We have left to the last two poets who belonged to the same epoch, sought the favor of the same emperor and the same patrons, and yet never mention each other: one the purest, the other the coarsest, poet in the history of imperial Rome. Publius Papinius Statius was the son of a Neapolitan poet and grammarian; his environment and his education gave him everything but money and genius. He lisped in numbers, startled salons with poetical improvisations, and wrote an epic, the Thebaid, on the war of the Seven against Thebes. We cannot read it today, for its movement is obstructed with dead gods, and its smooth verses have an overpowering virtus dormitiva. But his contemporaries liked it; crowds gathered to hear him recite it in a Naples theater; they understood his mythological machinery, welcomed the delicacy of his sentiment, and found that his lines ran trippingly on the tongue. The judges in the Alban poetry contest gave him the first prize; rich men became his friends and helped him stave off penury;124 Domitian himself invited him to dinner in the domus Flavia, and Statius repaid him by describing the palace as heaven and the Emperor as god.
To Domitian and other patrons, to his father and his friends, he addressed the most pleasing of his poems, the Silvae, modest idyls and eulogies in light and happy verse. In the Capitoline games, however, another poet won the crown, Statius’ star waned in fickle Rome, and he persuaded his reluctant wife to return with him to his boyhood home. In Naples he began another epic, the Achilleid; then suddenly, in 96, he died, a youth of thirty-five. He was not a great poet; but he struck a welcome note of kindliness and tenderness amid a literature too often sarcastic and bitter, and a society corrupt and coarse beyond any precedent. He would have been as famous as Martial if he had been as obscene.
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Bilbilis in Spain in the fortieth year of our era. At twenty-four he came to Rome and won the friendship of Lucan and Seneca. Quintilian advised him to butter his bread by practicing law, but Martial preferred to starve on poetry. His friends were suddenly swept away in the conspiracy of Piso, and he was reduced to addressing his poems to rich men who might give him a dinner for an epigram. He lived in a third-floor garret, probably alone; for though he indites two poems to a woman whom he calls his wife, they are so foul that she must have been an invention or a bawd.126
His poems, he lets us know, were read throughout the Empire, even among the Goths; he rejoices to learn that he was almost as famous as a racehorse, but he fretted to see his publisher enriched while he himself received nothing from the sale of his books. He descended to suggesting, in an epigram, that he badly needed a toga; the Emperor’s rich freedman Parthenius sent him one; he replied in two stanzas, one of which celebrated the newness of the garment, the other its cheap worthlessness. In time he found some more generous patrons; one gave him a little farm at Nomentum, and somehow he raised funds to buy a simple home on the Quirinal hill. He became a “client” or retainer to one rich man after another, waited upon them in the morning, and received an occasional gift; but he felt the shame of his situation and mourned that he did not have the courage to be contentedly poor and therefore free.127 He could not afford to be poor, for he had to mingle in the society of men who could reward his verse. He showered Domitian with lauds and announced that if Jupiter and Domitian were to invite him to dinner on the same day he would turn down the god; but the Emperor preferred Statius. Martial became jealous of the younger poet and suggested that a live epigram was worth more than a dead epic.128
The epigram had till now been a pretty conceit on any passing subject, sometimes a dedication, a compliment, an epitaph; Martial molded it into a briefer, sharper form, barbed with satiric sting. We do him injustice when we read these 1561 epigrams in a few sittings; they were issued in twelve books at divers times, and the reader was expected to use them in small portions as hors d’oeuvres, not as a prolonged feast. Most of them seem trivial today; their allusion was local and temporary, too well timed to endure. Martial does not take them very seriously; the bad ones, he agrees, outnumber the good, but he had to fill a volume.129 He is a master of versification, knows all the meters and all the tricks of the poetic trade; but he avoids rhetoric as proudly as his prose patrician analogue, Petronius. He cares nothing for the mythological furniture that littered the literature of his age; he is interested in real men and women and their intimate life and describes them with relish and spite; “my pages,” he says, “taste of men.”130 He can “take down” some stiff aristocrat or stingy millionaire, some pompous lawyer or famous orator; but he likes better to tell of barbers, cobblers, hawkers, jockeys, acrobats, auctioneers, poisoners, perverts, and prostitutes. His scenes are laid not in ancient Greece but in the baths, the theaters, the streets, the circus, the homes, and tenements of Rome. He is the poet laureate of worthless men.
He is more interested in money than in love, and most often thinks of the latter in one gender. There is some sentiment in him, and he speaks very tenderly of a friend’s child just dead; but there is no gallant line in his books, not even a noble wrath. He chants a litany of evil smells, and adds, “All these stenches I prefer to yours, Bassa.”131 He describes one of his mistresses:
Your tresses, Galla, are manufactured far away; you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silk dresses; you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you; you wink with an eyebrow brought to you in the morning. No respect moves you for your outworn carcass, which you may now count as one of your ancestors.132
He writes with unmanly vengefulness of the women who have refused him, and flings his epigrammatic mud at them with the delicacy of a scavenger. His love lyrics are addressed to boys; he climbs to ecstasy over the fragrance of “thy kisses, cruel lad.”133 One of his love poems begot a famous English counterpart:
I do not love you, Sabidius, the reason I cannot tell;
This only I can say—I dislike you very well.II
Indeed there are many whom Martial does not like. He describes them under transparent pseudonyms and in language that can be found today only on the most private public walls.135 He is always libeling his enemies, as Statius is always celebrating his friends. Some of his victims retaliated by publishing under his name poems filthier than his own, or attacking the men whom Martial was anxious to please. From these technically perfect epigrams one could construct a full vocabulary of barroom urology.
But Martial’s obscenity sits on him lightly. He shares it with his time, and never doubts that even highborn maidens in palace bowers will like it. “Lucretia blushed and laid down my volume, but Brutus was present. Brutus, go away; she will read it.”136 The poetic license of the age allowed indecencies, provided the meter and diction were correct. Sometimes Martial boasts of his lubricity; “no page of mine is without wantonness.”137 More often he is a bit ashamed of it, and begs us to believe that his life is cleaner than his verse.
At last he tired of purveying compliments and insults as a source of food; he began to long for a quieter, wholesomer life, and the haunts of his native Spain. He was now fifty-seven, with gray head and bushy beard, so swarthy that anyone, he tells us, could see at a glance that he had been born near the Tagus. He addressed a poetical bouquet to the younger Pliny and received in return a sum that paid his fare to Bilbilis. The little town welcomed him, forgiving his morals for his fame; he found simpler patrons there, but more open-handed than those at Rome. A kindly lady presented him with a modest villa, and there he spent his few remaining years. In 101 Pliny wrote: “I have just heard of Martial’s death. The news has deeply grieved me. He was a man of wit, piquant and mordant, who mixed in his verse salt and honey, and not least of all, candor.”138 There must have been some secret virtue in the man if Pliny loved him.
I Many farmers today plant according to the phases of the moon.
II Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare; Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.134