“Tanti non es,” ais! Sapis, Luperce.[191]
“Every time you meet me, Lupercus, you say something about sending a slave to my house to borrow a volume of my Epigrams. Do not give your slave the trouble. It is a long distance to my part of the city, and my rooms are high up on the third story. You can get what you want close to your abode. You often visit the quarter of the Argiletum. You will find there, near the Square of Cæsar, a shop the doors of which are covered on both sides with the names of poets, so arranged that you can at a glance run over the list. Enter there and mention my name. Without waiting to be asked twice, Atrectus, the master of the shop, will take from his first or second shelf a copy of Martial, well finished, and beautifully bound with a purple cover, and this he will give you in exchange for five deniers. What! Do you say it is not worth the price? O wise Lupercus!”
Martial takes occasion to recommend to another acquaintance (but on an entirely different ground) the propriety of purchasing rather than appropriating his productions.
He writes to a certain Fidentinus:
Fama refert nostros te, Fidentine, libellos
Non aliter populo quam recitare tuos.
Si mea vis dici, gratis tibi carmina mittam,
Si dici tua vis, haec eme, ne mea sint.[192]
“It is said, Fidentinus, that in reciting my verses you always speak of them as your own. If you are willing to credit them to me, I will send them to you gratis. If, however, you wish to have them called your verses, you had better buy them, when they will no longer belong to me.”
It is possible that Martial intends by this to suggest to Fidentinus the purchase of the author’s “rights” in these verses, “‘rights,’ which he was willing to sell for a price.” It is more probable, however, that he wanted to shame the plagiarist at least into the buying of some copies.