Martial
Martial, a Roman poet from the late first century CE, is best known for his sharp and entertaining epigrams, which provide a vivid portrayal of Roman society. Originally from Spain, he moved to Rome at a young age and spent much of his life there, garnering various honors, possibly under the patronage of influential families. His poetry often reflects the complexities of his life, navigating themes of wealth, social status, and personal relationships, creating a persona that mixes humor with poignant observations about human behavior. Despite his claims of poverty and reliance on the wealthy for support, his works suggest a more comfortable lifestyle than he publicly acknowledged.
Martial's epigrams cover a wide range of subjects, from daily life in Rome to intimate details of social interactions, often employing wit and a provocative style designed to engage and shock his audience. His ability to blend sincerity, humor, and critique has made his poetry endure through the centuries, influencing later writers and maintaining interest in the cultural nuances of ancient Rome. While his work was controversial, with explicit content that raised eyebrows in later interpretations, it remains a crucial source for understanding the social dynamics and moral complexities of his time.
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Subject Terms
Martial
Roman poet
- Born: March 1, 1938
- Birthplace: Bilbilis, Hispania (now near Calatayud, Spain)
- Died: c. 103 c.e.
- Place of death: Hispania (now in Spain)
Martial perfected the epigram, the witty, sometimes salacious poem, typically of two to four lines, which points out the moral and social ills of the poet’s day or lampoons prominent people.
Early Life
Everything known about Martial (MAHR-shuhl) comes from his poems and from one letter of Pliny the Younger, written at the time of the poet’s death. Martial alludes to his Spanish origins in an early poem, but by the age of fifty-seven he had already spent thirty-four years in Rome. His parents, of whom nothing more than their names is known, provided him with the standard rhetorical education designed to equip him to be a lawyer. In one of his poems, Martial depicts them as already in the underworld. Martial seems to have been in Rome by 64 c.e., perhaps under the patronage of the powerful Seneca family, also natives of Spain.
At some point he received the status of knight and an honorary military tribunate, but he does not mention which emperor bestowed on him those privileges. By contrast, it is clear that Titus gave Martial the privileges of a father of three children and that Domitian renewed the grant. His silence about the emperor who had provided the two earlier honors leads scholars to suspect that it was Nero, who fell into disgrace on his death in 68. It was important to Martial to have his honors known but impolitic to boast about who had given them to him.
Martial probably practiced law during Vespasian’s reign (69-79), though it does not seem to have suited him. His comments about the profession are unkind, yet fairly late in his life he gibed someone who had failed to pay him for pleading his case in court.
Exactly when or why Martial turned to poetry cannot be determined. His first published effort was Epigrammaton liber (80 c.e.; On the Spectacles, 1980), a collection of short poems in honor of the dedication of the Flavian Amphitheater (the Colosseum) in 80. Between 86 and 98 he published his epigrams at the rate of roughly a volume a year. Publication order is not necessarily the order of writing. Epigrams 2.59 and 5.26, for example, refer to the same incident but were published several years apart. The twelfth and final volume appeared in 101, after he had returned to Spain. There are also two volumes of incidental poems that were meant to accompany gifts given at banquets. Probably written between 80 and 85, these are sometimes numbered books 13 and 14 of his collected works, but this classification does not seem to have been Martial’s intention.
One of the great puzzles about Martial’s early life is how he supported himself. Many of his poems complain about his poverty and the necessity of flattering the rich in the hope of a handout or a dinner invitation. He mentions his wretched third-floor apartment, and his ragged toga is a frequent subject of lament.
In other poems, however, Martial refers to his “Nomentan farm,” a suburban villa not far from Rome, and to his private home in the city. He invites guests to dine with him and boasts about his kitchen and his cook, luxuries beyond the means of the urban poor who inhabited Rome’s apartment houses. He asks permission from the emperor to tap into the city watersupply and pipe the water directly into his house, a privilege reserved for the ruler’s wealthy friends. The image that he tries to project of a poor poet scrounging handouts from stingy patrons may be nothing more than a literary pose.
Life’s Work
This problem of the poetic persona complicates enormously the study of Martial’s life and work. His poems are the only source of information about his life, but there is doubt that what he says about himself is to be taken seriously. For example, in one poem he complains about his wife having a lover, while in another he objects that she is too moralistic to engage in the deviant sexual behavior that he enjoys. Can these poems be talking about the same woman? As a result, some modern scholars contend that Martial was never married and that any reference to a wife is merely a literary convention. Another possibility is that he was married several times, something that was not at all uncommon in Rome in the late first century c.e.
If one cannot be certain whether, or how many times, Martial was married, it is difficult to ascertain anything else about his life. In one poem, he refers to a daughter but only once in passing. In another, he mourns deeply the death of the slave child Erotion, tending her grave for years and requiring the next owner of the property to observe the same rituals. It is conjectured that this was his daughter by a slave woman on his farm.
It is virtually impossible to know Martial from his poems, as the contradictions in his work are numerous. In some of the poems he pictures himself engaging in homosexual relations; in others he ridicules men who do the same. He praises the joys of simple country life, but he lived in Rome for thirty-five years. He claims that, although many of his poems are bawdy, his life is decent.
Every writer must please his readers, and Martial seems to have been slanting his material to the tastes of his audience. In one poem he claims that he “could write what is serious” but emphasizes entertainment value, for that is what makes people “read and hum my poems all over Rome.” Most of his poetry was produced in the reign of Domitian, a cruel, self-indulgent emperor (according to the biographer Suetonius) who enjoyed brutal sex with prostitutes and initiated mixed nude bathing in Rome’s public baths. After his death, the emperors Nerva and Trajan brought about a kind of Victorian reaction to the loose morality of Domitian’s day. Martial found that his poetry no longer appealed to the general public, so he retired to Spain.
While he does not reveal himself to the reader, Martial does draw an intimate portrait of Roman society in the late first century. One commentator says that he “touched life closely at all levels.” One of his poems describes a Roman’s daily schedule, and several others focus on certain daily activities.
Martial’s day would begin with a visit at daybreak to his patron, a wealthy man who would give him a small daily handout in exchange for Martial’s accompanying him to public meetings and generally boosting his ego. Every Roman aristocrat had as many such clients as he could reasonably support. His status was measured by the size of the throng that surrounded him as he walked through the streets. Because Rome lacked a governmental welfare system, this informal arrangement redistributed some of the wealth that was concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy, a minute percentage of the population. In addition to the daily sportula, clients expected to receive gifts on their birthdays and at the festival of the Saturnalia in December. Martial’s poems show that the clients would complain vociferously if the gift was not as large as they had expected.
One of the client’s duties was to accompany his patron to court, an obligation that the litigious Romans faced frequently. Lawyers seem to have had difficulty collecting their fees, which was perhaps one reason that Martial abandoned the calling. The speeches in court were long and often irrelevant, but the client was expected to applaud his patron’s case in the hope of influencing the jury.
By midday, everyone was ready for a rest, followed by exercise and a bath. Martial frequented the baths and pointed out the flaws—the stretch marks, the sagging breasts, the brand of the former slave—which other patrons tried to hide. From the numerous poems that discuss the baths, one can conclude that they served as Rome’s social center. People went there to see and to be seen, to catch up on the latest gossip, and to wangle invitations to dinner. This last function was the most important to a client such as Martial. Failure to obtain an invitation meant that he had to provide his own meal, which marked him as a social outcast.
Dinner began in the late afternoon, as the Romans did not eat much, if anything, for breakfast or lunch. The city’s social life revolved around these huge meals, at which the food was often intended to impress the guests as much as to nourish them. The seating arrangement indicated the guests’ social standing, with the more prominent individuals reclined on couches closest to that of the host. Many aristocrats served two meals at once: elegant food for those eating immediately around them and cheaper fare for those in the farther reaches of the dining room. That this practice was common is evidenced by Pliny the Younger, who in a letter to a friend assured him that he did not engage in such habits.
Though these dinners did not often turn into orgies, the Romans had no compunctions about promiscuous sexual activity. Martial seems to have engaged in his share of such activity and was aware of what everyone else in his social circle was doing. His language is so explicit that no one dared to translate all of his poems into idiomatic English until 1968.
Significance
Scattered through Martial’s epigrams are the people of Rome, from the aristocracy to the prostitutes. He exposes their posturing and the vices they thought would remain secret. His picture of Roman society may be the most accurate available, for he does not adopt the bitterly satiric tone of Juvenal or the staid disdain of Pliny. Martial’s poetry gained for him renown in his own lifetime, something that he openly pursued. What made him successful, he believed, was the shock value of his epigrams. Martial once wrote that it is the nature of the epigram, as he refined it, to jolt the reader while it amuses, just as vinegar and salt improve the flavor of food.
Martial’s clearest statement of his purpose is found in epigram 6.60:
Rome praises, adores, and sings my verses.
Pliny’s judgment on Martial’s epigrams was that they were “remarkable for their combination of sincerity with pungency and wit. . . . His verses may not be immortal, but he wrote them with that intention.” Later generations have agreed with Pliny’s critique. Though the church fathers frowned on him in the Middle Ages, Martial’s technique was much admired and palely imitated from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century. His Erotion poems directly influenced Ben Jonson’s “On My First Daughter,” and Robert Herrick’s “Upon a Child That Died.”
Bibliography
Adamik, T. “Martial and the Vita Beatior.” Annales Universitatis Budapestinensis 3 (1975): 55-64. According to Adamik, Martial’s personal philosophy of life seems to be closest to Epicureanism. He satirizes Cynics and Stoics especially.
Allen, Walter, Jr., et al. “Martial: Knight, Publisher, and Poet.” Classical Journal 65 (May, 1970): 345-357. Discusses the problem of Martial’s persona and concludes that he was not actually a poor, struggling poet but a reasonably successful writer and publisher.
Ascher, Leona. “Was Martial Really Unmarried?” Classical World 70 (April/May, 1977): 441-444. Surveys scholarly opinion on the question of Martial’s marital status and finds the evidence inconclusive.
Bell, Albert A., Jr. “Martial’s Daughter?” Classical World 78 (September/October, 1984): 21-24. Suggests that the girl Erotion, who is the subject of several of Martial’s poems, was his daughter by a slave woman.
Carrington, A. G. Aspects of Martial’s Epigrams. Eton, England: Shakespeare Head Press, 1960. A nonscholarly introduction to selected poems, especially those discussing Martial’s life, Roman history, and the process of creating a book in antiquity.
Martial. The Mortal City: One Hundred Epigrams of Martial. Edited by William Matthews. Athens, Ohio: Ohio Review Books, 1995. Uses modern references and language to show the timelessness of Martial’s epigrams.
Sullivan, J. P. “Martial’s Sexual Attitudes.” Philologus 123 (1979): 288-302. Though graphic by modern standards, Martial was merely expressing contemporary sexual values in his poetry. His explicit language is a convention of the epigram, as seen in Catullus and earlier poets.