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This and a few other equally moderate utterances are the grounds on which the indictment rests. Surely we have not here one who tramples on a fallen oppressor, but rather one who feels that by former expressions he has forfeited the right to be as severe as the case warrants. Pliny† ascribes sincerity to Martial, and we must remember that the epigram, the form which he chose as the vehicle for his thoughts, almost excludes the softer feelings. His condemnation of Nero is certainly neither vehement nor abundant. A military despotism is the worst sort of tyranny, because it kills the sentiments which are the very life of a civilized society. It created around itself the quiet of the graveyard,' says Teuffel: servility alone was allowed to speak.' We cannot help feeling for the poet when we find how little material benefit he reaped from the prostitution of a great genius to the poor business of a court poet. It is pathetic to see him licking the hand which pushes him away, and blessing the Emperor for the kind tone in which he refuses his petition:

'If this be the smile with which help is refused, what must be the smile when he gives?' §

He got little but empty honours, which made his poverty the more galling, because they imposed upon him some little dignity to maintain. To set against thousands of petitions we have not a single acknowledgment of a pecuniary favour. He seems to have received from the Emperor a wretched little house in the country, the roof of which was not watertight, and the garden of which did not supply him with sufficient vegetables for his frugal table. He exults over the present of a new toga from Parthenianus, but feels that he can hardly live up to such a garment, and begs for a common one to save it.* Always the beggar's whine; and his delight when he receives an alms shows how rare was such a piece of luck.

XII. 15. 9 is equally temperate, but v. 19. 5 and XII. 6. 4 are stronger. The fierce couplet

Flavia gens, quantum tibi tertius abstulit hæres :

Pæne fuit tanti non habuisse duos'

is included in the 'Spectaculorum liber' (32). It is due to a Schol. on Juv. IV. 38, and it is not certain that it is by Martial.

† Ep. II. 21.

It is decided enough, but not very earnest, as in vi. 34. 4:

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Always indigence, which often betrays itself in the cynicism of his epigrams, as in that one where he cries:

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'My parents in their folly taught me letters,' †

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an unfilial exclamation wrung from him by the success of a contemporary shoemaker. Martial, like the other Roman poets, tells us hardly anything of his youth. We know, however, that he came from Bilbilis to Rome at the age of one-and-twenty in the reign of Nero, and lived there till he was six-and-fifty. He wrote nothing under Nero, nor under Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, those emperors whose reigns were counted by weeks, and four of whom sat in the Palace of the Cæsars during ten months, as if,' in the words of Plutarch, they were players in a booth going on to the stage and anon off again.' When he left Rome after a sojourn of thirty years, so little money had he made by being a court poet that his friend Pliny had to discharge the cost of his return to his native Bilbilis. The twelfth book, which was written there, is full of melancholy and regret for Rome. We do not know whether his life reached the limit of five-and-seventy years which he coveted, but he seems to have outlived his enjoyments, ambitions, and hopes.

He has left us fourteen books, containing nearly fifteen hundred epigrams. We could well dispense with about twothirds of them, but the residue is precious. We have in Martial a matchless picture of Rome. Nowhere else do we find one so strong, so spirited, so filthy, even so mean, for now nothing is on a great scale in Rome except vice. Though the vehicle of his thoughts is so adverse to the expression of sensibility, yet we have distinct signs of it in his poetry, as when he declares that the birthday of his beloved Quintus conferred on him a greater boon than his own; that a gift to a friend is the only thing that is out of the reach of chance, and money given away in presents is the only abiding wealth. His sincere and exquisite pictures of the delights of country life could not have been drawn by a man of shallow heart, and we cannot help feeling that he was on the whole a good man who in the forty-seventh epigram in the fifth book enumerates the ingredients of a happy life. His impurities would now forbid the application to him of any such title, but we must remember that expressions which shock us now did not seem shocking to his contemporaries. He even boasts that young girls can read him without danger; and indeed his books are a pathological museum of vice, and his foul epigrams, like Zola's novels, * IX. 74.

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'At me litterulas stulti docuere parentes.'

disgust

disgust rather than corrupt. Respectable men in Rome avowed their admiration of him, and he challenges his readers to find anything foul in his life, unchaste though his verses may be

and are.

*

Statius and Martial never mention each other's names, no doubt because they were rival beggars compelled to offer their literary wares to an Emperor who was no judge of them, and who had to be approached through illiterate eunuchs and freedmen. M. Nisard compares certain poems in which Statius and Martial have treated the same theme, and is disposed to award the palm to Statius. A favourite eunuch named Earinus had cut off his hair and dedicated it to Esculapius. Martial deals with this incident in four sportive little epigrams in the ninth book, chiefly dwelling on the unsuitableness of the name to the Latin metres. Statius devotes to it a poem nearly as long as Wordsworth's immortal Ode on Immortality, with elaborate mythological machinery. We cannot help thinking that victory, with such a subject and achieved by so laborious a method, is itself defeat. The result is much the same when we observe how each deals with another theme, a bronze statue of Hercules which had been owned by Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Sulla, and was now the property of a Roman virtuoso, Novius Vindex.† A better principle of comparison would be to observe how high each can rise and how low he can sink. Martial is often profoundly touching. He sometimes seems to mock his own sensibilities and those of his readers. As Heine sometimes seems ashamed of possessing human feelings, and, reversing the well-known Terentian phrase, delights in showing how alien to him is all that is human by putting a piece of cold cynicism beside some profound and pathetic reflection; so Martial, having touched the most exquisite note in Byron's

'O snatch'd away in beauty's bloom,'

we mean the last couplet,

'And thou who bidd'st me to forget,

Thy cheeks are wan, thine eyes are wet,'

concludes a noble poem with some lines of the foulest indecency. But he rises high, though he chooses to stoop low. Statius never approaches the 'pure serene' in which Martial sometimes is willing to float for a while,‡ and how miserably low he can fall will be evident to any one who reads the

* Silv. III. 4. † Mart. Ix. 44, 45; Stat. Silv. IV. 6. Perhaps his best piece is the prayer for sleep in Silv. v. 4, with which should be read a fine description of the abode of Sleep in Theb. x. 84 ff.

creeping

creeping Sapphics * in which he apostrophizes the condition of childlessness as 'to be avoided by every effort,'

'Orbitas omni fugienda nisu.'

Taking into consideration the absurdity of personifying and apostrophizing the condition of childlessness, the grotesque feebleness and almost offensive tastelessness of the expression, and the imbecility of the sentiment, we should be disposed to pronounce this the very worst line in Latin poetry, though others in the same poem run it close in the race for this distinction, especially the very next verse in which childlessness is described as 'buried with no tears' ('orbitas nullo tumulata fletu'), as if a father could enjoy the thought of his children weeping over his bier.

As we have been bold enough to select a particular verse as the worst in Latin poetry, and to challenge our readers to produce a feebler specimen of the poet's art, perhaps we shall not be straying too far from our subject if we venture to ask those readers whether they agree with us in our choice of the best line in Latin 'poetry. We know that there are a dozen or perhaps a score of verses which might compete with that which we have selected. But for ourselves we think nothing surpasses Virgil's

'Sunt lacrimæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.'

It has about it a kind of pathetic dignity, a 'diviner air,' which is beyond the reach of lines containing beauties more easily analysed. We ask leave to dwell upon it a little, as we are not sure that its whole meaning has yet been fully unfolded. The late Lord Bowen, whose recent death has left incomplete what promised to be the best of the modern translations of Virgil, renders the passage—

Tears are to human sorrow given, hearts feel for mankind';

and such is the accepted view of the meaning of words which have always seemed to us to come bitter from that well-spring of sadness which made Virgil marvel why the dead should desire to live again:

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O my father, and are there, and must we believe it, he said,
Spirits that fly once more to the sunlight back from the dead?
Souls that anew to the body return and the fetters of clay?
Can there be any who long for the light thus blindly as they?'

* Silv. IV. 7.

It was this minor key in Virgil's poetry that was ringing in Tennyson's ears when he apostrophized him as

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.' Surely in this famous verse,

'Sunt lacrimæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,' Virgil meant more than Wordsworth in the Laodamia' when he wrote

'But tears to human suffering are due.'

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Surely these words, which seem full of a natural magic, come to us with a grander message than this. Dr. Henry of Dublin, one of the acutest of modern Virgilian scholars, has greatly added to the impressiveness of the verse by a refined interpretation of the word rerum as meaning 'in the world,' as in the phrase dulcissime rerum. The meaning would then be, 'There are such things as tears in the world,' tears are universal, belong to the constitution of nature, and the evils of mortality touch the heart.' This is a great improvement on the ordinary explanation of this oft-quoted (and oft-misapplied) verse. But may not the words, which cannot but strike one as fraught with some new and exquisite fancy, bear a meaning far more definite, weighty, and distinguished? Æneas is gazing at the picture of the Trojan War in the temple of Juno in Carthage. As he looks he weeps and cries, E'en things inanimate (res, the material picture) can weep for us, and the works of man's hands (mortalia) * have their own pathetic power.' In other words, the meaning of Æneas would be, ‘Here in a strange land, where men knew me not till but yesterday, I find a painted picture to accord me sympathy, and call forth my tears.' The verse which follows falls in with this view:

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Then on the lifeless painting he feeds his heart to his fill.' †

Inani, as Conington points out, is not a mere general epithet, but has a pathetic sense as implying that the subjects of the picture are numbered with the lost and past. Rerum is the lonely word' in which flowers all the charm of all the Muses.+

It seemed as if the stream of Epic poetry would never run dry

* Mortalis means the work of man' in Æn. XII. 740, where mortalis mucro is contrasted with a brand fashioned by a god.

'Sic ait atque animam pictura pascit inani.'

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All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.'

(Tennyson.)

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