Short answers, pulled from the story.
Martial, whose full name was Marcus Valerius Martialis, was a Roman and Celtiberian poet born in Augusta Bilbilis, in Hispania Tarraconensis, the province that is now Spain. He lived from sometime between 38 and 41 AD to between 102 and 104 AD, and is best known for his twelve books of Epigrams.
A total of 1,561 epigrams written by Martial have survived, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. The twelve books in which they appear were published in Rome between AD 86 and 103.
Martial's Epigrams satirise city life in imperial Rome, covering topics including the cruelty shown to slaves, incompetent doctors, the fire hazards of wooden buildings, and the social rituals of the patron-client system. They are also notable for their obscene language and biting wit, and stand alongside Roman graffiti as key sources of Latin obscene vocabulary.
Martial published his twelve major books of epigrams during the reigns of Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. He secured the favour of Domitian, who granted him equestrian rank through the semestris tribunatus, though Martial failed to win more substantial advantages. He published Book XI shortly after Nerva's accession in 96 and a revised Book X around the time of Trajan's entrance into Rome in 98.
Martial returned to Hispania in 98, driven by weariness of the demands his social position placed on him and by the difficulty of meeting ordinary living expenses in Rome. He wrote about looking forward to the scenes of his youth, though the prose epistle to Book XII reveals he could not live happily away from Rome's literary and social world for long.
Martial's epigrams were rediscovered during the Renaissance, when writers saw in them a parallel to the urban vices of their own times. His influence is found in late classical literature, the Carolingian revival, the French and Italian Renaissance, the Siglo de Oro, and early modern English and German poetry. The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of scholarly attention to his work.