Note 334 — Chapter VIII · THE TWO PLINYS—MARTIAL—WAS THE ROD JOINTED?

The client had to be at his patron’s house in the morning and attend him, there or anywhere, all day if necessary. It was an act of disrespect to appear before his patron without donning the toga. Cf. Juvenal, VII. 142, and VIII. 49; also I. 96 and 119, and X. 45, and Martial, Ep., X. 10. In prose the most caustic description of the client-and-patron institution may be found in Lucian, Nigrinus, 20-26. In Ep., XII. 18, to poor Juvenal dancing attendance in Rome on his patron and sweating in the requisite toga he recounts the many delights of his home in Spain: among them “ignota est toga,” a blazing fire of oak cut from the adjoining coppice, and lastly the venator or keeper, whose attractions in lines 22-3 do not appeal to the modern sportsman. I draw attention to these lines, because they reflect quite casually, but quite clearly, the decadent vices of the age: remember, they are not quotations from some obscure, if obscene, versifier, but were written (and published!) by the second poet to the first poet of that generation. It has been pointed out that in the epigrams of Martial with which Juvenal is connected some obscenity usually creeps in. Cf. Ep., VII. 91.