During his life at Rome, although he never rose to a position of real independence, and had always a hard struggle with poverty, he seems to have known everybody, especially every one of any eminence at the bar or in literature. In addition to Lucan and Quintilian, he numbered among his friends or more intimate acquaintances Silius Italicus, Juvenal, the younger Pliny; and there were many others of high position whose society and patronage he enjoyed. The silence which he and Statius, although authors writing at the same time, having common friends and treating often of the same subjects, maintain in regard to one another may be explained by mutual dislike or want of sympathy. Martial in many places shows an undisguised contempt for the artificial kind of epic on which Statius’s reputation chiefly rests; and it seems quite natural that the respectable author of the Thebaid and the Silvae should feel little admiration for either the life or the works of the Bohemian epigrammatist.
Martial’s faults are of the most glaring kind, and are exhibited without the least concealment. Living under perhaps the worst of the many bad emperors who ruled the world in the 1st century, he addresses him and his favourites with the most servile flattery in his lifetime, censures him immediately after his death (xii. 6), and offers incense at the shrine of his successor. He is not ashamed to be dependent on his wealthy friends and patrons for gifts of money, for his dinner, and even for his dress. We cannot feel sure that even what seem his sincerest tributes of regard may not be prompted by the hope of payment. Further, there are in every book epigrams which cannot be read with any other feelings than those of extreme distaste.
These faults are so unmistakable and undeniable that many have formed their whole estimate of Martial from them, and have declined to make any further acquaintance with him. Even those who greatly admire his genius, and find the freshest interest in his representation of Roman life and his sketches of manners and character, do not attempt to palliate his faults, though they may partially account for them by reference to the morals of his age and the circumstances of his life. The age was one when literature had either to be silent or to be servile. Martial was essentially a man of letters: he was bound either to gain favour by his writings or to starve. Even Statius, whose writings are in other respects irreproachable, is nearly as fulsome in his adulation. The relation of client to patron had been recognized as an honourable one by the best Roman traditions. No blame had attached to Virgil or Horace on account of the favours which they received from Augustus and Maecenas, or of the return which they made for these favours in their verse. That old honourable relationship had, however, greatly changed between Augustus and Domitian. Men of good birth and education, and sometimes even of high official position (Juv. i. 117), accepted the dole (sportula). Martial was merely following a general fashion in paying his court to “a lord,” and he made the best of the custom. In his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur, and to attend their morning levées. Later on he went to his own small country house, near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative at the early visit. The fault of grossness Martial shares with nearly all ancient and many modern writers who treat of life from the baser or more ridiculous side. That he offends more than perhaps any of them is not, apparently, to be explained on the ground that he had to amuse a peculiarly corrupt public. Although there is the most cynical effrontery and want of self-respect in Martial’s use of language, there is not much trace of the satyr in him—much less, many readers will think, than in Juvenal.
It remains to ask, What were those qualities of nature and intellect which enable us to read his best work—even the great body of his work—with the freshest sense of pleasure in the present day? He had the keenest capacity for enjoyment, the keenest curiosity and power of observation. He had also a very just discernment. It is rare to find any one endowed with so quick a perception of the ridiculous who is so little of a caricaturist. He was himself singularly free from cant, pedantry or affectation of any kind. Though tolerant of most vices, he had a hearty scorn of hypocrisy. There are few better satirists of social and literary pretenders in ancient or modern times. Living in a very artificial age, he was quite natural, hating pomp and show, and desiring to secure in life only what really gave him pleasure. To live one’s own life heartily from day to day without looking before or after, and to be one’s self without trying to be that for which nature did not intend him, is the sum of his philosophy. Further, while tolerant of much that is bad and base—the characters of Crispinus and Regulus, for instance—he shows himself genuinely grateful for kindness and appreciative of excellence. He has no bitterness, malice or envy in his composition. He professes to avoid personalities in his satire;—“Ludimus innocui” is the character he claims for it. Pliny, in the short tribute which he pays to him on hearing of his death, says, “He had as much good-nature as wit and pungency in his writings” (Ep. iii. 21).
Honour and sincerity (fides and simplicitas) are the qualities which he most admires in his friends. Though many of his epigrams indicate a cynical disbelief in the character of women, yet others prove that he could respect and almost reverence a refined and courteous lady. His own life in Rome afforded him no experience of domestic virtue; but his epigrams show that, even in the age which is known to modern readers chiefly from the Satires of Juvenal, virtue was recognized as the purest source of happiness. The tenderest element in Martial’s nature seems, however, to have been his affection for children and for his dependents.
The permanent literary interest of Martial’s epigrams arises not so much from their verbal brilliancy, though in this they are unsurpassed, as from the amount of human life and character which they contain. He, better than any other writer, enables us to revive the outward spectacle of the imperial Rome. If Juvenal enforces the lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer pencil and from a much more intimate contact with it. Martial was to Rome in the decay of its ancient virtue and patriotism what Menander was to Athens in its decline. They were both men of cosmopolitan rather than of a national type, and had a closer affinity to the life of Paris or London in the 18th century than to that of Rome in the days of the Scipios or of Athens in the age of Pericles. The form of epigram was fitted to the critical temper of Rome as the comedy of manners was fitted to the dramatic genius of Greece. Martial professes to be of the school of Catullus, Pedo, and Marsus, and admits his inferiority only to the first. But, though he is a poet of a less pure and genuine inspiration he is a greater epigrammatist even than his master. Indeed the epigram bears to this day the form impressed upon it by his unrivalled skill.
Authorities.—The MSS. of Martial are divided by editors into three families according to the recension of the text which they offer. Of these the oldest and best is represented by three MSS. which contain only selected extracts. The second family is derived from an inferior source, a MS. which was edited in A.D. 401 by Torquatus Gennadius; it comprises four MSS. and contains the whole of the text. The third family, of which the MSS. are very numerous, also contains the whole of the text in a recension slightly different from that of the other two; the best representative of this family is the MS. preserved in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh.
The best separate edition of the text is that of Lindsay (Oxford, 1902); earlier editions of importance are those of Schneidewin (1842 and 1853), and of Gilbert (Leipzig, 1886). The best commentary is that of L. Friedländer (Leipzig, 1886) in two volumes with German notes) and in the same scholar’s Sittengeschichte Roms much will be found that explains and illustrates Martial’s epigrams. There is a large selection from the epigrams with English notes by Paley and Stone (1875), a smaller selection with notes by Stephenson (1880); see also Edwin Post, Selected Epigrams of Martial (1908), with introduction and notes. The translation into English verse by Elphinston (London, 1782) is famous for its absurdity, which drew an epigram from Burns.
(W. Y. S.)
