Rome's sharpest insult poet lived in a third-floor garret
Martial wrote 1,561 surviving epigrams, short barbed poems mocking Roman social climbers, quack doctors and men who torched their own houses for the insurance. He has been called the greatest Latin epigrammatist and the original insult comic. He also spent decades cadging dinners, cash and even clothes from wealthy patrons.
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born in March, sometime between 38 and 41 AD, at Bilbilis in Roman Spain, the modern Calatayud. The date comes from his own verse: a book written between 95 and 98 mentions his fifty-seventh birthday. His parents seem to have died while he was young, and he remembered a country boyhood of hunting and fishing with pleasure, boasting of his stiff Spanish hair. In AD 64 he followed other successful Spaniards, such as Seneca and Lucan, to Rome.
For about twenty years little is known of him. Friends, Quintilian among them, urged him to practise law; he preferred a looser, bohemian life. The emperors Titus and Domitian granted him favours, including honorary equestrian rank, though Domitian refused anything more lucrative. His earliest surviving work celebrated the shows at the opening of the Colosseum. From 86 he issued roughly a book a year, twelve in all, published under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. He lived up three flights of stairs, later owned a small, unprofitable farm near Nomentum and a house on the Quirinal.
Patronage shaped everything. The client-patron bond had once been honourable, as with Virgil and Maecenas, but by Martial's day even well-born men queued for handouts. He attended morning receptions and later simply sent a poem in his place. Critics find his flattery of Domitian hard to stomach, especially since he attacked emperors once they were safely dead. He counted Juvenal and Pliny the Younger as friends, while he and Statius pointedly ignored each other.
Worn out by the costs of city life, he went home to Spain in 98 and died around 102 or 103, missing Rome all the while. Pliny said he had as much good nature as wit. Renaissance writers loved him, and his poems, along with graffiti, remain a key source for Latin obscenities.
Source: Martial
