Translator's Note
Martial’s epigrams are best known for their snarky or bawdy zingers critiquing people at every level of society, from wealthy patrons to inept doctors to cadging parasites to aging prostitutes. But there is another side of Martial, in which he praises the ordinary pleasures of daily life and implicitly questions the priorities of the bustling, social-climbing Romans. His praise poems unabashedly appeal to the senses and reach out across millennia to offer common ground to contemporary readers, who often share his preference for relaxed, rural retirement over urban striving for success.
As part of their conversational style, some of Martial’s poems are addressed to one of his contemporaries, as in 2.90, addressed to Quintilian, a famous educator and writer on rhetoric who also had come from Spain. It may be inferred from this poem that Quintilian had urged Martial to pursue traditional roads to success, such as by arguing cases in the law courts as a step toward gaining political office and influence, but that Martial preferred the more leisurely—or lazy—life of a writer, and would rather live in rustic comfort than in ambitious luxury.
Martial had come to densely populated Rome from the town of Augusta Bilbilis, in a hilly, wooded region in Hispania Tarraconensis, in what is now northern Spain. He wrote nostalgically of rural pleasures and often sought to retreat to the countryside, to a small farm of his in Nomentum, eighteen miles from Rome. Late in life, he retired from Rome entirely and returned to live near his birthplace, on a small estate given to him by a local patroness. Though 2.90 is one of his early epigrams, it lays out preferences that he later fulfilled.
There is a lot of subtext in Martial’s short poem. The busts that he claims not to want in his hall are imagines, wax portrait busts of ancestors who had held public office, which were displayed in an upper-class house’s atrium and carried in funeral processions. Even today, owning many portrait busts is usually assumed to be a sign of wealth and family reputation. There is no evidence that Martial ever married or wanted to marry, though in some of his epigrams he pretends to be married or considering marriage. His portrayal of an idealized rural life includes marriage so that the readers of his time could identify with it more easily. His expressed preference for a well-fed homeborn slave implies that many slaves who were products of conquest or purchase were maltreated or deeply unhappy, and that such slaves would lead to a more unpleasant or contentious home life. Martial’s desire for “non doctissima coniunx” (a not overly learnèd wife) probably alludes to Catullus’s praise of his lover Lesbia as a “docta puella” (a learnèd girl). Martial implies that too much learning in a woman leads to adultery and other marital strife. I have not attempted to spell out the subtext of this poem, assuming that even readers not familiar with details of Roman life can follow the overtones of these details.
Because Latin meters, which depend on a pattern of short and long vowels, cannot be heard well in English, which uses a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, I have translated Martial’s elegiac couplets (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter) into iambic pentameter, the metrical pattern that is used most often in English verse and that fits English speech rhythms most closely. Although Latin verse of Martial’s time did not rhyme, in English the epigrams that Martial helped to popularize have traditionally used rhyme to add elements of surprise and emphasis to the poems, so I have followed that pattern. However, trying to rhyme every line would lead me too far away from the content of the original poems, so—except in the concluding couplet—I have rhymed every other line.
Susan McLean