Chapter VII: Martial and Minor Flavian Poetry

Martial’s career—Poetry and patronage—Order of his
books—Numeration and fresh editions by the author—His
personality—Relation of literary trifles to real life—Distaste
for epic—Varied assortment of Flavian types—Contemporary
Rome envisaged—The humorous and incongruous—Martial’s
friends—The epigram before him—His impress on it—Verse-forms
and sources—Comparative absence of rhetoric—Simplicity,
wit, polish combined—Pointed end in an epigram—Confidence
in popularity and immortality—Sense of wasted time—Double
nemesis of his two great faults—Adulation and coarseness—The
sentimental side—Poems on the dead—On friendship—On natural
scenery—Quotability—His influence.

Minor Flavian poetry—Maternus’s post-Neronian plays—Saleius
Bassus—Poets under Domitian—Lyrics by Spurinna—Epics by
Cerealis and Codrus—Erotic poems by Verginius Rufus, Arruntius
Stella and Sulpicia—Satires by Turnus—Tragedies by Scaeva Memor
and Canius Rufus.

MARTIAL

M. Valerius Martialis[1444] was a native of Bilbilis in Spain. In his tenth book, which belongs to A.D. 95-98, he celebrates his fifty-seventh anniversary,[1445] so that his birth fell between 38 and 41. His cognomem was due to his having been born on the first of March.[1446] While he claimed descent from Iberians and Celts,[1447] his name indicates Roman citizenship. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla,[1448] secured for him a literary education to which he owed an incalculable debt, although in a fit of cynical depression in his fifties he says:

My foolish parents taught me poetry,
But what were dominies and dons to me?[1449]

Already intellectually well-equipped when over twenty, he left Spain in _A.D._ 64 to find a wider scope for his abilities in Rome, which had grown so cosmopolitan that its population struck his fellow-Spaniard Seneca as made up more of foreigners than of citizens.[1450] This first immigrant—a young “compatriot of the Tagus” with bristling Spanish hair, as he describes himself[1451]—had before him a reasonable prospect of success as a lawyer or a speaker; but he did not choose to employ his training in oratory. What attracted him was verse-writing, with the patronage which verse might win. The common link with Spain explains why Seneca and Lucan were his earliest patrons; but the introduction to society in the capital begun under such auspices was followed next year by the ruinous implication of both patrons in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. The career to which he had turned, or drifted, was sure to be one of vicissitude and disillusion; and Martial had frequent cause to recognize that only the few among clever poets or obsequious clients could scrape a living, while the rest starved (_pallet cetera turba fame_).[1452]

We read of juvenile productions which an enthusiastic bookseller would not let die;[1453] but virtually Martial’s life is a blank for the first sixteen years of his residence in Rome (A.D. 64-80). What his works make certain is that he gained an intimate acquaintance with all grades of society, the highest and the lowest. Some honours came his way, of a kind that indicate his possession of more influence than money. He became a _tribunus_, perhaps without having seen military service; he was confirmed in the resultant title of _eques_ without possessing the means to support the position;[1454] and he had obtained from two emperors the _ius trium liberorum_[1455] without being a father—in fact, the tone of his work throughout argues the bachelor.[1456] It is doubtful if his plot of farmland at Nomentum was in his hands early enough to have been a gift from Seneca, as has been guessed; but whether it came from him, or from Lucan’s widow Polla, or from some one else, it must have often afforded a welcome change after his three pair back-room in the sweltering city.[1457] Later, he had a small house of his own on the Quirinal.[1458] Neither from Caesar, however, nor from grandee did Martial ever obtain as much as he expected and craved. As it was, he survived by adroitness in courting the favour of well-to-do citizens so as to earn personal presents or the dole of the _sportula_. If he was temperamentally unfit to do anything but write verse, it is hard to see what other opening there was, apart from a way of life indistinguishable from sponging. For the surmise that he practised at the bar there is no justification either in the advice he quotes from a person whom he asked for a loan, “if you want to be rich, plead cases,” or in the similar counsel from Quintilian.[1459] In spite of the fact that his verses had a sale, there was no such reading public as could ensure returns adequate for his maintenance: so pique at times made him argue that, if money-making is the supreme object, parents ought not to spend on education: much better make a boy something practical, a musician, an auctioneer, or an architect.[1460] For himself, he felt obliged to live, whatever scoffers might say about the necessity; and consequently had to capture patrons to be the props of his subsistence and, as he believed, the indispensable conditions of poetic production (_sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones_).

His first publication known to us was the _Liber Spectaculorum_ of A.D. 80 which commemorated the opening by Titus of the Flavian Amphitheatre familiar now as the Colosseum. Though anything but inspired, the surviving thirty-three poems of this group throw interesting light on the contests of the arena. Some four years later appeared the collections, almost entirely of couplets, which are usually printed in defiance of chronology, as Books XIII and XIV of the _Epigrams_. They owed their occasion to the _Saturnalia_ in December, when gifts might be sent to guests (_Xenia_) or taken home from the festive board (_Apophoreta_). The 127 pieces of the one, and 223 of the other were nearly all meant as suitable mottoes for such presents. Luckily Martial was capable of cleverer work. Epigrams of his had appeared before 86 when he published, perhaps together, the first two books of those which made his fame. Allusions enable us to date his volumes with fair closeness, and, while there are a few complications due to revised editions and collected issues, it is broadly true that from 86 until his return to Spain in 98 he brought out a new book about once a year. Taken together, his poems, few of them other than quite short, constitute one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches that have ever made a past society live again in the mind’s eye. While grace in the sight of the emperor commended him to those in high places, including the worst creatures at court like the notorious Crispinus and Paris, there were many at the other end of the social scale, needy and seedy outcasts, to whom Martial’s Bohemian indigence introduced him. He observed all. He is one of the great spectators in literature. But the vanity of the whole spectacle recurrently depressed him. Unremunerative attendance at the receptions of the great as well as disgust at loathsome vices which he exposes, contributed towards his tedium. Once weariness drove him to Cisalpine Gaul, whence he issued an edition of Book III.[1461] In the very next book[1462] he is hankering after Venetia as a retreat for his old age. Yet years passed before he could tear himself away from Rome, where, despite its drawbacks, he knew all the literary men of the day. At last in 98 the sense of monotony told. The ordinary expenses of life seemed as hard to meet as ever, and the old scenes in Spain, never wholly forgotten during more than the third of a century, came back now with alluring insistence to his mind:

While four-and-thirty harvests passed away,
Others gave Ceres rustic cakes at home;
But I, inhabiting fair sovran Rome,
Have turned in Italy from dark to grey.[1463]

Perhaps too some occult warfare in his soul between spirit and sense made him realize, as never before, the emptiness of the life around. At any rate the Flavian régime had suited him best; for under Nerva and Trajan a new age had dawned, when sycophantic blandishments were futile and _rustica ueritas_ had been restored (X. lxxii). His well-to-do friend, the younger Pliny, found money for the impecunious poet’s journey to Spain. There, settled at Bilbilis on land granted to him by a patroness Marcella, he could indulge to the full that yearning for a quiet retreat which he revealed in lines addressed to the great satirist of the time:

Mayhap, my Juvenal, your feet
Stray down some noisy Roman street,
While after many years of Rome
I have regained my Spanish home.
Bilbilis, rich in steel and gold,
Makes me a rustic as of old....
Outrageous lengths of sleep I take
And oft refuse at nine to wake.
I pay myself nor more nor less
For thirty years of wakefulness.[1464]

Missing the stimulus of the capital, he let three years elapse before his twelfth and last book was sent out from Spain in 102. He did not long survive its publication; for Pliny in a letter belonging to A.D. 104 mentions his death, adding the criticism that he was a man of talent, subtlety and vigour, whose writing was characterized by abundance of wit and pungency, but no less good nature.[1465]

The form in which Martial’s works have come down calls for brief remark. Imperfect though the book of _Spectacula_ is, the missing portions are perhaps a greater loss to archaeology than to literature. In the _Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_, unlike the later books, short headings (_lemmata_) are given to which the reader is facetiously told he may, if he likes, confine himself; and the presents of the _Apophoreta_ are arranged in pairs, expensive and less expensive. As regards the existing division into books, the numeration was Martial’s own,[1466] though some books, as we have them, are not exactly as originally issued. For instance it is inconceivable that his first book was from the beginning entitled “Liber Primus,” with the implication that he was certain of success enough to justify future issues; still less is it conceivable that in the original issue of his first book he could have been described as _toto notus in orbe Martialis_. His preface to Book II, which defends the innovation of an introductory prose epistle, reads as if it were written before the preface to Book I; and this latter preface, by speaking of “little books” (_libelli_) in the plural, suggests that it could not have been added till more than one book of epigrams had appeared—probably when a collected edition of I-VII was issued. Among the later books, X and XI, originally belonging to A.D. 95 and 96 respectively, had an Anthology made from them in 97; and a second edition of X came out in 98.[1467] Interesting prose prefaces are given to Books I, II, VIII and XII, while a few lines of prose at the opening of IX introduce verses for the poet’s bust in Stertinius’s library. The preface to I offers an apology for the coarse outspokenness in the epigrams, with a significant list of literary predecessors; that to Book II is, as mentioned, an apology for an introductory epistle, in answer to the objection _epigrammata curione non egent_; that to VIII professes that there has been less indulgence here than elsewhere in the licence of the mime; and the last preface is an apology for slackness in publishing, since Martial’s retreat to Spain has deprived him of his stimulating Roman environment.

Martial, in his epigrams, reveals himself, and, even more, the company he kept. With him we enjoy the luxury of an intimacy unusual among writers of the Silver Age. Seneca, it may be said, opens his philosophic heart, yet he does not make—it is hardly imaginable that under Nero he should make—a complete self-revelation. Juvenal’s outspokenness is that of indignant censure rather than of personal confession. But Martial is naked and unashamed: he does not hide his thoughts, and even those quick flashes in which he divines the thoughts of others still further illuminate his own. Thus his personality is reflected in his themes, and is inseparable from the things he described and the men he loved or hated. A spectator of life, he was yet no detached spectator, but in a sense a part of his own observations, so that his resolve to reflect his surroundings leaves him at the same time essentially autobiographic. We become familiar, then, with his poverty, his mendicancy, his contempt for shams, his confidence in his literary powers, his pride in Spain, his determination to pander to readers by spicy attacks on the uncleanest vices. At times he seems a sort of Villon, never so much of a gallows-bird as the French poet, nor ever master of so deep a note of anguish, but yet like him in Bohemian neediness and in direct vigour of style.

In the last resort, the key to his personality, to his style, to his reputation, to everything that matters respecting Martial, is to be found in this attitude towards life. Life afforded the inexhaustible material whence he recognized it was his special _métier_ to draw. His brief poems—some of them butterfly flights as brief as Japanese _tankas_—might be trivialities, but they at least sprang from the actual. There is a sort of double antinomy in him. On the one hand, he often calls his verses _nugae_ or _ioci_, as if he made no higher claim for them than the knack of amusing; yet he is insistent that they are not mere flippancies:

He misses what is meant by epigram
Who thinks it only frivolous flim-flam.[1468]

On the other hand, he explains elsewhere[1469] that he could write seriously, but prefers to write entertainingly—the secret of his vogue. At the same time, he cannot make a living out of pleasantries: instead, he gets praise and starves:[1470] so he jocularly even threatens to turn lawyer! In fact, however, though he said, and showed, that he could write seriously, he seldom chose to. The sportive, the flippant, the ludicrous, and often the indecent appealed to him irresistibly; for the truth is that he wrote, like all literary artists, because it was his pleasure:

For all their compliments, do verses pay?
They mayn’t, yet these same poems make me gay.[1471]

But he would not have been human, he would certainly not have been Martial, if he had not expected an adequate return from verses that entertained or flattered; and occasionally his tone appears to meditate a sort of literary strike—_pas d’argent, pas de poésie_:

A man on whom my poetry
Pronounced a handsome eulogy
Pretends that he owes naught to me—
I call this downright trickery![1472]

No writer ever more clearly recognized his field. In the third poem of