At the time his third book was published Martial had retired to Forum Corneli in Cisalpine Gaul. "If any one asks you,' he says, "why I went, tell him I was worn out with my empty round of duty calls at the houses of the great. If you are asked when I am coming back you may say that I was a poet when I left, I shall return when I have learned how to play the guitar." With the single exception of this one visit which was not as long as he had expected, thirty-five continuous years of Martial's life were spent in Rome. Even summer resorts were not to his liking. Among other things they were beyond the depths of his purse. He tried it once at Baix (1, 59). "The baths," he says, "are excellent. But man cannot live on baths alone. My one dole a day [35 cents from his patron] was mere starvation down there. I prefer the suburbs with regular meals and the natatorium." At the time his first book was published the poet had rooms in the third story of a house which faced the laurels in front of Agrippa's portico on the west side of the Quirinal. After 94, during the days when he was best off, he had a small house of his own near the temple of Quirinus. In spite of his various ups and downs he managed to keep his little country place at Nomentum until he finally left Rome. It was dry and unproductive. He once asked Domitian for permission to tap the aqueduct which ran near by, but was refused. Domitian liked his poetry and once invited him to dinner, but it is somewhat to the poet's credit that he never received any substantial recognition from Domitian. Of course Martial's country place was expensive. Those who have watched the steady rise in prices during the last few years will not fail to see the point of the following epigram (viii, 61): Charinus pines with envy, bursts with spite, He weeps, he raves, indeed, the rumor goes, Because my epigrams are said and sung From Thebes to Britain, Cadiz to Cathay? Oh no. My country place just out of town, The span of mules I own,- Dame rumor saith These be the things that make him dream of death. What curse invoked repays such envy best? I wish him this; my mules, my country place. Martial, however, spent his summers there, and as he himself tells us, it was at all times of the year his frequent haven of refuge from the bores and the noisy streets of Rome. With his universal fame and his numerous patrons he must have had a very comfortable income for several years. His references to his poverty are, no doubt, often exaggerated. The most of us are not in the habit of underestimating our poverty. Moreover, we must remember that poverty had always been, and still is, a traditional theme of the epigram. When Catullus, for instance, who owned a yacht and a country place, tells us that "his purse is full of cobwebs' we do not take him too seriously. Poverty, however, is comparative, and doubtless Martial often found it something of a struggle to make both ends meet. Rome in the first century was quite as expensive as New York in the twentieth century. Martial also had many rich friends. But, above all, he was one of those men who are constitutionally unable to save anything. When he finally decided to return to Spain the younger Pliny, to whom he had once written a very pretty little poem, sent him his travelling expenses. It was characteristic of Martial that after thirty-five years of hard work in Rome he really needed the money. This was in 98. The assisted death of Domitian had occurred in 96. His successor, the aged Nerva, a former patron of Martial's, had just passed away and the formal accession of Trajan had closed another volume of Roman history. It was the volume to which the best of the poet's life belonged. The Empire had had her last fling under Domitian. But she was already near the period of wrinkles and lithia tablets, and now she entered upon her âge dévot under the care of such family physicians as Trajan and Hadrian and of such family chaplains as Juvenal and Tacitus. At this juncture Martial was some what in the position of a playwright under the Commonwealth or of a 'regular' after one of our political cyclones. He may have made one or two faint attempts to swing into line. But his heart was not in it. The times had changed and it is not easy to begin life anew at sixty. Moreover, the splendid vitality which had made him Martial had been sorely taxed. It is worth noting that the boredom of calls, the noisy streets, the inability to sleep, and those other inconveniences of urban life to which the third satire of Juvenal is devoted are, in Martial's case, confined for the most part to the last two or three books. For example, when he was asked by one of his rich friends why he retired so frequently to his country place, Martial replies in his own characteristic fashion (xii, 57): "There is no place in Rome where a poor man can either think or rest. One cannot live for bakers' mills before daylight, schoolmasters at daylight, and brass foundries all day long. Here an idle money-changer rattles his pile of copper coins on his dirty counter, there, a beater of Spanish gold belabors his stone with his polished mallet, the fanatic gang of Bellona's priests never cease from shouting, nor the clamorous sailor as he carries a piece of the ship upon which he says he was wrecked, nor the little Jew whose mother has taught him to beg, nor the blear-eyed vendor of matches. Many indeed are the murderers of sleep. 'Tis all well enough for you, Sparsus, in your palace, your rus in urbe, your country place within the city walls. But as for me, I am roused anon by the laughter of the passing throng. All Rome is at my bedroom door." The baker's mill has yielded to the trolley car, the priests of Bellona to the Salvation Army, but the description has lost none of its force-especially, for those who have ever had the opportunity to compare the rural stillness of London at eight in the morning with that insane clatter which in every Latin town begins promptly at dawn and never lets up until well into the small hours of the following night. But strongest of all, perhaps, was that longing for the old Spanish countryside which had always haunted him. Years before when his friend and countryman Quintilian was urging him to practise law-the profession for which his education had fitted him-Martial's characteristic reply had been: "No, let me really live while I may. No one is ever too soon in getting about it. What are wealth and station if we must put off living until we acquire them? I am not ambitious. Give me,-'tis all I ask, A homely house, with ease the rule of life, A natural lawn, a spring not far away, A well-fed slave, a not too-learnèd wife, Sound sleep by night and never a quarrel by day." We may be sure that more than one memory of his boyhood home was suggested to Martial by these lines. Indeed, I suspect that the "not too learnèd wife," like the ideal helpmeet of many another incorrigible old bachelor, was, in reality, a replica of his mother. However that may be, Martial found friends and patrons in Bilbilis who made rest and retirement possible. Notable among them were Terentius Priscus and, especially, the lady Marcella, who gave him a small place upon which he was enabled to live as he had desired. Several epigrams in Book 12 show that, at first, he thoroughly enjoyed the change. But if he had cherished the illusion-as he actually appears to have done-that he would continue to enjoy it, he was soon to be undeceived. The golden memories of the past can always glorify the gray realities of the present; but the horizon of youth is not the horizon of age, and the dial of Time will not turn backward. Martial's awakening is seen in his preface to Book 12. The hurry, bustle, and activity of the city had wearied him, but he had been in the midst of it for a generation and, after all, it was his life. Above all, he missed the intellectual stimulus of the great capital, the libraries, the theatres, the social gatherings, the cultivated reading public. Epigram was the work of his life, and the possibilities of Bilbilis for epigram were soon exhausted. Moreover, he had little in common with the average denizen of Bilbilis. And it is easy to guess how the average citizen of Bilbilis looked upon Martial. Indeed, the poet himself complains of the "municipalium robigo dentium," as he calls it, "the backbiting that goes on in a country town." "What I get," he says, "is envy, not a genuine critic,—and in a little insignificant place one or two disagreeable people are a host. In the face of that sort of thing I find it hard to keep in a good humor every day." "Marcella," he acknowledges in another place, "is the only one who can give me back the city again.” It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in this last book of Martial's very few of the epigrams suggest Bilbilis. Most of them hark back to the home and the scenes of his prime. In a poem written on his fifty-seventh birthday (x, 24) he had expressed the hope of living until seventy-five. With the constitution and the temperament which nature appears to have given him he was justified in believing that he might live even longer than that. But it was not to be. The long tension and the high pressure of a metropolitan existence so like our own, the sudden relief from it in the afternoon of his day, the cessation of the paramount interests and occupations of a lifetime, all these things are peculiarly trying to the physique. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that Martial died soon after the publication, in 102, of his last book. He was barely sixty-four. I know of no ancient writer whose personal character has been more bitterly assailed by modern critics of a certain class. I know of few who have deserved it so little. We may say at once, that all Martial's faults are on the surface. Otherwise, many of his critics never would have discerned them at all. The just and sympathetic appreciation of an ancient author demands a much larger background of knowledge and experience than seems to be generally supposed. It is, of course, obvious that, first of all, before attempting to criticize an author one ought to read his entire works with care and understanding. In the case of a man like Martial, one must also be thoroughly acquainted with all the conditions of his life and times: one must know all about the history of the antique epigram as a department, one must be able to realize the peculiarities of the Latin temperament as such and make due allowance for them. For example, most prominent and most widely circulatedindeed, with many persons, the only association with the name of Martial-is the charge that both in subject and in language his epigrams are offensive to modern taste. To a certain extent this is true. We should add, however, that Martial himself |