Martial, : the twelve books of Epigrams,.

INTRODUCTION
I
LIFE OF MARTIAL
MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS was born about the year
A.D. 40, during the short reign of the Emperor Caius. in
the Spanish town of Bilbilis. The name by which he
is now commonly known was probably due to the accident
of his birth occurring on the first of March: ' Marcus
Valerius' forms part of the Roman dress which his
countrymen soon after the time of Julius Caesar had so
readily adopted. In the first century of our era Spain
passed through one of those periods of intellectual
activity which diversify the torpor wherein that strange
land normally reposes, and Martial is but one of the group
of brilliant Spaniards who are among the chief glories of
the silver age of Latin literature. Two of the galaxy,
the critic Quintilian, born at Calagurris A.D. 40, and the
poet Lucan, born at Cordova A.D. 39, were his close contemporaries, and when, abandoning Bilbilis and the
rushing Salo, he came to Italy to seek his fortune in 63,
Seneca had reached the highest point of his long and
magnificent career and seemed all-powerful at Rome.
As a humble dependent of the Senecas, and through them
of the Pisos, the most literary of all the great Roman
families, Martial made his first entry into Roman life;
and when in 65 B.C. on the discovery of the conspiracy
Seneca and Piso were involved in a common ruin, the
young stranger from Spain shared their downfall in his
small degree, and was thrown upon his own resources.
For many years existence for him must have been as
hard a struggle as it was for Charles Dickens in his youth,
and both writers owe much of their power to the forced
realization of the most important fact in life, that a man
must in some way or another get enough to eat. Being
a Roman citizen Martial had a certain value as a clientif he could find a patron willing to employ him-but a
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