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Martial
Martial | |
|---|---|
 Marcus Valerius Martialis | |
| Born | Marco Valerio Marcial, Marcus Valerius Martialis March 1, 40 |
| Died | 104 ibidem |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Writing career | |
| Genre | Satire |
Marcus Valerius Martialis (in Latin, Marcus Valerius Martialis; Bilbilis, present-day Calatayud, March 1, 40 – ibidem, 104) was a Latin poet.
Biography
He came from Bilbilis (Calatayud), in Hispania Tarraconensis. Around the year 64 he went to Rome to complete his legal studies under the protection of Seneca, but the latter's fall from grace and his suicide in the year 65 left him unprotected, and his poverty forced him to survive in a bohemian and itinerant manner as a client of various patrons for most of the 35 years he spent there. He nevertheless won the friendship of the greatest writers of that time, Pliny the Younger, Silius Italicus, the fellow satirist Juvenal and the great rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, who was also a Hispano-Roman. In the same way he struck up a friendship with the poet from Gades Canius Rufus, a temperament akin to his own. Gradually favored by the emperors Titus and Domitian, to whom he dedicated self-interested praise, they named him a member of the equestrian order, and he won various honors, among them exemption from the taxes that those without children had to pay, that is, the ius trium liberorum. However, their successors Nerva and Trajan forgot about him, and he had to return to Bilbilis and accept there the gift of a country estate from a female admirer; the return to rural life was one of his great dreams. He went there in the year 98 to spend his old age and died six years later.[1] It was the life he longed for, as he wrote in some very famous and much-quoted verses to his friend Julius Martialis:
The things that make life happy, / friend Martialis, / are these: inherited wealth, / not acquired with toil; / land not ungrateful to cultivation; / a hearth with a constant fire; / no lawsuits, little of the court; / a mind always tranquil; / ample strength, health; / prudence, but simple; / equality among friends; / a table without artifice, exquisite; / a night free of sorrows; / no excess in drinking; / a chaste, cheerful wife, and sleep / to shorten the cold night; / to be content with one's lot, / without aspiring to bliss; / finally, neither to fear / nor to long for the last day.
— Book X, ep. 47.
Work
His work, which has survived practically complete, consists of fifteen books of verse, with a prologue in verse or in prose, in various meters (above all the elegiac couplet, but also Catullan hendecasyllables, Phalaecian hexameters and catalectic iambics), a total of some fifteen hundred poems belonging to a single literary genre, the epigram, in which he had no rival in his time and in which he surpassed his predecessors and models, Catullus and the Cicuta of Domitius Marsus. In a certain way the epigram represented the verse counterpart to the concision of the aphoristic prose of the fellow Hispano-Roman Seneca the Younger.
The first book is the Liber spectaculorum, also the first chronologically speaking, since it was composed in the year 80 AD and celebrates the construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, currently known as the Colosseum, by the emperor Titus.
The Xenia (book XIII) and the Apophoreta (book XIV) are couplets composed for the gifts that clients gave to their patrons at the festival of the Saturnalia.
Books I and XII have varied content: literature, society and personal topics. The author's silence about the historian Tacitus and the poet Statius, his contemporaries, is striking; while he may have considered the latter a rival, the lack of allusions to the former is harder to explain.
Martial's fame derives mainly from his satirical wit; but, although he was a penetrating observer of the society of his time, his vision is affected by the most absolute moral indifference, which is why he cannot strictly be considered a satirist. The tone of his pieces ranges from the purest lyricism to the most abject obscenity. His epigrams are also important for their documentary value, for the information they provide about Roman society of the period, which he reflects with great vitality. He displays an extremely sharp wit and extreme concision, which has sometimes led him to be considered the first of the Spanish conceptistas; he also knows how to skillfully find the miserable and hidden side of apparent human greatness. The opportunists, the scoundrels, the degenerates, the hypocrites, the aging demimondaine lady, the dancer and the whole human comedy of the great metropolis that Rome was at that time appear colorfully attacked and described in his poems. But although he always mocks, sometimes wounding, he never does so out of moral irritation. He complains calculatedly about his poverty and dedicates groveling and unworthy flattery to the emperor Domitian.
In the Renaissance painting Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (1488) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of his epigrams can be read in the background of the scene, which says:
ARS VTINAM MORES ANIMVMQUE EFFINGERE POSSES PVLCHRIOR IN TERRIS NVLLA TABELLA FORET ('Art, if only you could portray conduct and spirit, there would be no more beautiful painting on earth').[2]
Translators and commentators of Martial
The Canon of Huesca Manuel de Salinas y Lizana made a translation of Martial's Epigrams that can be found in Baltasar Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio; Juan de Iriarte made another in the 18th century, which is found in the first volume of his Obras sueltas (Madrid, Francisco Manuel de Mena, 1774). Víctor Suárez Capalleja made another in three volumes for the Biblioteca Clásica of the Casa Editorial Hernando.
Martial's witticisms frequently aroused, along with admiration, the scholarly or moral commentary of the humanists from the Renaissance onward. Among the Spanish scholiasts, notable are Baltasar de Céspedes for his Comentario a los Epigramas de Marco Valerio Marcial; Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, for his of 1607; the Dean of Alcoy, Manuel Martí; the Jesuit Fr. Tomás Serrano, who argued with Girolamo Tiraboschi about the merits of Martial in his singular book Super iudicium Hieronymi Tiraboschi de Marco Valerio Martiale, Rome, 1786?; other commentators were Víctor Suárez Capalleja, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Arturo Masriera.
References
- ↑ "Marco Valerio Marcial : poeta satírico hispanorromano" (in español). Retrieved October 4, 2020.
- ↑ "Full text of "Urbi et orbi"" (in español). Retrieved October 4, 2020.
Bibliography
- Marcial, Marco Valerio (1997). Epigramas (in español). Complete works. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. ISBN 978-84-249-1856-9.
- Volumen I: Epigramas I (in español). ISBN 978-84-249-1857-6.
- Volumen II: Epigramas II (in español). ISBN 978-84-249-1858-3.
- Cicerón, Marco Tulio & Marcial, Marco Valerio (1986). Cartas de Cicerón y Epigramas de Marcial (in español). Madrid: Editorial Gredos. ISBN 978-84-249-3476-7.
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- Analytical bibliography
- Bieler, Ludwig (1971 (1965)). Historia de la literatura romana (in español). Madrid: Editorial Gredos. ISBN 978-84-249-2810-0.
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External links
- Texts in Latin, on Wikisource.
- Texts in Latin, on The Latin Library website.
- Portal devoted to Martial
- Epigrams of Martial; complete edition in PDF on the website of the Virtual Library of the Institución Fernando el Católico.
- Latin text, with electronic index, at the Perseus Project.
