[330] Cf. Martial, Epist., X. 30, 17,
“Nec saeta longo quærit in mari prædam Sed e cubili lectuloque iactatam Spectatus alte lineam trahit piscis.”
[331] Epist., V. 7.
[332] P. Lund, The Lake of Como (London, 1910), p. 23, refers to P. Giovio, De Piscibus Romanis, c. 38.
[333] Latin Literature (1906), p. 193. “Martial’s gift for occasional verse just enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city: in later years he could just afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills.” This three-pair-back theory seems a bit strained, for he often speaks of his Nomentanus ager, a small farm at Nomentum, which yielded excellent wine. Cf. Ep., II. 38; VI. 43; XIII. 119. He owned, in addition to a house in Rome, apparently another small place at Tibur (IV. 80); so his complaints of being a “pauper” must be understood only in a relative sense. Thither he goes chiefly, he delicately insinuates, for the pleasure of seeing Ovid, who was his neighbour there. Cf. also VII. 93.
[334] The client had to be at his patron’s house in the morning and attend him, there or anywhere, all day if necessary. It was an act of disrespect to appear before his patron without donning the toga. Cf. Juvenal, VII. 142, and VIII. 49; also I. 96 and 119, and X. 45, and Martial, Ep., X. 10. In prose the most caustic description of the client-and-patron institution may be found in Lucian, Nigrinus, 20-26. In Ep., XII. 18, to poor Juvenal dancing attendance in Rome on his patron and sweating in the requisite toga he recounts the many delights of his home in Spain: among them “ignota est toga,” a blazing fire of oak cut from the adjoining coppice, and lastly the venator or keeper, whose attractions in lines 22-3 do not appeal to the modern sportsman. I draw attention to these lines, because they reflect quite casually, but quite clearly, the decadent vices of the age: remember, they are not quotations from some obscure, if obscene, versifier, but were written (and published!) by the second poet to the first poet of that generation. It has been pointed out that in the epigrams of Martial with which Juvenal is connected some obscenity usually creeps in. Cf. Ep., VII. 91.
[335] Ep., III. 58, 26,
“Sed tendit avidis rete subdolum turdis Tremulave captum linea trahit piscem”.
[336] Cf. Ep. VI. 11, 5, and III. 60, 3, and XII. 48, 4.
[337] Ep., V. 37, 3.