Martial

• 1. Introduction

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  Martial, the Roman poet born in Bilbilis in Hispania, left behind 1,561 epigrams that read less like literature and more like dispatches from the crowded, stinking, brilliant heart of imperial Rome. He wrote about landlords who committed arson for insurance money, doctors whose patients kept dying, masters who flogged their cooks over trivial mistakes. He catalogued the urban vices of his age with a precision no one before him had attempted. How did a provincial from what is now Spain become the defining voice of city life in the ancient world? And why, after centuries of neglect, does his work keep pulling readers back?

• 2. A Hispanian in Rome

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  In AD 64, Martial left Bilbilis and arrived in Rome. His hometown was Augusta Bilbilis, in the province of Hispania Tarraconensis, a region that had already produced some of the most celebrated Latin writers of the first century: Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Lucan, and Quintilian. Martial described himself as "sprung from the Celts and Iberians, and a countryman of the Tagus," and in one poem he drew particular attention to "his stiff Hispanian hair" when contrasting himself with an effeminate Greek.

  Seneca the Younger and Lucan may have served as his first patrons when he arrived in the city, though the evidence is uncertain. For the first twenty or so years in Rome, the record of his life is thin. He published some early poems that he later dismissed, and he chuckled at a bookseller too stubborn to let those juvenilia die quietly.

  What is clear is that Rome shaped him. He lived at first up three flights of stairs in a garret overlooking the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He would eventually acquire a small villa near Nomentum in the Sabine territory, and later a small house on the Quirinal near the temple of Quirinus. But the city itself, its baths, brothels, market stalls, public houses and clubs, became the raw material of everything he wrote.

• 3. Emperors and Patrons

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  Martial secured the favour of both Titus and Domitian, and from them he obtained real, concrete rewards. Among those rewards was the semestris tribunatus, a post that conferred equestrian rank on him. He also used his access to Domitian to win the privilege of citizenship for other people who appealed to him for help. He commemorated the glory of having been invited to dinner by the emperor.

  Yet he never won the more substantial advantages he sought from Domitian, and the favour of the emperor came with uncomfortable company. It brought him into contact with figures like the notorious Crispinus, and probably with Paris, who was widely thought to have caused the poet Juvenal's exile. Martial later wrote a eulogistic epitaph for Paris's monument.

  The relationship between a poet and his patron was, in Roman tradition, considered entirely honourable. Virgil and Horace had accepted the favours of Augustus and Maecenas without shame. But by Martial's time, something had shifted. Men of good birth and high official position were accepting the sportula, a simple cash dole handed out by wealthy patrons. Martial was following that general fashion, accompanying his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur, attending their morning levees. As he grew older he stopped attending in person and sent a poem instead.

  Book XI appeared at the end of 96, shortly after Nerva came to power, and a revised edition of Book X appeared in 98, around the time of Trajan's entrance into Rome. Martial turned on Domitian immediately after his death, which struck some readers as opportunistic. He censured the emperors he had flattered, and Pliny the Younger, a friend, wrote on hearing of Martial's death that "he had as much good nature as wit and pungency in his writings."

• 4. The Epigrams Themselves

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  Martial's earliest surviving work, the Liber spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum under Titus, though the version that survives was published around the first year of Domitian's reign, about AD 81. Two further books, numbered XIII and XIV by later editors and known as Xenia and Apophoreta, were published at the Saturnalia of 84. These were essentially inscriptions in two lines each for gifts. In 86 he produced the first two of the twelve books on which his lasting reputation rests, and from that point he published a volume almost every year until his return to Hispania in 98.

  Of the 1,561 epigrams that have survived, 1,235 are written in elegiac couplets. The subjects range from the cruelty shown to slaves to the fire hazards of wooden buildings, from scorn for incompetent doctors to sharp insults aimed at identifiable figures in Roman society. He professed to avoid targeting real individuals by name, and he listed honesty and sincerity as the qualities he most admired in his friends.

  Yet the epigrams are also, by any measure, frequently obscene, and they stand alongside Roman graffiti as key sources of Latin obscene vocabulary. This combination of moral seriousness and scatological humour gave Martial the reputation of being the original insult comic of literary history. Translations by writers including Mark Ynys-Mon have brought some of his more pointed work to modern readers who lack Latin.

• 5. The Pull of Rome

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  In the early years of producing his major books, Martial retired briefly to Cisalpine Gaul out of weariness with his unprofitable attendance on the powerful. He contemplated, in Book IV, the prospect of settling near Aquileia and the Timavus. The poems he sent from Forum Corneli and the Aemilian Way during this period ring, despite their datelines, entirely of Rome.

  His final departure from Rome, in 98, was driven by a combination of exhaustion and financial difficulty. He looked forward to returning to the scenes of his youth. The epigram addressed to Juvenal, recorded as Mart. 12. 18, shows that for a time the homecoming delivered what he had hoped. But the prose epistle prefixed to Book XII tells a different story: he could not live happily away from Rome's literary and social world for long.

  In Hispania, the one consolation he writes about is a woman named Marcella, described in terms that are notably platonic, as if she were his patroness rather than a wife or mistress. That Martial always needed a patron or patroness, he seemed to recognise as simply a fact of his own nature. His last book was written after three years back in Hispania, shortly before his death around AD 102 or 103.

• 6. Afterlife and Influence

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  Martial's epigrams were rediscovered during the Renaissance, when writers recognised in his eye for urban vice a mirror for their own cities. His influence extended to late classical literature, the Carolingian revival, the French and Italian Renaissance, the Siglo de Oro in Spain, and early modern English and German poetry. The rise of the Romantic movement eventually pushed him out of fashion: his blunt, worldly, urban sensibility sat poorly with an era that preferred nature and feeling.

  Among his contemporaries, Martial was friends with Silius Italicus, Juvenal, and Pliny the Younger. His relationship with the poet Statius was notably cool. Martial showed undisguised contempt for the kind of artificial epic on which Statius built his reputation, and Statius, the respectable author of the Thebaid and the Silvae, appeared to return the sentiment. Two writers sharing the same city and the same circle of friends who were largely silent about each other.

  Martial traced his own poetic lineage to Catullus, Pedo, and Marsus. His skill in shaping the epigram form was, in his own estimation and in that of later critics, unmatched. The twenty-first century has brought renewed scholarly attention to his work, and the twelve books published between AD 86 and 103 remain the primary surviving record of what daily life in imperial Rome actually looked and sounded like from the streets.