Martial in English

by Marcus Valerius Martialis

In almost 1,600 epigrams, written in styles ranging from the lyrical to the pornographic, Martial (c. 40-c. 103CE) painted a definitive picture of everyday life, society and sexuality in ancient Rome. His influence on English literature, both direct and indirect, has been immense. From Elizabethan times, writers like Jonson, Herrick, Cowley and Byron translated (or adapted to the London of their day) Martial's portraits of poseurs, prostitutes and philosophers, legacy hunters and social climbers. His urbanity and sharply polished wit helped inspire Pope's heroic couplets and Swift's savage irony. Although Romantics and Victorians tended to react against Martial's obscenity and fulsome flattery of his imperial masters, he always retained a reputation as an underground classic and then became an important model for Ezra Pound. Recent poets, as J.P. Sullivan and A.J. Boyle explain in their Introduction, have also found in his work 'a fully realized, if sometimes sombre world, which altern