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Footnote 326:

xiv. 10.

Footnote 327:

vi. 82.

Footnote 328:

iv. 14; vii. 63.

Footnote 329:

Footnote 330:

Footnote 331:

Footnote 332:

xi. 20.

"Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus Quem non ignoras, sed puto lector amas: Majores majora sonent, mihi parva locuto Sufficit in vestras saepe redire manus."

Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.

Footnote 333:

xii. 65.

Footnote 334:

x. 75.

Footnote 335:

Footnote 336:

Footnote 337:

Footnote 338:

The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread, and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume , upbraids him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen, arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.

This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial's literary pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of the poet's literary confidences. It contains the famous line--

"Sint Maecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones"--

and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Maecenas gave him? Well, no, perhaps: but I may be a Marsus--a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue on Tibullus--

"Te quoque Virgilio comitem non aequa Tibulle"--

with two or three other fragments, we possess. And the same doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.

Footnote 339:

Footnote 340:

Martial does not often come down to the minutiae of criticism, but he sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm of the name Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then adds--

"Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetae, Sed Graeci, quibus est nihil negatum Et quos ???? ???? decet sonare: Nobis non licet esse tam disertis, Qui Musas colimus severiores."

Footnote 341:

There are two things noticeable here--first, Martial's truly poetical sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none prettier than Earine which also appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that licence of "common" quantification, which has made Greek and English the two great poetical languages of the world. If he would have developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length, we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue, however, to profess disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book, which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished . It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the eating--that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of the rules, is the thing--that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might have shocked Quintilian if he had.

Footnote 342:

The 78th, addressed to Macer, contains the graceful request--

"Nec multos mihi praeferas poetas, Uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo"--

which shows Martial's faithfulness to his exquisite master.

Footnote 343:

Footnote 344:

Footnote 345:

The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper , are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for us, though by no means immaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus, the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like

"Luceili columella heic situ' Metrophanes"

Footnote 346:

It ought, however, perhaps to be added that these include a considerable batch of inscription-distichs for presents of books from Homer and Virgil downwards. Most of these are decorative but conventional: that on Lucan , "There are those who say that I am not a poet; but my bookseller thinks me one," is keen with a double edge.

The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three years' silence , due to the poet's return to Spain. He had been, as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work "not merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple." In the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation to his book to revisit the dear old places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the crown of style--

"Quid titulum poscis? Versus duo tresve legantur, Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum."

He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of literary epigrams ceases with another odd piece, which may be either gross flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing, so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry. Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself--Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn't care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.

Footnote 347:

"Seu magna sacer et superbus umbra Nescis Tartaron, et procul nocentum Audis verbera, pallidumque visa Matris lampade respicis Neronem."

"Baetin Mantua provocare noli;"

and after some time--

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