Letter to Juvenal 101 Epigrams from Martial

Martial’s name is a byword for caustic and often obscene wit. The fiercest Roman satirist after Juvenal, he was also a poet with a more reflective nature, whose acute observations of life are tinged with a keen awareness of death. Peter Whigham’s selection from his enormous output represents both the serious and lighter aspects of a many-sided professional poet. His translations also convey, in their frequent homage to earlier translators and English followers of Martial, a sense of his enduring influence on the English poetic tradition. J.P. Sullivan’s critical introduction sets Martial’s life and poetry in the social and political context of his times, and accounts for his continuing popularity through the ages.

Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) was born between AD 38 and 41 in the Roman provincial town of Bilbilis (now Calatayud) in what is now Spain. He went to Rome as a young man and there obtained imperial patronage for his writing from Titus and Domitian. He wrote over 1,500 poems and epigrams, often witty and satirical. He retired to Bilbilis in 98 and died in 103. Peter Whigham was born in Oxford, England in 1925 and was largely self-educated. He worked as a gardener, a school teacher, an actor, a newspaper reporter, and a script writer before moving to live for some years in Italy. He moved again to the United States in 1966, the year in which his Penguin The Poems of Catullus appeared, first as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later in the comparative literature department at UC Berkeley. He was a well known Ezra Pound scholar. He died in a car accident in 1987.