Martial (c.40-101), as we have seen (above, p. 680), also took trouble to set himself at a distance from the
grander poets; but he is, by contrast, easy and undemanding. Active mainly in the reign of Domitian, he is the
father of the epigram in the modern sense of the term: the short poem, sometimes very short, with a witty point
or a twist in the tail. For example:
Hesterno fetere mero qui credit Acerram, fallitur: in lucem semper Acerra bibit.(1.28)
He who thinks Acerra reeks of yesterday's wine is wrong: Acerra always drinks till dawn.Sometimes the wit has a touch of Ovid's or (to look forward) of Herrick's charm:
Intactas quare mittis mihi, Polla, coronas?
a te uexatas malo tenere rosas.(11.89)
Why, Polla, do you send me chaplets that you have not touched? I had rather hold roses that your
hands had disturbed.And sometimes he achieves pathos, still without losing his epigrammatic pointedness, as in his poem on the
death of Erotion in childhood, which ends thus:
mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa nee illi,
terra, grauis fueris: non fuit ilia tibi.(5-34-9f.)
Let the turf be not hard that covers her soft bones; earth, be not heavy upon her; she was not
heavy upon you.On the other hand, a high proportion of his epigrams is obscene; and he cheerfully allows that his object is to
titillate his readers.
We have seen that silver epic was most successful when, with Lucan, it shaded into satire; the finest fusion of
rhetorical magnificence and epigrammatic harshness comes, however, in Juvenal, the greatest poet of the silver
age. Little is known about his life: a fair hypothesis is that he was born around 65 or a little later and died around
- His style is dense, muscular, declamatory. He seems to have composed slowly and laboriously, since he has
left us just fifteen satires and a fragment of a sixteenth, probably unfinished.
Since Juvenal's is the Latin poetry most like satire in the modern sense, it should be stressed that he departed
decisively from the traditions of Roman satura. Lucilius and Horace had adopted a rapid, discursive, informal
manner; they offered, or purported to offer, a view of the poet off duty, with the quirks of his personality freely