Quem non ignoras, sed puto lector amas:
Majores majora sonent, mihi parva locuto
Sufficit in vestras sæpe redire manus.”
Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.
The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii. 77, where, not in the best temper |Précis of their critical contents.| (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them. Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. He can reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no mere bombast in his book: his Muse is not frounced with senseless tragic train.[[335]] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise them: but they read me,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O Martial!] men do not “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation of Corinna.[[336]] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[[337]] in epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of literature. In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal” verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one.
Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that æqualis mediocritas which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it will not be unfair to allow to æqualis also its other sense of “unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the equivalence with malus of the last line.[[338]] Martial specially and critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the celestial verecundia of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the naughtier epigrams.
The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread, and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume (probably Thalia, certainly not one of the Musæ severiores), upbraids him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen, arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.
This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line—
“Sint[[339]] Mæcenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones”—
and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no, perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue on Tibullus—