Martial, : the twelve books of Epigrams,.

MARTIAL'S EPIGRAMS

what greater gift can a man receive than glory and praise
and eternity of fame? You may say that Martial's verses
will not gain eternity: perhaps they will not; but he
wrote them with the supposition that they would."
II
THE EPIGRAMS
THE chief value of Martial's Epigrams, disregarding for
the moment their literary excellence, lies in the picture
they give us of Roman society towards the end of the
first century A.D., that period in the world's history
which, beyond all others, bears the closest resemblance
to our own times. It is a picture drawn by a realist, and
in its mingling of light and shade far more convincing
than the lurid colours and unrelieved blackness with
which Juvenal and Tacitus present us. Martial is a
Sancho Panza who sees things as they are: the satirist
and the historian have more likeness to the mad knight,
and fired by their righteous indignation tilt as blindly
against the established order of the Empire as Don
Quixote did against his giant windmills. Their moral
earnestness is certainly impressive, and as characters they
are doubtless more deserving of our esteem than is the
easy-going and pleasure-loving epigrammatist; but if we
wish to gain a true idea of Rome and Roman life, about
the year A.D. 90, it is to the pages of Martial, rather than
to Juvenal or Tacitus, that we should turn. Martial has
three great advantages over the other two writers: he
is good-tempered, while they are soured and disappointed
men: he is a Spaniard, to whom the Empire has brought
nothing but benefits, while they are Romans who can
never forget the time when the world was ruled in the
interests of Rome: he is one of the middle class, the
great discovery of the new system, while they belong to
the official hierarchy which had for centuries enjoyed the
doubtful privilege of government.
And so, writing from the outside without temper and
without bias, Martial is able to give us a complete
panorama of Roman society from top to bottom. At
the very summit comes His Most Gracious Majesty, the
Emperor Domitian, ' dominus ei dens ', as he insisted on
being called by the reluctant senate, whose shadowy
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