Editing Martial (section)

==Life in Rome==
The success of his countrymen may have been what motivated Martial to move to [[Rome]], from Hispania, once he had completed his education. This move occurred in AD 64. [[Seneca the Younger]] and [[Lucan]] may have served as his first patrons, but this is not known for sure.

Not much is known of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome. He published some juvenile poems of which he thought very little in his later years, and he chuckles at a foolish bookseller who would not allow them to die a natural death [http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Epigrammaton_liber_I#CXIII (Mart. 1. 113)]. His faculty ripened with experience and with the knowledge of that social life which was both his theme and his inspiration; many of his best epigrams are among those written in his last years. From many answers which he makes to the remonstrances of friends&mdash;among others to those of [[Quintilian]]&mdash;it may be inferred that he was urged to practice at the bar, but that he preferred his own lazy, some would say [[Bohemianism|Bohemian]] kind of life. He made many influential friends and patrons and secured the favor of both [[Titus]] and [[Domitian]]. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the ''semestris tribunatus'', which conferred on him [[equestrian (Roman)|equestrian]] rank. Martial failed, however, in his application to Domitian for more substantial advantages, although he commemorates the glory of having been invited to dinner by him, and also the fact that he procured the privilege of citizenship for many persons on whose behalf he appealed to him.

The earliest of his extant works, known as ''Liber spectaculorum'', was first published at the [[Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre|opening]] of the [[Colosseum]] in the reign of Titus. It relates to the theatrical performances given by him, but the book as it now stands was published about the first year of Domitian, i.e. about the year 81. The favour of the emperor procured him the countenance of some of the worst creatures at the imperial court&mdash;among them of the notorious Crispinus, and probably of Paris, the supposed author of [[Juvenal]]'s exile, for whose monument Martial afterwards wrote a eulogistic epitaph. The two books, numbered by editors XIII and XIV, known by the names of ''Xenia'' and ''Apophoreta''&mdash;inscriptions in two lines each for presents&mdash;were published at the [[Saturnalia]] of 84. In 86 he produced the first two of the twelve books on which his reputation rests.

From that time till his return to Hispania in 98 he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of Book X appeared in the reign of Domitian; Book XI. appeared at the end of 96, shortly after the accession of [[Nerva]]. A revised edition of book X, that which we now possess, appeared in 98, about the time of [[Trajan]]'s entrance into Rome. The last book was written after three years' absence in Hispania, shortly before his death about the year 102 or 103.

These twelve books bring Martial's ordinary mode of life between the age of forty-five and sixty before us. His regular home for thirty-five years was the bustle of metropolitan Rome. He lived at first up three flights of stairs, and his "garret" overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of [[Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa|Agrippa]]. He had a small villa and unproductive farm near [[Nomentum]], in the [[Sabine]] territory, to which he occasionally retired from the pestilence, boors and noises of the city (Mart. 2. 38, Mart. 7. 57). In his later years he had also a small house on the [[Quirinal Hill|Quirinal]], near the temple of [[Quirinus]].

At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to [[Cisalpine Gaul]], in weariness, as he tells us, of his unprofitable attendance on the bigwigs of Rome. For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (Mart 4. 25) he contemplates the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of [[Aquileia]] and the [[Timavus]]. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society was too great; even the epigrams sent from Forum Corneli and the [[Aemilian Way]] ring much more of the Roman forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos, brothels, market stalls, public houses, and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated.

His final departure from Rome was motivated by a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and apparently the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (Mart. 10. 96); and he looks forward to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (Mart. 12. 18) shows that for a time his ideal was happily realized; but the evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to Book XII proves and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome for long. The one consolation of his exile was a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather platonically as if she were his patroness&mdash;and it seems to have been a necessity of his life to always have a patron or patroness&mdash; rather than his wife or mistress.

During his life at Rome, although he never rose to a position of real independence, he seems to have known many writers of the time. In addition to [[Lucan]] and [[Quintilian]], he numbered among his friends [[Silius Italicus]], [[Juvenal]] and [[Pliny the Younger]]. Despite the two authors writing at the same time and having common friends, Martial and [[Statius]] are largely silent about one another, which may be explained by mutual dislike. Martial in many places shows an undisguised contempt for the artificial kind of epic on which Statius's reputation chiefly rests; and it is possible that the respectable author of the ''Thebaid'' and the ''Silvae'' felt little admiration for the life or the works of the bohemian epigrammatist.