“Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua Tibulle”—
with two or three other fragments, we possess.[[340]] And the same doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.
Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm of the name[[341]] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then adds—
“Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetæ,
Sed Græci, quibus est nihil negatum
Et quos Ἄρες ἄρες decet sonare:
Nobis non licet esse tam disertis,
Qui Musas colimus severiores.”
There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the two great poetical languages of the world.[[342]] If he would have developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length, we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue, however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them) disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book, which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished (exactos). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if he had.
The Tenth book is particularly rich in literary epigrams. It opens with a batch of them,—one of his pleasant excuses for yet another reappearance (the pieces are so short that if you don’t like the book you can lay it down as finished at any moment), an honest indication of the fact that some of the epigrams are only new editions, so to speak, of old ones, smoothed with a recent file, one of the not disagreeably boasting reminders that letters outlive brass and marble (a boast justified in his own case, but not so, alas! in those of Marsus and others whom he admitted as his masters), a strongly worded protest against some clandestine poet who has been forging bad epigrams in his name, a repetition of the old contemptuous pooh-poohing of stock Greek subjects, and the old exhortation to study the life. The 19th, in a pleasant envoy of the book to Pliny, bids the Muse who carries it observe her time, and not disturb the grave man at his graver hours. The 21st is an expostulation with a certain Sextus, who seems to have prided himself on the eccentric vocabulary of his poems. What is the use of writing so that Modestus and Claranus themselves (known men of learning) can scarcely understand you, and so that your books demand not an ordinary reader but the Delphic Apollo? You would prefer to Virgil Cinna—Helvius Cinna, whose fancy for out-of-the-way words we can see, even in the petty wreckage of his work that time has fated to us.[[343]] Perhaps, Martial admits, such poems may be praised; but he would rather have grammarians like his work, and not be necessary to its liking.[[344]] The 35th is a specially graceful compliment to the poetess Sulpicia, who wrote her love poems (apparently rather warm ones[[345]]) to her husband only, and with whom, says Martial, for schoolmate or schoolmistress, Sappho herself would have been doctior et pudica—a right happy blending of comparative and positive. 70 is a quaint apology, not for writing so much but for writing so little, the satire of which is so ingeniously airy that it is possible to interpret its irony in more ways than one. Potitus calls him lazy because he does not bring out more than one book a-year. What time has a man to write poetry? Calls and congratulations (which, somehow, he does not find returned), attendances at religious and official functions, listening the whole day long to other poets, to advocates, to declaimers, to very grammarians, the bath, the sportula—why, the whole day slips away sometimes without one’s being able to settle to work at all!