Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/607

Rh M A 11 T I A L 579 Canius of Gades, proves how eagerly the novel impulse of letters was received in Spain in the first century of the empire, just as a similar impulse had been received in Cisalpine Gaul in the first half of the first century before our era. The success of his countrymen may have been the motive which induced Martial s parents to prepare him for a literary career, &quot; At me litterulas stulti docuere parentes&quot; (ix. 73, 7), and which induced Martial himself to remove to Rome whan he had completed his education. This he must have done some time before the fall, in 65 A.D., of Seneca and Lucan, who were probably his earliest patrons. He speaks of the halls of the Pisos and of Seneca as having been opened to him when he first went to Rome (iv. 40); and in epigrams, addressed to his widow nearly thirty years after the death of Lucan, he speaks of him with grateful admiration, and applies to her the word &quot; Regina,&quot; &quot;his lady patroness.&quot; Of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome we do not know much. He published some juvenile poems of which he thought very little in his maturer years, and he laughs at a foolish book seller who would not allow them to die a natural death (i. 113). Martial had neither youthful passion nor youth ful enthusiasm to make him precociously a poet. His faculty ripened with experience and with the knowledge of that social life which was both his theme and his inspiration ; and many of his best epigrams are among those written in his last years. From many answers which lis makes to the remonstrances of friends, among others to those of Quintilian, it may be inferred that he was urged to practise at the bar, but that he preferred his own lazy Bohemian kind of life to more settled and remunerative modes of industry. He made many in fluential friends and patrons, and secured the favour both of Titus and Domitian. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the&quot;semestris tribunatus,&quot; which conferred on him equestrian rank. He failed, however, in his application to the latter for more substantial advantages, although he commemorates the glory of having been invited to dinner by him, and also the fact that he procured the privilege of citizenship for many persons in whose behalf he appealed to him. The earliest of his extant works, that known by the name of Liber Spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum in the reign of Titus ; but the book as it now stands was given to the world in or about the first year of Domitian, i.e., about 81 A.D. The favour of the emperor procured him the countenance of some of the worst creatures at the imperial court, among them of the notorious Crispinus, of Parthenius, Earinus, Regulus, and probably of Paris, the supposed author of Juvenal s exile, on whose death Martial afterwards wrote a eulogistic epitaph. The two books numbered xiii. and xiv., and known by the name of Xenia and Apopkoreta, inscriptions of two lines for presents, were published between 81 and 86 A.D. In that last year he gave to the world the first two of the twelve books on which his reputation rests. From that time till his return to Spain in 98 A.D. he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of book x. appeared in the reign of Domitian ; and book xi. .at the end of 96 A.D., shortly after the accession of Nerva. A revised edition of book x., that which we now possess, appeared in 98 A.D., about the time of the entrance of Trajan into Rome. The last book was written after three years absence in Spain, shortly before his death, which happened about the year 102 or 103 A.D. These twelve books bring Martial s ordinary mode of life between the age of five-and-forty and sixty very fully before us. His regular home for five-and-thirty years was Rome. He lived at first up three pair of stairs (&quot; et scalis habito tribus sed altis,&quot; i. 117), and his rooms over looked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He had a small and not very valuable country house near Nomentum, in the Sabine territory, to which ho occasionally retired as a refuge from the bores and noises of the city (ii. 38, xii. 57). In his later years he had a small house on the Quirinal, near the temple of Quirinus. At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to Cisalpine Gaul, in weariness, as he tells us, of his unremunerative attendance on the levees of the great &quot; Non poterat vanse t0edia ferre togfe &quot; (iii. 4). For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (iv. 25) he contemplates, probably with a reminiscence of Horace (Od. ii. 6), the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of Aquileia and the Timavus in his old age. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society &quot;was too great to permit of a prolonged absence ; and even the epigrams sent from Forum Cornell and the yEmilian Way ring much more df the Roman Forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos, and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated. So too his motive for his final departure from Rome in 98 A.D. was a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and, appa rently, the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (x. 96) ; and he looks forward, with a kind of &quot; nostalgia,&quot; to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (xii. 18) shows that for a time his ideal was realized ; but the more trustworthy evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to book xii. proves that his contentment was of very short duration, and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome (&quot;bibliothecas, theatra, convictus&quot;), which supplied both the impulse to his genius and the material on which it could exercise itself. The one consolation of his exile was the society of a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather as if she were his patroness, and it seems to have been a necessity of his being to have always a patron or patroness, than his wife or mistress. His delight in her society arose from his finding in her one who, though born and bred in this remote province, yet by her natural grace and accomplishment revived for him the charm of Rome. During his life there, although he never rose to a position of real independence, and had always a hard struggle with poverty, he seems to have known every body, especially every one of any eminence at the bar or in literature. In addition to Lucan and Quintilian, he numbered among his friends or more intimate acquaintances Silius Italicus, Juvenal, the younger Pliny ; and we find a number of other names, such as those of Julius Martialis, Faustinus, Bassus, Decianus, Melior, Stella, &c., of men holding a high social, legal, or literary position, whose society and patronage he enjoyed. The silence which he and Statius, although authors writing at the same time, having common friends, and treating sometimes of the same subjects, maintain in regard to one another may^be explained by mutual dislike or want of sympathy. Martial, in many places, shows an undisguised contempt for^ the artificial kind of epic on which Statius s reputation chiefly rests; and it seems quite natural that the respectable author of the Thebaid and the Silvx should feel little admiration for either the life or the works of the Bohemian epigrammatist. The personal faults of Martial, which deny to his