Within this writer’s own lifetime, Latin has disappeared in Britain as a requirement for entry into university. The publication of a new edition in the renowned Loeb Classical Library of the poems of Martial—Latin verse and English prose face à face—affords the pleasant reflection that someone somewhere is still studying the language, and also offers an occasion for thinking about the way Martial’s presence shows itself in English poetry and about the poet in person.

A reliable English version is always good to possess and here we have one that gives us access to many a dark and difficult corner of the original Latin. To anyone, like myself, who has only fitfully kept up his Latin, I cannot exaggerate the usefulness of an unpretentiously accurate approach to the meaning such as this. It helps the reader to the mental possession of the original and it also makes one conscious anew of how splendidly some of our English poets responded to Martial.

Marcus Valerius Martialis was born round about A.D. 40 at Bibilis in Spain, a sort of first-century Pittsburgh, famous for its iron mines and the manufacture of steel, and a center of Roman culture. Like most cities in the ancient world, Bibilis lay within easy access of the countryside and when, in later life, Martial returned there, a local patroness whom he refers to as Marcella provided him with a rural property that sounds rather like Horace’s Sabine retreat.

Patronage was a lifelong