Martial, : the twelve books of Epigrams,.

INTRODUCTION

of spying on his neighbours and accusing them of some
offence against the imperial regime: the Yecilator, less
dangerous than the informer but even more annoying,
the amateur poet who insists on boring his friends with
recitals of his verses. Every aspect of Rome Martial
presents to us. With him we pass through the crowded
streets and the long muddy stairways up the hill-sides,
along which the white-robed client in the early morning
has to trudge his way in order to be present at his patron's
levee. We see the law courts beset by a crowd of litigants
and hear the applause and cheers that greet some brilliant
effort of eloquence by a great advocate. We visit the
baths, public and private, each with its own regular
clientele, and watch the masseurs anointing and rubbing
down their customers, while sly thieves look for their
opportunity to filch some bather's gown. We sit among
the audience in the theatre and smile as Leitus or
Oceanus, the two chief ushers, touch some upstart on
the shoulder and eject him from the rows of seats reserved
for senators and knights. We smell the odour of the
circus mingled of the blood of slain animals, the scent of
liquid saffron and cinnamon, and the press of the great
crowd. And finally we hear all the gossip of the town:
the shameful behaviour of the priests of Cybele, the unfortunate accident that befell an Etruscan at the sacrifice,
how one boy was killed by a falling icicle, another by a
snake lurking within a hollow statue, how a tame lion
mauled the circus attendants, how a hare escaped unharmed from the arena; and so on and so on. There is
hardly any incident however trivial which will not serve
Martial as the subject for an epigram, and he always
treats his theme with the lightest wit and the most
dexterous skill. He is a realist, and one of the most
extreme of that school: he shrinks from nothing, dull,
coarse, and disgusting though it be; and consequently
many of his pieces are extremely offensive to a delicate
reader. But the blame for them, if blame must be
allotted-in this volume they are mostly left in their
original Latin-does not rest solely with Martial: part
must be assigned to the realistic method, part to the
Roman character, and part to life itself.

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