Martial. Marcus Valerius Martialis, one of the finest among the few original Latin poets, and still the first of epigrammatists in verse, was born 1st March 38 or 41 A.D., in Celtiberian Spain, at Bilbilis, famed as a steel factory, for which its iron-mines and ice-cold Salo torrent specially fitted it—a centre, too, of Roman culture, which afforded him the good education he got under the eye of his parents, Fronto and Flaccilla. Like other gifted young provincials, he repaired to Rome, where (64 A.D.) he became a client of the influential Spanish house of the Senecas, through which he found other patrons, among them L. Calpurnius Piso, the leading man of his day. The tragic failure of the Pisonian plot lost Martial his warmest friends—Lucan, and still more Seneca, from whose heirs, however, he doubtless derived the small wine-growing estate at Nomentum. Of his life till Domitian became emperor we know little, except that he never maintained himself by the steady professional work to which his compatriot Quintilian seems to have exhorted him, but rather courted imperial and senatorial patronage by his rare social gifts and his genius for vers de circonstance. When (80 A.D.) Titus, by a series of gladiatorial spectacles, dedicated the Colosseum to the annusement of Rome, Martial signalised the occasion by epigrams which brought him the jus trium liberorum and the equestrian rank—probably proposed by Titus, and afterwards confirmed by Domitian. Substantial independence, however, he did not obtain from either emperor, though his venal flattery of Domitian and of that despot's corrupt retinue was gross enough to leave a stain on his memory. In request as a diner-out, he divided his day between the baths, the theatres, the recitation-halls, and the composition of epigrams, and so far saw his ambition gratified as to count the most distinguished senators of the time among his friends, and all the litterati in city or province among his readers. Of envy and detraction he had, of course, his share; but what he most complained of was not, for instance, the jealousy of Statius, his young Neapolitan competitor for imperial favour, but the use of his name by malignant poetasters, who fathered on him their own libels on the leaders, including the ladies, of society. His life, indeed, was not a happy one—continually shadowed by that 'ignoble melancholy which arises from pecuniary embarrassment,' so that we find him importuning a patron even for a toga or a mantle. From 86 to 90 he had a lodging, three stories high, at the sign of the 'Fear' on the Quirinal, and in 94 a house of his own in the same quarter; while his Nomentan pied-à-terre, which, under better husbandry, might have yielded a living, was prized by him mainly as a retreat from the bores (or duns) of the city. During his thirty-four years of Roman life he seems to have made an excursion from it only once (in 87)—to Forum Corneli and other resorts in the Æmilia. But, by degrees, the capital, its cares and its pleasures, became irksome to him; advancing years bereft him of Domitian and his friends of the palace; and the austere Nerva and Trajan had to be conciliated by other and less congenial arts than the adulatory epigram. In a fit of nostalgia he borrowed from his admirer, the younger Pliny, the means of revisiting those haunts of childhood he had never forgotten—Bilbilis on the mountain-side overhanging the headlong Salo, the snowy peaks of the Sierras, the golden Tagus, the rich orchards, the awe-inspiring oak-forests—his home, with its frugal meals and simple joys. Here again his good genius found him patrons—among them the highly-cultured Marcella, who presented him with an estate, on which, with its grove, its fountain, its vineyard and rosary, its kitchen-garden, its fish-pond and dovecot, he led an idyllic life. But the vita muni-eipalis palled on him once more, and even in such surroundings we find him fretting for the vita urbana and angling for patrons in that distant world of theatres and libraries, cultured connoisseurs, and social dissipation he was never again to see. Baulked of his wish to attain his seventy-fifth year, he died, at latest, in 104, aged sixty-three or sixty-six.
Martial possessed, for good and evil, the artistic temperament, its lack of steady purpose, its love of hand-to-mouth independence. This latter he enjoyed by humouring the contemporary vices he could not reform, though, conscience-stricken, he excuses himself on the ground that if his 'page were wanton, his life was honest.' Much of his best work, unfortunately, is his least pure, and this has produced an exaggerated impression of his moral turpitude. If, however, we excise 150 epigrams from the 1172 of the first twelve books, his collective writings (including his early 'spectacular' epigrams and his Xenia and Apophoreta) are free from licentiousness. On the other hand, his genius and skill in verse it were hard to overestimate. An improvisatore in readiness, he could attain to the most fastidious finish; with his love of antithetic shocks and electric surprises, he had the true poet's eye for nature; he could alternate the organ-note of a masterful eloquence with minor tones of the most tremulous pathos—witness his epigrams on 'Arria and Pætus,' on 'Pompeii,' on his little slave-girl 'Eroton,' and on 'Formice' with its lovely seaboard. But it is as an epigrammatist, even in its modern and restricted sense, that he remains without a peer, wielding a weapon peculiarly his own, bright and pointed as a rapier from the anvils of his native Bilbilis, chastened in the rushing Salo. Unequal, of course, he often is, but never vulgar—rarely (it has been well observed) with all his sense of the ridiculous degenerating into caricature. He lifts the veil from the Rome of Domitian and exposes it mainly on its seamy side, with a Hogarthian vividness not outdone by Juvenal himself.
Martial has had to wait long for an adequate commentator, and has found him in the author of the Stittengeschichte Roms, Ludwig Friedländer, who alone combined the critical power and the archaeological knowledge necessary for the task. The same writer's M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton Libri mit erklärenden Anmerkungen (2 vols. Leip. 1886) furnishes the student of Martial with every help available—the editor's own work reinforced by that of the best of his predecessors and contemporaries, including the illustrious Cambridge scholar, Munro, to whom the edition appropriately is dedicated.