Martial

Marcus Valerius Martialis, known in English as Martial, was a Latin poet born at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis in the first century CE. He moved to Rome in the 60s and built a literary career within the capital’s competitive system of patronage. His earliest surviving collection celebrates the opening games of the Colosseum in 80, and he later issued twelve numbered books of Epigrams, together with collections associated with Saturnalian gift-giving.

Martial made the short epigram into an exceptionally flexible instrument for describing imperial Rome. His poems move between patrons and clients, dinners, baths, booksellers, sexual relationships, public entertainments and literary rivalries, mixing flattery with obscenity and abrupt comic reversals. They are invaluable evidence for Roman social attitudes but are also carefully constructed literary performances rather than straightforward autobiography. Late in life he returned to Spain, where he died sometime in the early second century.

The linked Epigrams are Martial’s own surviving work rather than a later fictional portrayal of him. They provide the principal basis for his literary reputation and much of what can cautiously be inferred about his life in Rome and Spain. The poems repeatedly stage a speaking persona called Martial, but that voice should not automatically be treated as a literal record of the historical poet’s private life. Martial’s The Epigrams represents him in his own voice: the poems turn his observations of patronage, sex, dining, literary rivalry and social ambition into a sharply personal record of life in imperial Rome.