About twenty miles to the west of Saragossa, in that part of Spain now known as Aragon, there was in the first century after Christ a small country town which has since disappeared from the map. It was known as Bilbilis. The name is obviously unRoman, and, as a matter of fact, the place was no doubt a Celtiberian fortress as far back as the days when the Phoenician adventurers swept the seas and Rome herself was nothing but a small village on the bank of the Tiber. As befitted its origin Bilbilis was perched high up on the edge of beetling cliffs acutis Pendentem scopulis, as the Christian poet Paulinus of Nola described it. At the foot of the precipice ran the small but bustling stream of the Salo, the water of which was supposed to impart a sovereign temper to steel. For that reason the principal industry of the town was the manufacture of hardware,-for the most part, weapons of war.

The inhabitants of the district were an amalgamation, more or less complete, of Roman settlers, generally military veterans, with the descendants of those Celtiberian troopers who, two hundred and fifty years before, had harried Italy from the Po to the Sicilian Straits, and had done no small part in rendering the name of "Hannibal the Dread" a useful adjunct of nursery discipline until late in the Empire. The average denizen of Bilbilis still took an un-Roman delight in hunting and fishing, his inky locks were disposed to be stiff and rebellious after the manner of his forbears; but those stormy days had long since passed away, the power of Rome was supreme, and the profound peace of distance and obscurity had reigned for generations in this

remote corner of the world, where, perhaps, the only sound that interfered with the stillness of nature was the tinkling of anvils in the armories near by.

The fame of such a place, if it ever becomes famous at all, is usually due to accident. Such was the fortune of Bilbilis. The renown of this little village rests entirely upon a single event--a strictly family matter which took place there on the first of March in the year 39 or 40 of the Christian Era. On that day, Flaccilla presented her husband, Valerius Fronto, with a son. The boy was called Marcus Valerius, and to commemorate the month in which he was born the cognomen was added of Martialis. He was destined to become the greatest of Roman epigrammatists, indeed, if we may believe Lessing, the greatest epigrammatist the world has ever produced.

Martial's parents belonged to the old Celtiberian stock, and were distinctly well-to-do for that neighborhood. He describes their house as plain and unconventional, but overflowing with rustic cheer. This home and the country round about, its forests of oak, its echoing gorges, its lonely mountain tarns, its icy streams and springs, its snow-capped sierras, to all which the poet reverts again and again, were the setting of an unusually healthful and happy childhood, the golden memory of which never left him. After more than thirty years in the world's capital he could still recite all the local industries of Bilbilis with the characteristic pride of a small townsman. He was as proud of his Celtiberian strain as any Virginian could be of the blood of Pocahontas. He even loved to dwell upon the old barbarian place-names of his native land, those oddly uncouth words which, like our own 'Walla-Wallas' and 'Popocatepetls,' are the lonely monuments of an elder race rising here and there in the midst of a newer civilization.

It was only such surroundings as these that could have given Martial that fund of buoyancy and nerve force, that strength and poise of mind and body, which amid the deadly routine of his long years in Rome was destined to keep him alive and human. Indeed, it would be hard to say how far the man's unerring yet sympathetic vision of the realities of life, how far his ability to steer clear of the various literary and social illusions, insinceri

ties, and artificialities so characteristic of his time; in short, how far his most striking qualities as a man and as an author were fostered and strengthened by this close contact with genuine nature and the simple honest folk among whom his early life was passed.

But although Bilbilis was remote from Rome, it was not remote from cultivation. At that time Spain was in the zenith of her influence at the capital and of her prosperous activity at home. Martial's province of Hispania Tarraconensis supported some of the finest schools in the Empire, and his parents saw to it that their son received the best education available. "Which was utter folly on their part," he remarks in an epigram written nearly forty years later: "What have I gained by consorting with professors of literature and oratory in these days when an exshoemaker can become a millionaire?"

One ought not to take an epigrammatist too seriously; and at all events when the youth of twenty-three set out for Rome to seek his fortune he was undoubtedly filled with energy and enthusiasm. And few young provincials ever began a career in the great city under more favorable conditions or with fairer hopes for the future. In his position all depended on patronage. Here Martial was peculiarly fortunate. He could number among his patrons the great Spanish house of the Annæi, at that time represented by the three brothers, Seneca the philosopher, Junius Gallio, who as proconsul of Achæa presided at the trial of Paul the apostle at Corinth, and lastly, Annæus Mela, father of Lucan the poet. Still another patron was Gn. Calpurnius, head of the famous patrician house of the Pisones.

But at the very hour of Martial's arrival the shadow of imminent disaster had already fallen upon these men. In April, 65, the tragic discovery of the Pisonian Conspiracy swept away not only all Martial's friends, but also many others among the best and greatest of the State. It was clearly a stunning blow to the young man just from the Provinces. His friends were gone, new friends had to be made, and his Spanish blood was no longer a passport.

The next fifteen years were among the most eventful in Roman history. They contained the spectacular death of Nero and with

it the end of Cæsar's line, the awful year of the three emperors, and the accession of the Flavian house. But so far as the life of Martial is concerned this period is a complete blank. It may or may not be significant that he himself makes no reference to it. Nevertheless, we know that our keen-eyed, quick-witted onlooker from the Spanish countryside was acquiring every day a perception of the sights and humors of the great capital, and that he was rapidly losing his illusions, if he ever had any; in short, that he was laying the foundation of his future career. In fact,

we know that he actually made some essays in the department of epigram which years afterward, much to the poet's dismay, were republished as a speculation by Pollius Quintianus, an enterprising Macmillan of Domitian's time.

For us, however, the first appearance of Martial as an author was in the year 80, when Titus dedicated the Coliseum with a brilliant series of games and entertainments. The so-called Liber Spectaculorum which now stands at the head of our modern editions was originally written by Martial for that occasion and addressed to the emperor. Most of the epigrams in this collection are pot-boilers; but they brought their author to the notice of the court, and such was in reality their principal object.

Two honors came to the poet as a result. One was the ius trium liberorum, that is to say, the special privileges granted by law to any Roman citizen who was the father of three children. The value of it to Martial was the fact that he was henceforth exempt from that law of Augustus which forced a bachelor into matrimony whether he liked it or not. The second honor was a titular position as a tribunus militum by virtue of which the poet was raised to the rank of a Roman knight. The principal advantage of it to Martial appears to have been the fact that whenever he attended the theatre he now had the privilege of a seat in the first row back of the orchestra. He never received any more substantial recognition than this from either Vespasian of Titus. Both emperors encouraged literature. But, unfortunately, Vespasian had a close fist and Titus a short life.

The so-called Xenia and Apophoreta were published four or five years later by Martial's bookseller Tryphon. They afterwards formed an appendix to the édition définitive and are now

numbered as Books 13 and 14. Xenia were presents given to guests during the Saturnalia. Apophoreta were the presents given to the guests at dinner parties, and, as the name implies, were intended to be taken home. It was usual to accompany these Christmas presents, Xenia, and these dinner souvenirs, Apophoreta, by a verse or two. The two books of Martial supply the verses for appropriate presents on such occasions. It will be seen that they were designed to meet the wants of those who were not adepts in the polite art of turning a distich. Like the obituary poetry of the Baltimore Sun, these distichs of Martial could be kept on hand and dealt out as needed. The fact that he ever bored himself with composing them suggests that one of his recurrent attacks of poverty was upon him. Indeed, as he himself says to his reader: "The Xenia in this slim little booklet can be bought for four nummi. You may have 'omnis turba,' the whole gang of them for twenty cents. Is that too much? Well, Tryphon can afford to knock off fifty per cent. He would be making money at it even then. You can present these distichs to your guests instead of a gift,—si tibi tam rarus quam mihi nummus erit, if pennies are as far apart with you as they are with me."

But a better time was now at hand. Books 1 and 2 appeared in 86, and from that time he published at the rate of about one book a year until his return to Spain. Book 12 appeared in 102, three years from that date. Shortly after came the poet's death, and then a second edition of Book 12, which is the one we now possess.

During the fifteen years that followed the publication of Book 1, Martial was one of the best-known men in the Empire. "The other day, Rufus," he says in one of his epigrams, "a certain man looked me all over with the thoroughness of one who intended to buy me for a slave or train me for the prize ring. After he had gazed at me and had even felt of me for some time, 'can it be,' he cried, 'that you really are that famous Martial whose jests and lively sallies are known to every one who does not possess a downright Dutchman's ear?' I smiled a little and with a slight nod admitted that I was the person whom he had named. 'Why then do you wear such bad cloaks?' 'Because,' I replied, 'I am such a bad poet.'