Chapter VII · MARTIAL AND MINOR FLAVIAN POETRY

Martial’s career—Poetry and patronage—Order of his books—Numeration and fresh editions by the author—His personality—Relation of literary trifles to real life—Distaste for epic—Varied assortment of Flavian types—Contemporary Rome envisaged—The humorous and incongruous—Martial’s friends—The epigram before him—His impress on it—Verse-forms and sources—Comparative absence of rhetoric—Simplicity, wit, polish combined—Pointed end in an epigram—Confidence in popularity and immortality—Sense of wasted time—Double nemesis of his two great faults—Adulation and coarseness—The sentimental side—Poems on the dead—On friendship—On natural scenery—Quotability—His influence.

Minor Flavian poetry—Maternus’s post-Neronian plays—Saleius Bassus—Poets under Domitian—Lyrics by Spurinna—Epics by Cerealis and Codrus—Erotic poems by Verginius Rufus, Arruntius Stella and Sulpicia—Satires by Turnus—Tragedies by Scaeva Memor and Canius Rufus.

MARTIAL

M. Valerius Martialis⁠[1444] was a native of Bilbilis in Spain. In his tenth book, which belongs to A.D. 95-98, he celebrates his fifty-seventh anniversary,⁠[1445] so that his birth fell between 38 and 41. His cognomem was due to his having been born on the first of March.⁠[1446] While he claimed descent from Iberians and Celts,⁠[1447] his name indicates Roman citizenship. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla,⁠[1448] secured for him a literary education to which he owed an incalculable debt, although in a fit of cynical depression in his fifties he says:

Already intellectually well-equipped when over twenty, he left Spain in A.D. 64 to find a wider scope for his abilities in Rome, which had grown so cosmopolitan that its population struck his fellow-Spaniard Seneca as made up more of foreigners than of citizens.⁠[1450] This first immigrant—a young “compatriot of the Tagus” with bristling Spanish hair, as he describes himself⁠[1451]⁠—had before him a reasonable prospect of success as a lawyer or a speaker; but he did not choose to employ his training in oratory. What attracted him was verse-writing, with the patronage which verse might win. The common link with Spain explains why Seneca and Lucan were his earliest patrons; but the introduction to society in the capital begun under such auspices was followed next year by the ruinous implication of both patrons in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. The career to which he had turned, or drifted, was sure to be one of vicissitude and disillusion; and Martial had frequent cause to recognize that only the few among clever poets or obsequious clients could scrape a living, while the rest starved (pallet cetera turba fame).⁠[1452]⁠

We read of juvenile productions which an enthusiastic bookseller would not let die;⁠[1453] but virtually Martial’s life is a blank for the first sixteen years of his residence in Rome (A.D. 64-80). What his works make certain is that he gained an intimate acquaintance with all grades of society, the highest and the lowest. Some honours came his way, of a kind that indicate his possession of more influence than money. He became a tribunus, perhaps without having seen military service; he was confirmed in the resultant title of eques without possessing the means to support the position;⁠[1454] and he had obtained from two emperors the ius trium liberorum⁠[1455] without being a father—in fact, the tone of his work throughout argues the bachelor.⁠[1456] It is doubtful if his plot of farmland at Nomentum was in his hands early enough to have been a gift from Seneca, as has been guessed; but whether it came from him, or from Lucan’s widow Polla, or from some one else, it must have often afforded a welcome change after his three pair back-room in the sweltering city.⁠[1457] Later, he had a small house of his own on the Quirinal.⁠[1458] Neither from Caesar, however, nor from grandee did Martial ever obtain as much as he expected and craved. As it was, he survived by adroitness in courting the favour of well-to-do citizens so as to earn personal presents or the dole of the sportula. If he was temperamentally unfit to do anything but write verse, it is hard to see what other opening there was, apart from a way of life indistinguishable from sponging. For the surmise that he practised at the bar there is no justification either in the advice he quotes from a person whom he asked for a loan, “if you want to be rich, plead cases,” or in the similar counsel from Quintilian.⁠[1459] In spite of the fact that his verses had a sale, there was no such reading public as could ensure returns adequate for his maintenance: so pique at times made him argue that, if money-making is the supreme object, parents ought not to spend on education: much better make a boy something practical, a musician, an auctioneer, or an architect.⁠[1460] For himself, he felt obliged to live, whatever scoffers might say about the necessity; and consequently had to capture patrons to be the props of his subsistence and, as he believed, the indispensable conditions of poetic production (sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones).

His first publication known to us was the Liber Spectaculorum of A.D. 80 which commemorated the opening by Titus of the Flavian Amphitheatre familiar now as the Colosseum. Though anything but inspired, the surviving thirty-three poems of this group throw interesting light on the contests of the arena. Some four years later appeared the collections, almost entirely of couplets, which are usually printed in defiance of chronology, as Books XIII and XIV of the Epigrams. They owed their occasion to the Saturnalia in December, when gifts might be sent to guests (Xenia) or taken home from the festive board (Apophoreta). The 127 pieces of the one, and 223 of the other were nearly all meant as suitable mottoes for such presents. Luckily Martial was capable of cleverer work. Epigrams of his had appeared before 86 when he published, perhaps together, the first two books of those which made his fame. Allusions enable us to date his volumes with fair closeness, and, while there are a few complications due to revised editions and collected issues, it is broadly true that from 86 until his return to Spain in 98 he brought out a new book about once a year. Taken together, his poems, few of them other than quite short, constitute one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches that have ever made a past society live again in the mind’s eye. While grace in the sight of the emperor commended him to those in high places, including the worst creatures at court like the notorious Crispinus and Paris, there were many at the other end of the social scale, needy and seedy outcasts, to whom Martial’s Bohemian indigence introduced him. He observed all. He is one of the great spectators in literature. But the vanity of the whole spectacle recurrently depressed him. Unremunerative attendance at the receptions of the great as well as disgust at loathsome vices which he exposes, contributed towards his tedium. Once weariness drove him to Cisalpine Gaul, whence he issued an edition of Book III.⁠[1461] In the very next book⁠[1462] he is hankering after Venetia as a retreat for his old age. Yet years passed before he could tear himself away from Rome, where, despite its drawbacks, he knew all the literary men of the day. At last in 98 the sense of monotony told. The ordinary expenses of life seemed as hard to meet as ever, and the old scenes in Spain, never wholly forgotten during more than the third of a century, came back now with alluring insistence to his mind:

Perhaps too some occult warfare in his soul between spirit and sense made him realize, as never before, the emptiness of the life around. At any rate the Flavian régime had suited him best; for under Nerva and Trajan a new age had dawned, when sycophantic blandishments were futile and rustica ueritas had been restored (X. lxxii). His well-to-do friend, the younger Pliny, found money for the impecunious poet’s journey to Spain. There, settled at Bilbilis on land granted to him by a patroness Marcella, he could indulge to the full that yearning for a quiet retreat which he revealed in lines addressed to the great satirist of the time:

Missing the stimulus of the capital, he let three years elapse before his twelfth and last book was sent out from Spain in 102. He did not long survive its publication; for Pliny in a letter belonging to A.D. 104 mentions his death, adding the criticism that he was a man of talent, subtlety and vigour, whose writing was characterized by abundance of wit and pungency, but no less good nature.⁠[1465]⁠

The form in which Martial’s works have come down calls for brief remark. Imperfect though the book of Spectacula is, the missing portions are perhaps a greater loss to archaeology than to literature. In the Xenia and Apophoreta, unlike the later books, short headings (lemmata) are given to which the reader is facetiously told he may, if he likes, confine himself; and the presents of the Apophoreta are arranged in pairs, expensive and less expensive. As regards the existing division into books, the numeration was Martial’s own,⁠[1466] though some books, as we have them, are not exactly as originally issued. For instance it is inconceivable that his first book was from the beginning entitled “Liber Primus,” with the implication that he was certain of success enough to justify future issues; still less is it conceivable that in the original issue of his first book he could have been described as toto notus in orbe Martialis. His preface to Book II, which defends the innovation of an introductory prose epistle, reads as if it were written before the preface to Book I; and this latter preface, by speaking of “little books” (libelli) in the plural, suggests that it could not have been added till more than one book of epigrams had appeared—probably when a collected edition of I-VII was issued. Among the later books, X and XI, originally belonging to A.D. 95 and 96 respectively, had an Anthology made from them in 97; and a second edition of X came out in 98.⁠[1467] Interesting prose prefaces are given to Books I, II, VIII and XII, while a few lines of prose at the opening of IX introduce verses for the poet’s bust in Stertinius’s library. The preface to I offers an apology for the coarse outspokenness in the epigrams, with a significant list of literary predecessors; that to Book II is, as mentioned, an apology for an introductory epistle, in answer to the objection epigrammata curione non egent; that to VIII professes that there has been less indulgence here than elsewhere in the licence of the mime; and the last preface is an apology for slackness in publishing, since Martial’s retreat to Spain has deprived him of his stimulating Roman environment.

Martial, in his epigrams, reveals himself, and, even more, the company he kept. With him we enjoy the luxury of an intimacy unusual among writers of the Silver Age. Seneca, it may be said, opens his philosophic heart, yet he does not make—it is hardly imaginable that under Nero he should make—a complete self-revelation. Juvenal’s outspokenness is that of indignant censure rather than of personal confession. But Martial is naked and unashamed: he does not hide his thoughts, and even those quick flashes in which he divines the thoughts of others still further illuminate his own. Thus his personality is reflected in his themes, and is inseparable from the things he described and the men he loved or hated. A spectator of life, he was yet no detached spectator, but in a sense a part of his own observations, so that his resolve to reflect his surroundings leaves him at the same time essentially autobiographic. We become familiar, then, with his poverty, his mendicancy, his contempt for shams, his confidence in his literary powers, his pride in Spain, his determination to pander to readers by spicy attacks on the uncleanest vices. At times he seems a sort of Villon, never so much of a gallows-bird as the French poet, nor ever master of so deep a note of anguish, but yet like him in Bohemian neediness and in direct vigour of style.

In the last resort, the key to his personality, to his style, to his reputation, to everything that matters respecting Martial, is to be found in this attitude towards life. Life afforded the inexhaustible material whence he recognized it was his special métier to draw. His brief poems—some of them butterfly flights as brief as Japanese tankas—might be trivialities, but they at least sprang from the actual. There is a sort of double antinomy in him. On the one hand, he often calls his verses nugae or ioci, as if he made no higher claim for them than the knack of amusing; yet he is insistent that they are not mere flippancies:

On the other hand, he explains elsewhere⁠[1469] that he could write seriously, but prefers to write entertainingly—the secret of his vogue. At the same time, he cannot make a living out of pleasantries: instead, he gets praise and starves:⁠[1470] so he jocularly even threatens to turn lawyer! In fact, however, though he said, and showed, that he could write seriously, he seldom chose to. The sportive, the flippant, the ludicrous, and often the indecent appealed to him irresistibly; for the truth is that he wrote, like all literary artists, because it was his pleasure:

But he would not have been human, he would certainly not have been Martial, if he had not expected an adequate return from verses that entertained or flattered; and occasionally his tone appears to meditate a sort of literary strike—pas d’argent, pas de poésie:

No writer ever more clearly recognized his field. In the third poem of Book VIII he pretends to hesitate over multiplying epigrams—five books, six, seven are already out and the whole collection is thumbed everywhere (teritur noster ubique liber), there should be some stint and limit (sit pudor et finis). Here the rebuke from the Comic Muse Thalia is significant: “Abandon your charming trifles! But what better thing is an idle singer (desidiosus) to do? Not tragic drama surely? Not epic? No, Martial’s function is to hold the mirror up to the manners of the day”:

The claim is also well illustrated in his objection to mythological twaddle—an objection sufficient to account for a radical lack of sympathy with Statius, the only prominent poet of the time whom he does not name:

This confident acceptance of life as his great exemplar explains the variety and truth of Martial’s pictures. He knew that he could portray his fellows with a sure hand; and his conviction that his forte lay in light verse reflecting manners and morals gave him an assurance that his work had force enough to last. It is essentially Flavian Rome that he drew; for, though his writing continued under Nerva and the first few years of Trajan’s reign, nine books of epigrams had come out under Domitian. The repression of the Reign of Terror, which brought about the fifteen years of silence to which Tacitus alludes, did not affect the sort of verse which Martial composed. It was spicy, but not at the expense of the emperor or the imperial system. All contemporary types appear in Martial’s pages (hominem pagina nostra sapit). They range from Domitian himself, haloed beyond recognition, down to the vilest of characters to whom Martial owed no flattery and of whom to tell the truth was to produce a shudder. Since fun comes easiest at the expense of human weakness, there is a predominance of types in some way objectionable. Hence a multitudinous array of spongers, dinner-hunters, fortune-hunters, bores, coxcombs, charlatans, topers, freaks, stingy hosts, and incorrigible reprobates. But if there are false friends there are also firm ones, there are faithful slaves as well as faithless, moral wives as well as immoral, and genuine poets as well as poetasters. The eye for detail is remarkable: nothing is too slight for mention: the hawker of sulphur and the purchaser of broken glass are not overlooked any more than a wealthy connoisseur of artistic treasures. Such pieces as the neat summary of how the hours in a Roman day were spent convince one that Martial saw things as they were, whereas Juvenal, though possessed of an unchallenged sense of picturesque realism, tended to overlay his subject with violent exaggeration or with a thesis-like treatment in the manner of the rhetorical schools.

Thus to turn over Martial’s leaves in the most casual way transports one to ancient Rome. There we find the Stoic heroine and hero, Arria and Paetus, face to face with death; and intimates of the author who have to be admonished about using life aright, or welcomed home, or reminded of the enjoyable ideals of the unambitious, or urged, on the principle of Satan reproving sin, to decide on a profession (dum quid sis dubitas iam potes esse nihil). We can enter a private library; we can join in the despatch of marriage greetings, or condolences under bereavement, or congratulations to a lucky person on the prospect of a long holiday which will send him back sun-burnt to the pale dwellers in town. We can see artistic triumphs in a handsomely enchased wine-bowl, or an antique bronze statuette. Again, we may listen to the author’s petition for the ius trium liberorum, his request for a supply of domestic water from the Aqua Marcia, or his many growls over the burdensome duty of calling on patrons, over paltry presents (some folk, he observes, send less and less each December!) and over the failure of patrons to maintain him fittingly; he is, he complains, not so well sheltered as his patron’s orchard-trees:

But it is not solely for town life that he has an eye. We note the almost Dutch detail in some of his sketches of rustic scenes. Especially out on Faustinus’s estate with its steading, the corn in heaps, the wine in casks, the barn-yard fowls, the labourers’ work, the rural fare, he appears to revel in “the genuine country, uncivilised” (rure uero barbaroque).⁠[1476] He envisages for us a real farm in Spain free from the formal dress of Rome, and provided with shade against the summer heat, and against the winter cold with a wood fire surrounded by grubby youngsters.⁠[1477]⁠

True to the author’s promise, there are many figures that amuse—the dry-as-dust antiquary spoiling his wine-parties by tedious rigmaroles about the pedigree of his silver goblets, the prosy pleader in court who needs hours to make a few legal points, the counsel who sagaciously blushes in preference to stating his client’s full case, the guest who arrives too late for breakfast but too early for lunch, and the too prolific poet who finds no time to revise his hasty compositions:

The element of humour in Martial was largely due to a keen sense of the incongruous. He could not help chuckling at the notion of keeping about eight birthdays each year to secure presents, or at the huge Gaul who sprained his ankle and was glad to be carried home on a pauper’s bier, or at the nuisance who rummages a shop for objets d’art and gives endless trouble without buying enough to compensate for it.⁠[1479] Again there is the decidedly plain lady who takes care to frequent the company of ladies still plainer so as to appear a beauty by comparison:

Ailments and the medical profession are the subjects of many jests. There was the rebellious client who pretended to have gout in order to avoid calling on his patron, but who, after hobbling about swathed in wrappings, finally got the genuine disease; there was the patient who died because he dreamt of his medical man overnight; there was the ex-physician who turned undertaker and therefore had undertaken the same undertaking for the sick as before; and there was the doctor who on his clinical rounds gave a sufferer fever:

Such alert perception of the incongruous made him scoff at shams—the cupboard love that acts friendship with a view to hospitable invitations, the lady whose artificial aids to beauty leave her with no face of her own, the hypocrisy of pretended philosophers who were at heart dissolute reprobates.⁠[1482]⁠

Ability to see the ludicrous side of things is always an entertaining social recommendation. With the literary circles of the day Martial was on familiar terms. He sends lines to Lucan’s widow on an anniversary of the poet’s birth, he records Caesonius’s fidelity to Seneca in exile, and shows patriotic pride in mentioning the Spanish birthplace of the Senecan family.⁠[1483] Quintilian, Arruntius Stella, a writer of polished verse, and Valerius Flaccus were among his friends. Despatching poetry to the younger Pliny, he good-humouredly quizzes him on his serious work at the bar: the judicious moment of festive relaxation “when rose-leaves reign, when locks are scent-bedew’d” must be chosen for the presentation of Martial’s trivialities.⁠[1484] With Silius Italicus he was well acquainted: would that Epic poet, “pride of the Castalian sisterhood,” he asks, deign to spare some leisure for the sportive trifles which he begs to forward? Just so, he suggests anachronistically, might Catullus have sent his Sparrow to Virgil!⁠[1485] He also shows interest in Silius’s activities and expresses sympathy for him in bereavement.⁠[1486] But no one, he felt, could embroil him with so true a friend as Juvenal, to whom he wrote after his retirement to Spain and whose distaste for long-winded epics he plainly shared.⁠[1487] As regards Statius, who often wrote about the same things and people as Martial did, their mutual silence must have been due to incompatibility of temperament. Martial’s circle included also the orator Aquilius Regulus, whom Pliny could not bear; Antonius Primus from Toulouse, who helped as a commander to secure the Empire for Vespasian; Julius Martialis, a close intimate; Q. Ovidius, a country neighbour at Nomentum; wealthy knights like Atedius Melior and Claudius Etruscus, but also many people less prominent like the centurions Varus and Pudens. While he gives the real names of friends, it is to his credit that he uses disguised names for the victims of his satire. Disclaiming any intention of hurting (ludimus innocui), he declares that his concern is to attack not persons but vice (parcere personis, dicere de uitiis).⁠[1488] Consequently, resentful at having scurrilous verses fathered on him, he draws a lurid picture of the punishment which ought to befall a slanderous poet.⁠[1489] The systematic backbiter, he agrees, may be called malign; but, with a fine touch of human feeling, he adds:

The epigram in Martial is to be distinguished from, even if related to, the epigrammatic in contemporary rhetoric, whether prose or verse. In Martial it is a short independent verse composition, not one of a series of glittering ornaments in a continuous poem, history, or oration; that is, it constitutes a miniature unity; and there is a notable freedom from the forced conceit with which the epigrammatic is often allied in writers like Lucan. The epigram reached Rome from Greece in the form of a brief poem originally inscriptional in character, as its name implies. But the Greek ἐπίγραμμα itself had gone through a wide evolution since Simonides of Ceos employed it for the tomb of the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. Beyond its use for epitaph, memorial, dedication, or gift, the elegiac metre in particular had been devoted, with its Greek quality of delicate and finished charm, to occasions which in modern times would be considered essentially lyrical. The impression made by a passing event or inward experience found utterance in a brief poem: the poem might convey the feeling produced by a landscape, a book, a storm, an artistic work, a misfortune, a mental disturbance, a friendship, an affair of the heart. In contrast therewith, the Roman tendency, on taking over from the Greeks this ill-defined branch of lyric, was to sacrifice the poetic flavour to point, and most of all to the point that stings. Hence, losing much of the lyric charm of the Greek, the epigram was largely transferred to the service of satiric purposes. Catullus, though certainly not wanting in true lyric quality, gave to the elegiac that bent towards invective which was more definitely associated with the abusive iambic. In this latter field, it is noticeable that Diomedes,⁠[1491] describing the bitter iambic, names, along with the Greeks Archilochus and Hipponax, the Latin writers Lucilius, Catullus, Horace and Bibaculus. Now Martial owns his obligations and traces his freedom of speech (lasciuam uerborum ueritatem)⁠[1492] to Catullus, Domitius Marsus, Albinovanus Pedo, and Lentulus Gaetulicus of Caligula’s reign. Roman dilettanti of the Empire liked composing such verses, and it is among the freaks of time that, though many authors like Marsus, Pedo, Gaetulicus, Seneca and Petronius wrote epigrams, too little has survived in this genre, outside Martial’s collection, to afford a criterion of their individual contribution. Clearly, however, the march of literature had worked changes that could not fail to affect Martial. By his days, satire and rhetoric had both played a great part. He is but following the traditions of the epigram in maintaining its essential elements of concise expression and unity of idea; but he owes a debt to satire for his width of range (Juvenal’s farrago libelli), his dramatic vigour, his scraps of dialogue, his reflective pieces, his mordant wit and irony. So too, although he is not enslaved by rhetorical artifice, he knows how to make use of rhetorical point, as the culmination—usually a stinging culmination—up to which the rounded whole of a short poem should lead. His satiric epigrams, then, mark the close of the evolution of this partly lyric type.⁠[1493] Hence Martial’s individual impress on the epigram is permanent. With him it reached that fixity of form which it has retained up to modern times.

In a total of 1561 epigrams in the Spectacula and fourteen other books, 1235 are in elegiac metre, 238 in hendecasyllabic, and 77 in choliambic or scazon. There are, besides, a few in hexameter and iambic verse. The elegiac distich is common, and is almost the only form among the 350 pieces of the Xenia and Apophoreta. Often, however, his elegiac poems run to ten or a dozen lines, occasionally to twice that length. When the delights of Faustinus’s farm tempt him to write 51 scazons, or when a dinner menu needs 32 hendecasyllabics, one hesitates whether to call these epigrams at all. Vigorous and correct in versification, his metres are in felicitous accord with the theme and spirit of his various pieces. With great skill he can employ the elegiac to express tender sentiment or weighty compliment, the hendecasyllabic for sportive and ironic occasions, and the scazon for trenchant invective. But, if the mood takes him, he can equally adapt the elegiac to satiric, and both hendecasyllabics and scazons to descriptive purposes. Martial’s favourite verse-form, the elegiac, is based, though not pedantically so, on Ovid: lines and phrases are occasionally taken from him, but Martial does not adhere to the Ovidian ending of the pentameter on a disyllable. Typical endings such as hospitibus, ingenio, undecies, amicitiae show that here, as elsewhere, he is under the influence of Catullus. It is upon Catullus principally that his hendecasyllabics and choliambics are founded, with the notable difference that Martial, departing from the Catullian freedom in the opening foot of the choliambic, restricts himself to a spondee. In style and metre we can trace some echoes of Virgil, Horace and the Priapea; and, to a less degree, of Tibullus and Propertius. Nor was the pointed manner of his early patrons Seneca and Lucan without effect on him.⁠[1494] Greek authors too have their share in his sources, but, on the whole, he is remarkably independent of models. Sometimes he appears to do little more than continue the kind of popular tradition found in the smarter graffiti at Pompeii. This, for example, is not unlike his manner:

Low life and the commonest objects came under his survey and saved him from bookish pedantry. The workaday spoken Latin of the caballus type, and words which many Romans would have shrunk from uttering (as we know from Cicero), enter into his pages, alongside of language sanctioned by exalted literary usage. This range of vocabulary is proportionate to the width of his outlook, which contemplated, perhaps occasionally with too heartless an indifference, the ugly as well as the beautiful. His unabashed persistence in observation and his conscious power of natural portrayal left him free to use at will, or not to use, the literary predecessors whom he had studied. On subjects drawn direct from life he writes with a finished neatness of expression and a freshness that reads like improvisation. Over and over again, his natural themes appear to fall into natural phrases. It is a straightforwardness that gives him, for all his debt to patterns, the unmistakeable ring of originality. In literature there is only one Martial.

Rhetoric is in the main absent from one who, primarily interested in man, wrote as a realist. His most representative work is simple, with little of that Spanish note of excess which one detects or suspects in several of his compatriots, from the violent Porcius Latro onwards, not excepting Lucan and at times Seneca himself. Martial feels no attraction to mythology, though a court-poem might involve a few learned allusions. He is content that elevated epics should be praised, admired, even adored, so long as his verses are read. Hence the fundamental contrast, and therefore presumably the antipathy, to Statius⁠[1496] already mentioned. Hence too the justification for Martial’s pronouncement: “all turgid rhetoric (omnis uesica) is foreign to my writings: my muse swells not in wild tragic robe.”⁠[1497] Conformably thereto, he has a genial way of disarming criticism by making no high claims:

In another piece he admits that, while tossing off epigrams may appear simple, the crux lies in making a book; and, again, the criticism that a book of his shows marked inequalities is answered by the contention that this is in its favour, because a bad book is of uniform quality!⁠[1499] No author ever passed a more honest criticism on his work. It is just this unevenness that makes Martial a successful surprise. Alongside of plain-speaking—the plainest of the plain—the reader may chance upon poems which prove in him an exquisite sense of beauty. If the seaside or a pretty name engages his fancy, he rises to a style in keeping with the subject. There are no finer scazons in Latin than those he wrote on “the sweet strand of genial Formiae” to rival the Catullian scazons on Sirmio:

So the liquid consonants of the admired “Springtide Lad” (Earinos) seem to run over into his enthusiastic hendecasyllabics on

So beauty of idea is combined with neatness when he sends a rose-wreath to a friend:

There the pedigree of the opening movement in Waller’s “Go, lovely rose” and Herrick’s “Go, happy rose” is evident. Much, indeed, that might be called Herrickian comes from brief pieces like

This neatness in expression underlies the characteristic suspense of point until the concluding line, phrase, or even word of an epigram—the typical manner of Martial familiar to us from imitations in neo-Latin writers, in writers of our own eighteenth century and in Byron, on the bee-like principle that

Very often, whether the piece is a brief couplet or a more extended set of elegiac, choliambic, or hendecasyllabic verses, the surprise and the bite come at the end. The epigram thus constitutes an artistic “period.” Such is the force of the sharp tussit of I. x.: “What is the inducement that lures Gemellus to propose marriage to Maronilla? Why does he long, plead, implore, send presents? Is she pretty? Nay, none so ugly! What is the bait and charm then? Why, her churchyard cough!”—an ugly but effective close on the attraction of a consumptive heiress for a fortune-hunter.⁠[1504] So he retorts on a person whose absence would be a good riddance:

He makes fun of unwelcome kisses:

Again, less briefly than, but to the same effect as, Mr. Punch’s advice to those about to marry, he writes on a debtor’s going to law to dispute a claim:

From the idea of uniting in wedlock a much widowed widow with an equally bereaved widower he extracts grim fun:

He introduces us smilingly to a Roman hairdresser:

He jeers at the systematic diner-out:

This last is a frequently imitated form in which the apparent confirmation of the first statement leaves the final state of the victim worse than the first. A similar effect is got by an apparent contradiction of the original statement:

Just as elsewhere we trace the legacy of Martial in some of the gallantry of Cavalier poets, and as his “Non amo te, Sabidi” descends to “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,” so this corrective form of epigram is the prototype of such quips as Samuel Rogers’s:

An engaging blend of modesty and confidence is an ingredient in the variety of Martial. At times, by way of pose, he may wish to give the impression that, like Byron, he “rattles on exactly as he’d talk” and that his verses are of little consequence:⁠[1512] at other times, he is both proud of his popularity and confident of his permanent place in literature. The emperor read him (II. xci.): so did ministers of state and men of letters (VI. lxiv. 8-10): everybody at Rome did, in fact (VI. lx.). He was pointed out (monstramur digito, IX. xcvii. 4), and people whispered “There he is!” (V. xiii. 3). Such a vogue had he that it was possible to find a nuisance of a person who could repeat Martial by heart and decline to stop! (VII. li.). In mock-heroic strain he declares:

His naughty jests (nequitiae, VI. lxxxii. 5) were known to everyone who had not a Dutchman’s ear: no wonder, then, that his circle of readers should be as wide as the world (I. i. 2; V. xiii. 3; VIII. lxi. 3). He was flattered to realize that he was a favourite in Vienne (VII. lxxxviii.): his poems might be despatched to one person, but would be read by all (uni mitteris, omnibus legeris, VII. xcvii. 13). Away among the Goths a centurion thumbed his Martial (a rigido teritur centurione liber), and Britain learned to repeat his verses (XI. iii. 3-5). His books went through different editions; they were on sale by Secundus in parchment binding (I. ii. 3, 7-8), suitable for travellers; or at Atrectus’s shop, smart in purple (I. cxvii. 13-7); or at the establishment of Tryphon (IV. lxxii.), who was Quintilian’s publisher. Furthermore, his juvenile verses could be had in collected form (I. cxiii.), and plagiarists stole from his works. Yet even a “best seller” in ancient Rome could not ensure handsome returns: Martial significantly takes satisfaction in the thought that anyone can make money, but not everyone can be a poet (V. xiii. 9-10); for he has a fine consciousness that a book, to live, must possess an indwelling spirit (VI. lxi. 10). No doubt crosses his mind about his own literary survival (X. ii. 7-12), or about the immortality which mention by him can confer (V. xv. 3-4). Nobodies, therefore, must not expect to have their names perpetuated in his verse (V. lx. 6-7).

Alongside of this confidence, however, there rings out a note of impatient fretfulness. Weariness of the bustle in the Vanity Fair of Rome brought to this merry companion his intervals of heart-searching. Surrender day by day to the solicitations of purely trivial circumstance produced a natural revulsion against such waste of time. Led by a too facile compliance into insipid society, he awakes upon occasion to a sense of paltry achievement and lost opportunity. Etiquette, he felt, wars with poetry:

The same fretful malady of the age troubled him when he wrote to his namesake Julius Martialis on making the best of time:

The same friend is reminded that social duties may hamper one in living one’s own life:

Yet in spite of this discontent over a partially spoiled life, it may be doubted whether Martial was capable of more than he accomplished. He could only be himself. While he ought not to be called entirely shallow, he lacked the profundity which might have made him other than a laureate of the occasional.

The two glaring faults in Martial, servility and obscenity, brought each their own nemesis: where he is most flattering he is least simple, and where he is most indecent he is least witty. Both defects sprang from his circumstances. Never wealthy, he found in adroit dedications a more likely source of profit than in book-sales. Subservience towards patrons, on whose uncertain favours he had to rely, was inevitable. Hence adulation of the emperor, cringing to exalted personages, and continual clamour for bounty. He flattered Domitian because there was no choice. In touch with court, he could not logically keep out of his verse the official title of “Lord and God” assumed by the emperor: not belonging to the political opposition, he had no doubt a genuine belief in the imperial system; and, as the most fulsome compliments were acceptable, he resorted to mendacious homage. It is not merely that it appears historically ludicrous in Martial to apply to Domitian the epithet of chaste (pudicus) or to commend one of his own volumes as fit to be read without a blush by that permanently red-faced prince; but it is also, as already suggested, noticeable that he pays a literary penalty for his moral weakness herein by deviating from his usual straightforwardness of style. In the midst of his extremest sycophancy, he becomes artificial owing to the intrusion of over-ingenious conceits. Thus, it is grotesque to assert⁠[1517] that Rome envies the barbarians with whom Domitian has been warring in person, because they were lucky enough to see the emperor’s face, whereas the poor capital had to be content with the laurel-wreathed despatch of victory. And no one can take seriously the far-fetched absurdity of his congratulations to the enemy on “seeing Domitian’s face at close quarters and in that countenance finding material for both terror and rejoicing.” Similar extravagance marks his welcome on his Majesty’s return from Dacia,

His argument, also, in favour of making requests to the divine emperor is far too clever; “it is not the sculptor of an image who makes a god; it is the man who prays.”⁠[1519]⁠

Martial’s indecency palls no less than his adulation. We are not amused. The foulest epigrams force on the reader a resilient disgust as if from some sickening contagion; and repeated shocks end in boredom. Conceivably it was a salutary instinct that prompted the quaint idea of a Delphin editor to remove from their original place in the text all the unsavoury epigrams into a musée secret at the end of the volume, in which might be taken one nauseating draught of concentrated impropriety. They number more than 150 or over ten per cent of the whole. Many open out vistas down by-lanes of hideous vice. It might be argued that even the foulest practices of sexual inverts had to be included in a complete picture of pagan Rome; and that there was much to which an avowed realist could not shut his eyes. Perhaps just because in their naked Romana simplicitas the worst epigrams are so repulsive, they might, though filthier, be considered less pernicious than Ovid, or than a sex-encumbered modern novel, which often lacks Martial’s truth to life. Here we have a repellent rather than an erotic obscenity. The author realizes that some apology is needed for overstepping the limits of propriety. His poems are not for the prim and prudish, who are in set terms warned away with the mischievous suggestion that the warning will only whet their curiosity.⁠[1520] Certain of his books he can recommend as respectable:⁠[1521] in general, however, he does not address children but the seasoned onlookers at the Floralia and folk of easy morality.⁠[1522] So the freedom of Book XI is defended by the licence of the Saturnalia.⁠[1523] The fundamental excuse offered is one which not a few Roman writers were at pains to make by way of protest against any assumption that he who composes foul verses must himself be foul. Martial’s declaration “our page is wanton but our life is clean”⁠[1524] is couched in terms similar to those used by Catullus and Ovid, and practically repeated by Pliny, Apuleius and Ausonius.⁠[1525] The attitude suggests that the author had no objection to giving readers the particular spice they wanted: sometimes a fine poem is marred by a gross jest reserved as a surprise.⁠[1526] Beside so much nauseating coarseness, the claim of ludimus innocui (VII. xii. 9) may sound ironical; yet this can be said by way of comment, if not of palliation—he is not a slanderer, for in general real names are avoided. If victims were foully satirized, it was left to themselves or others to fit the cap. He resents the impudent dishonesty of a verse-writer who “vomits viperous venom” under Martial’s name.⁠[1527]⁠

His character is too complex to be satisfactorily analysed on psychological principles. Whether one thinks of a super-man as well as a subter-man within the same self, or thinks of the surprising contradictions in him as liberated at different crises from the oubliettes of a chequered experience, the diversity of his genius remains beyond full explanation. If one side belonged to a realm where ethics and ideals seemed contraband, he presented another side in which sentiment under various aspects prevailed. Wrapped up with the sentiment on this more kindly and genial side there is admittedly some conventionality: the Greek tradition may act in one place, and the Latin tradition through poets like Catullus in another. A certain amount of sentiment may be due to the growth of more humane feelings in his age, as is traceable in Seneca. Yet a large portion must be ascribed to Martial’s own disposition. These phases of sentiment are most observable in his attitude to the dead, his genius for friendship, and his love of nature.

His best known epitaph, that on a little girl Erotion, bespeaks for her spirit in the land of shades the sheltering protection of Flaccilla and Fronto, his parents, who had gone before. It ends:

This conclusion, suggestive of the “sit terra tibi leuis” in sepulchral inscriptions, was twisted to malicious effect by Martial himself on a disreputable person:

Long afterwards it was parodied in reference to the massive buildings of the architect Vanbrugh:

A slave-boy is thus commemorated:

There is a manifest sense not merely of the poet’s personal loss but of the blow to the father of a youth from North Italy who has died in Asia Minor:

Kindly affection towards associates came easily to Martial. Q. Ovidius’s birthday and his own he considers

Enthusiasm animates his admiration for Decianus:

Again, in a brief review of an intimacy of thirty-four years with Julius Martialis, he finds it has contributed on the whole to happiness, but pathetically fights against the notion of making friendship too warm, lest its loss prove overwhelming:

Martial’s appreciation of the country was inspired by something deeper than the relief felt by a jaded town-dweller. His ideals may not have been mightily exalted, but he had the poet’s eye for landscape and colour, and therewith a gift of fancy. Nowhere does he seem more poetic in his attitude towards external nature than in his lines on Vesuvius visited some years after the terrible eruption of A.D. 79. The poem has the interest of treating volcanic soil, which made both a practical and an imaginative appeal to the Romans.⁠[1535] The poet’s recollection of the old fertile greenery and cool shadows of the vines (hic est pampineis uiridis modo Vesbius umbris) contrasts with the bare desolation of the land now buried beneath the mournful ashes of the volcano (cuncta iacent flammis et tristi mersa fauilla). Then an exquisite touch of romantic imagination pictures the vine-slopes as once haunted by the Wine-god, near the dancing-places of the Satyrs (moderns might fancy them as gnomes and elves)—a region where Pompeii enjoyed the patronage of the Queen of Love and Herculaneum was called after the renowned demi-god:

So the poem ends in a tone of heartfelt sorrow over beauty destroyed, while other pieces are full of a healthy delight in fresh air and country scenes. A plane-tree might set his fancy roaming into fairy-land:

Nature could bring him lively sensations of sight and smell, so that he scents the fragrance from the myrtle, from the vine flowering white in its first clusters, and from the grass newly nibbled by the sheep.⁠[1538] Such images for the moment at least shut out the revolting vices of the city.

His own career in retrospect, when he left Rome for ever, contained much to dissatisfy him. But though he had fallen short of the noblest ideals, his experience enabled him to appraise aright the value of a good conscience in a review of bygone years. To this thought he has given admirable expression:

The pith of style which contributed to Martial’s vogue in his own day has always kept his poems alive; for quotability favours the preservation of literary work. Among his memorable sayings, in addition to the couplet quoted, are “To live is not a life—one must live well” (non est uiuere sed ualere uita, VI. lxx. 15); “To-morrow’s life comes late—live then to-day” (sera nimis uita est crastina, uiue hodie, I. xv. 12); “Accept the lot thou hast—prefer naught else” (quod sis esse uelis nihilque malis, X. xlvii. 12); “He hath no home whose home is everywhere” (quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat, VII. lxxiii. 6), which suggests his curt apostrophe to the owner of a spacious but comfortless mansion, “How well you are—not housed!” (quam bene non habitas! XII. l. 8.) His dislike of shams appears in “There is a gulf ’twixt goodness and pretence” (refert sis bonus an uelis uideri, VIII. xxxviii. 7). Many sundials have repeated his reflection on the flight of “sunny days that are lost but set to our account” (soles ... qui nobis pereunt et imputantur, V. xx. 12-13); and there is educational wisdom in the hint “Boys who keep fit in summer learn enough” (aestate pueri si ualent satis discunt, X. lxii. 12). For literary production he values patronage: “Give us but patrons—Virgils will not fail” (sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones, VIII. lvi. 5); but he goes deeper when he says “To live, a book must have a soul within” (uicturus genium debet habere liber, VI. lxi. 10), which is in keeping with “’Tis not a reader your books need but Apollo” (non lectore tuis opus est sed Apolline libris, X. xxi. 3). On the risk of publishing too many books he reminds himself “The rare delights: so early fruits please best” (rara iuuant: primis sic maior gratia pomis, IV. xxix. 3).

Martial’s influence began to act on Juvenal,⁠[1540] and remained operative throughout antiquity. Fathers of the Church showed knowledge of him, and grammarians found illustrative material in his words and phrases. During the Renaissance he was much studied and edited. His hendecasyllabics were constantly imitated by the neo-Latin poets of Italy and France for satiric purposes. None followed more keenly in his steps than the Hungarian Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), who, besides modelling his epigrams in freedom of utterance upon Martial’s elegiacs and hendecasyllabics, enthusiastically praised him as a “father of wit” (ludorum pater et pater leporum)⁠[1541] to be invoked in preference to Apollo and the Muses. Alongside there also flows (what is present in Martial himself) the stream of Catullian influence observable in the easy though occasionally solecistic Basia of the Pancharis by Jean Bonnefons (Bonefonius) printed at Paris in 1587.

Then the influence passed over from Latin into the epigrammatic writing of all modern literatures. Even the couplets of the Xenia bore fruit; for from them sprang the sarcastic Xenien in which Goethe and Schiller confronted dullness and satirized their literary enemies. Although in quite recent times the epigram may have been less cultivated, in his own field Martial remains, as a pattern, supreme.

MINOR FLAVIAN POETS

The minor and lost poetry of the Flavian era reaches a considerable amount. Vespasian, though an enemy to philosophers, gave financial encouragement to rhetors and poets. Both his sons, Titus and Domitian, wrote poems; but the latter, after his accession, did little for poetry, unless we put to his credit the continuance of Capitoline and Alban competitions which ministered to his pride by eliciting laudatory verse. Curiatius Maternus, best known from Tacitus’s Dialogus, has been included among poets of the Neronian age, when his career as dramatist began. His tragedy of Thyestes, however, and his praetextae entitled Domitius and Cato belong to Vespasian’s reign. The epic poetry of Saleius Bassus may have been, like that of Valerius Flaccus, based on mythology. Statius’s father was more attracted by current themes.

Under Domitian, dilettanti might keep the path of safety, if they confined themselves to such compositions as erotic poems, conventional epic, eulogies and colourless occasional verse for recitation before friends or for public competitions or for private exchange with other literary men. The authors were the kind of persons whom we meet in Statius, Martial or the younger Pliny. A considerable list could be drawn up from these three sources; but it may suffice to select, in lyric, Vestricius Spurinna,⁠[1542] a military commander on Otho’s side; in epic, Julius Cerealis and the Codrus or Cordus whose Theseid is mentioned in Juvenal’s second line; in erotic verse, Verginius Rufus, an elderly friend of Pliny’s; Arruntius Stella, consul in 101, author of passionate poems on Violentilla, whom he afterwards married; and Calenus’s wife, Sulpicia, to whom the later so-called satire of Sulpicia in seventy hexameters should not be ascribed.⁠[1543] Turnus succeeded in writing satire and yet surviving at the court of Domitian.⁠[1544] His brother Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, we have seen, wrote tragedies, as did Canius Rufus, along with others mentioned by Martial and Juvenal. There are also traces of lost palliatae and togatae. Neither these, however, nor productions like the Agaue by Statius prove that there was any real renascence of drama. It had fallen on evil days.