cannot be held responsible for it. The conventional tradition of the epigram demanded that a certain portion of one's work should be of this character. That in Martial's case the peculiarity is more the result of this convention than of individual taste is shown by the fact that it does not run through his entire text. On the contrary, it is confined to certain epigrams and those epigrams do not represent his best and most characteristic work. Lastly, the proportion of these objectionable epigrams is by no means as large as the majority of people appear to suppose. The text of Martial contains 1555 epigrams. The Delphine edition of 1660 excluded 150 of this number. The standards of another age and a different nationality would probably exclude about 50 more. All told, hardly a seventh of the total. This leaves more than 1200 little poems into which anyone may dip without hesitation, and on this residuum Martial can easily support his claim to be called one of the wittiest, one of the most amusing, and at the same time one of the most instructive, writers in any period of the world's history. Martial's flattery of Domitian is a charge easily disposed of. Flattery of the reigning emperor has been the rule since Augustus. By this time it was almost as conventional as our titles of nobility. What do these mean when we interpret them literally? Moreover, Martial is outdone not only by his predecessors but, which is more to the point, by his graver contemporaries, Statius and Quintilian. Still more to his credit is the fact that he did not revile the memory of Domitian after his death. Finally, we must remember that Martial was a Spaniard and a provincial. Why should he care about Domitian's vices or virtues or about his moral fitness or unfitness to be a Roman emperor? The third and, on the face of it, the most serious charge against Martial is his relation to his patrons. To state the matter baldly as well as briefly, it is Martial's idea that his patrons owe him a living and if he has reason to think that they are forgetting it he does not hesitate to refresh their memories. For instance, he frequently reminds his readers in general and his patrons in particular that a poet is a person who needs money. Again, he makes pointed reference to the depleted con dition of his wardrobe. Once, he reminds Stella that unless he is moved to send him some new tiles the farmhouse at Nomentum will have to go on leaking as before. Now all this is unpleasant to us, but we must not forget that as a matter of fact Martial's patrons actually did owe him a living. Such were the habits and standards of his time, the accepted and unavoidable conditions of his life. That life was the life of a brilliant provincial who came to the city without an independent fortune and chose literature as his profession. Nowadays, the most of us are familiar with the idea that an author is entitled to a share in the success of his book, that he draws his income for literary work from that source. But this idea was not generally entertained until the nineteenth century and our recent experience with the law of international copyright shows that the idea is still rudimentary in many minds. In antiquity, therefore, unless an author possessed independent means his only alternative was patronage, and until 1800 patronage was the general rule of literature. The relation of client to patron was an ancient and honorable institution in Roman society. There was nothing to criticize in the relation of Vergil and Horace to Mæcenas and Augustus. And at the time of his death Vergil possessed not less than half a million in our money. But whatever Vergil was worth, the bald fact remains that practically all of it was acquired by gift. It was only through the generosity of a patron that a poor author could secure the leisure for literary composition. In return, he undertook to immortalize his patron in his works. He also attended him in public from time to time, he went to his regular morning receptions, and if his patron invited him to dinner he made himself agreeable. In short, he made every return in his power for the favors he had received or hoped to receive. It will easily be seen that this relation, like the fee to the waiter, was peculiarly liable to abuse. The pages of Martial, Pliny, and Juvenal show how much it had deteriorated by the time of Domitian. Both sides were to blame. Prices were outrageous and wealth the standard of life. The rich were largely the descendants of dishonest nobodies and with habits, tastes, and views to match, the poor had lost their pride, their inde pendence, their spur of ambition. Each class despised the other and each class was justified in it. Both Juvenal and Martial tell us that men of birth and education, men of high official position, even men with fortunes of their own were not ashamed to take the sportula (originally the basket of food for the day, now the dole of money) given to those who had made the regular morning call. One is reminded of the retainers of a noble house in the Middle Ages or of the poor courtiers under the old regime in France and England. Not pleasant, this custom-but it existed, and Martial in paying court to a patron was only following the universal rule of his time. He had the further justification of necessity, and it is also clear that he made all the return for it in his power. Indeed, it was characteristic of the man, and all things considered, rather to his credit that he insisted upon the business aspect of it, and refused to pretend that it was anything else. So far, therefore, from severely criticizing Martial's relation to his patrons, it seems to me that in a situation which he could not avoid and for which he was not responsible, he showed himself a better man than most of his contemporaries would have done under the same conditions. It was a hard, uncertain, Bohemian sort of life in many respects. But to a certain degree Martial was himself a genuine Bohemian. The type is excessively rare in the annals of Roman literature. The one other striking example whom I now recall is that brilliant old reprobate Furius Bibaculus. Martial's combination of improvidence and gaiety is distinctly Bohemian. He also seems to have had the peculiarly attractive personality by which that temperament is sometimes accompanied. At any rate, his epigrams show not only that he knew everybody in Rome who was worth knowing, but that few men as great as he have at the same time been so universally liked by their contemporaries. Some of Martial's best epigrams are to his friends. In one of his last poems (xii, 34)—it is addressed to Julius Martialis, whom he had known and loved for four and thirty years the poet closes by saying: "If you would avoid many griefs and escape many a heartache, then make of no one too dear a friend. You will have less joy, but will also have less sorrow." This can only be the observation of a man who has had real friends and has really loved them. Another attractive side of his nature was his evident devotion to little children. I content myself with I content myself with a single illustration. This is his epitaph for Erotion, a little girl belonging to his household who died at the age of six. Martial, who was then a man of nearly fifty, was deeply affected by the loss of his little favorite. The poem, which is one of three devoted to her memory, recommends the child to the care of his own parents, who had long been dead-a touchingly naïve conception quite in harmony with antique methods of thought, but inspired with a simple and homely tenderness for which there are few parallels in the annals of literature (v, 34):— Dear father and dear mother: Let me crave Who bears these lines. Don't let her be afraid! - To toddle down that pathway to the Styx All by herself! Black shadows haunt those steeps, May she be comforted, and may she play About you merry as the livelong day, And in her childish prattle often tell Of that old master whom she loved so well. Lines like these help us to understand why under continual provocation he could still be patient with a fussy, dictatorial, old slave who was utterly unable to realize that the boy he had spanked forty or fifty years before had now arrived at years of discretion. The only contemporary reference to Martial which has happened to survive is found in the passage of Pliny, to which I have already alluded. He describes the poet whom he knew as "acutus, ingeniosus, acer,"-clear-sighted, clever, shrewd. And truly, as a keen observer of men and things, Martial has rarely been equalled. The world of Rome was an open book before him. He read the text, fathomed its import, and wrote his commentary upon it in brilliant and telling phrases and in a literary form of which he was undoubtedly the master. But after all, the mainspring of Martial's character and career, the real secret of his abiding greatness as an epigrammatist, is found as soon as we learn that he possessed the quality which Pliny calls candor. Candor means frankness, genuineness, sincerity. It was one of the highest tributes to character that a Roman could pay. Here we have, according to Pliny's showing, a man who was witty, yet kindly, who was clear-sighted, yet tolerant, who was shrewd, yet sincere. This is the character of one who is never blind to the true proportion of things. And, as a matter of fact, a sense of proportion, a conception of the realities as applied to life, conduct, thought, art, literature, style, everything, is the leading trait of Martial's character, the universal solvent of his career and genius. All is expressed in Mŋdèv ayav,—nil nimis,"avoid extremes," that phrase so characteristic of antiquity, the summary of its wisdom and experience, its most valuable contribution to the conduct of life. So it was that in spite of his surroundings and associations Martial remained simple, genuine, and unaffected to the end. In an age of unutterable impurity he had no vices. In an age of cant, pedantry, affectation, and shams of every sort and description he was still true to himself. In an age as notable for exaggeration as is our own, Martial knows that strength does not lie in superlatives. He tells us again and again in his own characteristic fashion that the secret of happiness has not been discovered by the voluptuary nor the secret of virtue by the ascetic. The present is quite good enough for him, to live it heartily and naturally as it comes, to find out what he is best fitted to do, and then to do it this is the sum of his philosophy. It is true enough that most friendship is mere feigning. But there are real friends. Let us, therefore, bind them to us with bonds of steel. It is true that life is hard and bitter. But we have to live it. Let us, therefore, find the sunshine while we can. In v, 58, he says [Cowley's translation]: To-morrow you will live, you always cry. |