Martial Epigrams

THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY EDITED BY E.CAPPS, PH.D., LL.I). T. E. PAGE, Lrrr.D. W. IT. I). ROUSE, Lnr.D. MARTIAL EPIGRAMS I MARTIAL EPIGRAMS WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY WALTER C. A. KER, M.A. SOMETIMB SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE OK THK INNKR TEMPI.K, BARRISTER-AT-LAW IN TWO VOLUMES I LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS MCMXIX CONTENTS I'ACiE INTRODUCTION vii BIBLIOGRAPHY xix ON THE SPECTACLES . 2 BOOK I 27 BOOK II 107 BOOK III 163 HOOK IT-- . T 229 BOOK v 293 BOOK vi 357 BOOK VII 421 INTRODUCTION AN epigram, as its etymology denotes, was originally merely an inscription, such as is put on a statue or a 1 monument, a temple, or a triumphal arch. But in process of time it came to mean ;i short poem dealing with some .person, thing, or incident which the writer thinks worthy of observation and record, and by which he seeks to attract attention in the same way as a passer-by would be attracted by an inscription " on a physical object. It must have," says Professor " Mackail, the compression and conciseness of a real inscription, and in proportion to the smallness of its bulk must be highly finished, evenly balanced, simple, lucid." The comment of the writer on the subject-matter of the epigram is called the point, " and this is generally satirical Dost thou think," 2 " says Benedick, I care fora satire or an epigram ?"- but it is not necessarily so : it may even be pathetic. Martial has several poems 3 which by reason of their length are not strictly epigrams within the definition. 1 Even as a brand on the forehead of a runaway slave - (FUG) : Petr. ciii. Shak. Much Ado, v. iv. 103. 3 Iviii. t.g. HI. ; x. xxx. INTRODUCTION But these are of the nature of epigrams, being written in order to lead up to the point at the end. Marcus Valerius Martialis, the greatest of epigram- matists, and the father of the epigram as we l understand it, was born at Bilbilis, or Augusta Bilbilis, in Hispania Tarraconensis. The town stood on a rocky height surrounded by the rushing Salo, a confluent of the Ebro, and was a municipium celebrated for the manufacture of iron, to which the cold waters of the Salo gave a peculiar temper. 2 It also produced gold. The year of the poet's birth cannot be fixed with certainty, but it was one of the years A.D. 38 to 41. It has been inferred 3 from one of his epigrams that his parents were named Pronto and Flaccilla. Though they were probably not rich, they gave the future poet a good education, a fact he afterwards acknowledges * some- what bitterly, having regard to its uselessness in that corrupt age as a means of making money. About A.D. 63 or 64 he came to Rome in the last days of Nero, and attached himself to his countrymen Quintilian, Lucan the poet, and the Senecas, who introduced him to the Pisos. The ruin and death of Seneca the philosopher and of Lucan, for partici- pation in the abortive conspiracy of L. Calpurnius 1 2 cf. x. ciii. 1. xn. xviii. 9. 3 4 v. xxxiv. 1. In ix. Ixxiii. 7. viii INTRODUCTION Piso in A.I). 65 threw Martial on his own resources. Quintilian seems to have advised him to take up a profession/ perhaps the bar, but Martial preferred, as he says, to make the most of life while he could, a note which he strikes consistently throughout his writings. Of his life up to A.D. 84 or 85, the date of the publication of Book I. of his epigrams, we know nothing. In A.D. 80, however, the collection known as the Liber Spectaculorum was published to cele- brate the opening of the Colosseum by Titus. On the strength of this book, and the Xenia and Apophoreta (Books XIII. and XIV.) which were issued in A.D. 84 or 85, or of other writings that have not come down to us, Martial by A.D. 85 enjoyed an 2 assured position as a poet, as he himself says, "known all over the world," and equally widely plagiarised. At Rome he remained continuously for thirty-five years, and here all his books were published except Book III., which was issued from Gallia Cisalpina, whither he had gone in a fit of spleen at the poor 3 rewards of literature. In Book I. he speaks of him- 4 self as living in a garret up three high flights of 1 - cf. n. xc. cf. i. i. 2. 3 * cf. in. iv. 8. cf. i. cxvii. 7. ix INTRODUCTION stairs. Later on, by A.D. 94, he had a house of his own in the same quarter, the Quirinal, and a country villa at Nomentum, 1 which according to his own account was a poor place. Whether these houses were purchased or given to him is unknown. During his thirty-five years' sojourn he led the ordinary life of the needy client dependent on rich patrons, and he never ceases to complain of the weariness of levees to be attended, complimentary duties to be discharged at unreasonable hours and in all weathers- and of the insolence and stinginess of wealthy men. Yet he was not without compensations. Domitian rejected his petition for a sum of money, but he received from Titus the jus trium liberorum, a right confirmed by Domitian, and the tribunatus semestrix, a kind of honorary tribuneship carrying with it the 2 title of a knight. Moreover, he mixed in the best society in the capital, numbering among his friends Quintilian, the poets Silius and Valerius Flaccus, the younger Pliny, and Juvenal. That Martial was capable of a very sincere and lusting friendship is shown by many of his epigrams. It is curious that he never mentions Statius, nor is he mentioned by him. At the end of his thirty-five years' residence in 1 cf. ix. xviih -2. ix. 5. cf. in. xcv. 9, 10 ; xcvii. INTRODUCTION Rome, either as recognizing the fact that the new regime under Nerva or Trajan was not favourable to adulation of emperors, or from that general weariness of City life of which he complains, and a longing to see again the patrii anmes and the saturae xordida rura casae of his native Bilbilis on the rough hill-side, he returned in A.D. 100 to Spain. The means of travel were supplied by 1 Pliny, as Pliny tells us, from friendliness towards the poet, and in recompense for the complimentary 2 verses Martial had written upon him. Three years afterwards Book XII. was sent from Spain. In the meantime a Spanish lady, Marcella, of whom 3 he writes with great affection, and whom some have supposed to be his wife, gave him a country house, where he lived until his death. "She," he says, "alone made a Rome for him." But the delights and the freedom of the country, of which at first he speaks exultingly, began to pall upon 4 him, and this fact and the narrow-minded jealousy of his neighbours made him look back fondly towards the fuller life of the Imperial City. But he was destined never to see it again. His death cannot be dated later than A.D. 104. 1 2 Ep. iii. 21. rf. x. xix. 3 * cf. xn. xxi. and xxxi. cj\ xii. K/iial. xi INTRODUCTION Whether Martial was married is uncertain. In l several epigrams he speaks as if he had a wife, 2 and in two (and those of the foulest) he assumes to address her. Again, a daughter is alluded to 3 in one epigram, and perhaps in two, for the read- ing is uncertain. A writer, however, does not always speak in his own person, and also (as Martial did 4 sometimes writes on a sub- ) subject 5 mitted to him. In other epigrams the poet speaks of a wife as an aspiration of the future, and, as " Professor Sellar says, the general tone of his epigrams is that of an easy-living bachelor who knew nothing of the cares or consolations of family life." The probability is that he was never married, and it may be said with some degree of certainty that children for the who touched so he had no ; poet tenderly on the deaths of Erotion, Urbicus, and Canace, and who showed so loving a disposition towards the young and the helpless, could not have been silent if he had had children of his own. 6 " Pliny says of him, I hear that Valerius Martialis is dead, and I am sorry. He was a man of genius, ] xxiii. xi. Ixxxiv. 15. cf. iv. 2 ; vn. xcv. 7 ; - xi. xliii. and civ. 3 4 cf. vii. xcv. 8; x. Ixv. 11. cf. xi. xlii. 1. s * xcii. iii. n. xc. 9 ; ii. Ep. 21. INTRODUCTION of subtle, quick intelligence, and one who in his writings showed the greatest amount of wit and pungency, and no less of fairness. But it may be said his writings will not last. Perhaps they will not, but he wrote as if they would." The quality of candor which Pliny emphasises agrees l " with what Martial claimed for himself. I spare the person, I denounce the vice." Much of his work is poor, and some of it even stupid, as might have been expected in an author with so large an output. And indeed he says himself that, to con- stitute a book, the good must be mixed with the 2 bad and the indifferent : "the equal book," he 3 " says, is the bad one." But Martial at his best is without a rival.

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