Before we come to Martial, let us pause a moment over the Greek Anthology, of which some parts, no doubt, were written later than his day, but others must share with Catullus the honor of suggesting to the brilliant Spaniard the right conception of the epigram, as well as the appropriate treatment. Unlike Horace, however, Martial rarely condescended to borrow either thought or expression from a foreign source. We may say of him, and more truthfully, what Denham said of Cowley, that he “melted not the ancient gold.” Perhaps the most famous epigram in the Anthology is that on a picture of Pythagoras. It has been a dozen times translated into Latin or expanded in Greek, but generally with indifferent success:
Αὐτὸν Πυθαγόρην ὁ ζωγράφος ὃν μετὰ φωνῆς
Εἶδες ἂν εἴγε λαλεῖν ἤθελε Πυθαγόρης.
Most of the versions require four lines, and some eight, to project the idea, and only two that we have seen matches the original in compression; here is one of them, by Hugo Grotius:
Ipsum Pythagoram dat cernere pictor et ipsum
Audires sed enim non cupit ipse loqui.
The objection to this is—and it lies to the Greek as well—we are asked to imagine that Pythagoras expressly desired to be depicted silent, in other words, requested the painter not to perform an impossibility—which is very like an absurdity. The true idea, and one that gives point and beauty to the compliment, is rather this, that since a prime tenet of the Pythagoreans was the maintenance of a thoughtful silence and a wise reserve, it would have been false to the mental posture of the man, and therefore bad art (supposing it to have been possible) to have represented him otherwise than in speechless meditation. We have attempted to give some such turn to the thought in English elegiacs.
There Pythagoras stands to the life! Be sure we should hear him
Speak—but Pythagoras taught wisdom in silence to muse.
It is no mean honor to be indisputably the first in any line of art, and certainly within the field of the epigram Martial is prince of poets. He conceived the form of poetry to which he devoted his life to possess much more of dignity and importance than we incline to allow it, and he did much to make good his claim. He held towards previous epigrammatists the same commanding position which Dante holds towards Sicilian and Provençal poets, or Marot towards the Trouvères, and he wrought the epigram to that climax of perfection from which progress means nothing but decline. He filed and fitted his lines with a punctilious care which we should expect to betray itself, yet his verse flows with a limpid ease through which the eye seeks in vain the labor that smoothed the channel. We may call him in simple justice what Bulwer called Addison:
Exquisite genius, to whose chiselled line
The ivory’s polish lends the ivory’s shine!
To hope to reflect in a translation the gleam and edge of Martial would be absurd. We shall merely aim in a general way, while preserving the metre, to sketch the outlines of the central thought. If our readers miss the bloom on the rose, we at least cannot help them. They must seek the garden where it grew, and pluck it for themselves.
In the course of a long residence in Rome, Martial seems to have suffered the usual vicissitudes of authors, and sometimes in moments of eclipse found his friends more willing to reproach than to relieve him. He fancies he detects a reason for it: