definitely announced and in practice maintained, the programme of Realism that explains most of his literary antipathies. He dislikes, we have seen, mythological themes. This hardly needs further illustration; but one short piece may sum up. In V, 53, which is based upon a Greek epigram preserved in Anth. Pal. XI, 214, he reasons with Bassus against writing tragedies on Medea, Thyestes, Niobe and Andromache, already overdone in Latin literature (we know of half a dozen attempts at a Thyestes drama).¹² The most suitable materia for such work would be Deucalion or Phaëthon: it should, that is to say, be drowned in water or consumed in fire!

He dislikes bombast. This follows from his disclaimer of anything like the epic grand manner, though in the same breath he parodies it:

Lo! I the man for trifles unsurpassed,
I mayn't o'erawe you, yet I hold you fast.
Great themes are for great bards: enough to see
You oft re-reading my light poetry.
(IX, praef.)

Another of his dislikes is obscurity. Himself preferring the straight-forward style of an essential realist, free from the enigmatic and the precious, he was out of sympathy with such Alexandrine poets and such of their imitators as followed that cult of the obscure which is a recurrent ideal of decadents in ancient and modern poetry. A literary contemporary preferred to Virgil the recondite Zmyrna of Cinna for its difficulty, and Martial banters him on his hard style:

It's not a reader but Apollo's light
   Your books require:
As Cinna, matched with Virgil, was like night,
  You rank him higher!
(X, 21, 3-4)

Further he felt an objection to compositions written merely to display technical skill—lines … such as those that read backward as well as forward or those 'echoic' elegiacs where the words constituting the opening two and a half feet of the hexameter are repeated at the close of the pentameter. Such ingenious trifles he dismisses with the sentence 'silly is the labour spent on puerilities' (stultus labor est ineptiarum: II, 86, 10).

Likewise he shares Horace's contempt for slack composition, advocating care in writing, and stigmatizing the glib versifier who tosses off 200 lines per day, but doesn't recite them—for a fool, how wise! (VIII, 20). And he dislikes the archaistic tendencies of some contemporaries, reducing ad absurdum the idea that dead poets are necessarily the best (VIII, 69: cf. XI, 90).

His interest in standard poets and prose-writers is shown in couplets suited for copies of their works, in Book XIV, 183-195. It was an interest fostered by friendship with the chief literary men of his day. Most of them he mentions, but he never names Statius, though L. Arruntius Stella was the poet-patron of both (I, 7; IV, 6, 5; V, 11, 2; VII, 14, 5). Statius' mythological poems would not attract Martial: a Thebaid or an Achilleid were too remote from life around. His concern was not with mythical heroes but with men. One practice, however, he shares with Statius, that of prefixing to some books explanatory prefaces in prose. Indeed, Statius in certain of his Silvae handles the same subjects as Martial in his epigrams: and occasionally they use similar expressions more like borrowings than coincidences (e.g. Mart. I. 41, 4-5; Stat. Silv. I, 6, 73). In Martial's aspersions on mythological epics (he does not appear to feel the same objection to Silius' historical epic, the Punica), he must have had Statius in mind, just as Statius can hardly have failed to think of Martial, when in his introduction to Silvae, Book II, he apologises for some of his own light poems (e.g. on a parrot) as leves libellos quasi epigrammatis loco scriptos. What they felt was in all likelihood not deep animosity but incompatibility of taste and temperament.¹³

It is pleasant to take leave of Martial as one of a literary circle, in which his gift for friendship was an asset. He honoured Lucan's memory, keeping the anniversary of his birth and maintaining relations with his widow Polla (VII, 22; X, 64). He respected Silius for the reverence he showed to 'great Virgil's monument' on land he had bought (XI, 48 and 49); as an epic poet he is 'the pride of the Castalian sisterhood' (IV, 14). His activities as advocate, consul and poet are celebrated (VII, 63); and Martial is so proud of his admiration that he asks how a detractor dare carp at poetry valued by Silius (VI, 64, 6-15). To Juvenal he was linked by a share of his satiric outlook and a warm affection (VII, 24 and 90; XII, 18). The younger Pliny, of whose seriousness he affected to be half afraid (X, 19), was another good friend, who supplied him with the expenses of his final journey home to Spain. A common interest in literature animates the friendly note to the prose author Frontinus (X, 58) and the commendation of Sulpicia's writings (X, 35 and 38) as poetry of honourable love and healthy jest. The general effect is that of a versatile man with sympathies broad enough to enable him to understand literature and human beings of the most various types.

Martial is at his best where he is most himself—where he adheres to the theme of humanity which he recognized as his own. When he has beasts of the arena or an imperial dominus et deus for his subject he is tempted into artificiality. Here the quest for variety of style makes a display of skill that over-reveals itself. But humanity he can depict, disdain, loathe, pity with a convincing truth which brings into play simple style and fitting metres used with consummate mastery. This realism and his literary genius for reserving to the end the point or sting in many of his most celebrated epigrams are, amidst all his manysidedness, the sure pillars of his fame.

Notes

¹ J. Wight Duff, Martial: Realism and Sentiment in the Epigram (Cambridge University Press, 1929, printed for Leeds Classical Association).

² J. Wight Duff, 'Martial: the Epigram as Satire,' in Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 126-146.

³ O. Weinreich, Studien zu Martial (Stuttgart, 1928).

⁴ F. Sauter, Der romische Kaiserkult bei Martial und Statius (Stuttgart, 1934).

⁵ The whole poem is translated by J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age (London, 1927), 527.

⁶ J. Wight Duff, Roman Satire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 128-129.

⁷ E. Wagner, De M. Valerio Martiale poetarum Augusteae aetatis imitatore (Regimonti = K6nigsberg, 1888).

⁸ R. Buttner, Porcius Licinus u. der litterarische Kreis des 2. Lutatius Catulus (Leipzig, 1893), ch. 9.

⁹ J. Wight Duff, A Lit. Hist. of Rome in Silver Age, 555-6; cf. p. 536 for Pliny's own light poetry.

¹⁰ O. Autore, Marziale e l'epigramma greco (Palermo, 1937) gives a judicious estimate of Martial's debt to Greek epigrams. Cf. K. Prinz, Martial u. die griechische Epigrammatik I (Wien, 1910); E. Pertsch, De Valerio Martiale graecorum poetarum imitatore (Berlin, 1911); R. Schmook, De M. Valeri Martialis epigrammatis sepulcralibus et dedicatoriis (Weidae Thuringorum, 1911).

¹¹ See L. Friedlaender, M. V. Martialis Epigrammaton libri (Leipzig, 1886), II, Register 6, 'Wirkliche und fingirte Privatpersonen aus Martials Zeit.'

¹² O. Ribbeck, Tragicorum Latinorum Reliquiae: (Leipzig, 1852), index.

¹³ H. Heuvel, 'De inimicitiarum, quae inter Martialem et Statium fuisse dicuntur, indiciis,' Mnemosyne (1937), 299-330.