BOOKS.

MARTIAL.* THOSE who devote themselves to the classics should be greeted with kindliness and sympathy by all who frequent the old authors ; and it is surely commendable to spread a knowledge

of them among people who do not enjoy the inestimable ad- vantage and pleasure of reading them in the original. The translator and his readers should nevertheless be mindful of Newman's cautious and acute warning where he says, " Who is able to infuse into me, or how shall I imbibe, a sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil if I have not read their writings " The sentiment of these words is unim peach-

able; not so, perhaps, the grammar; and therefore we have scored a pronoun which appears, to say the least of it, questionable. Excellence in translation can only be a relative term, for no author can be transferred just as he is into another language. Translating is at best a matter of degree, not of perfection or finality. But we can judge, both fairly and for tangible reasons, about certain qualities which are essential to it. If we understand the original words of a translated author we can test the accuracy of a rendering into our own language ; and, unless we are shamefully deficient in our own language, we can estimate the value of a trans- lation as English literature. It is with these two objects in view that we approach Mr. Nixon's work, endeavouring to apply these tests to it for the benefit of our readers.

Let us begin, however, in fairness to both sides, by telling them what he has to say about himself. His preface is a model of brevity :—

"Two years ago, in an attempt to prove to certain bored Freshmen that the Romans were not at all times hopelessly austere and lofty, I started writing for my Latin classes some of the following versions of Martial's epigrams. They were received patiently, almost cheerfully. This was success. It suggested the possibility of introducing Martial to a larger audience than he now enjoys ; and to the general reader, therefore, rather than to the classicist, this modest volume is offered."

This humble and ingenuous confession almost disarms criticism; though it might be suggested that a sympathetic

and competent exposition of Horace would have been a more effectual way of proving to the Freshmen of Bowdoin College that the Romans were on the whole average human beings, with the usual defects and merits which this implies ; and that some of them, especially Horace himself, were not only accomplished men of letters, but masters in urbanity and tact. These lessons are not conveyed, as fully as they might and should be, in Mr. Nixon's renderings of Martial :-

" Philo swears he was never known To dine alone:

He wasn't.

Dine at all, when it comes about He's not asked out, He doesn't."

This effusion is headed " In Society." The original is entitled De Philone inope and it runs Nunquam se coenasse domi Philo jurat, et hoc est Non coenat, quoties nemo vocavit eum."

We may remark further that the reference in Mr. Nixon's Table of Contents does not agree with the numbering in our

Delpbin edition of Martial (Amsterdam, 1701) either in this Passage or in many others :—

" The command of our master and lord That the law must no more be ignored

Which reserved fourteen rows As knights' seats at the shows Seemed to most Romans rather untoward."

This is not happy rhyming, so far as English is concerned; and though it is passable as a rendering it has less resem-

blance to the metre or style of the original than to the Limericks in a newspaper competition.

• A Berman Wit : Epigrams of Martial rendered into English. By Paul Nixon. Boston and New York : Houghton Mifflin Co. [$1 net.1

" There's a sly old fox at Ravenna Who cheated me of late ;

When I ordered a whiskey and water He gave me whiskey straight."

Callidus imposuit nuper mihi canpo Ravennao: Cum peterem mixtum, vendidit ille merum."

Our readers may judge of the translation for themselves according to their taste. For our own part it seems, first., needless and then grotesque to intrude whiskey into the place of wine. We might as well foist motor cars and telephones and electric light into our reconstructions of Roman life ; make Caesar mow down the Helvetii with Maxim guns and cross the Channel with aeroplanes, or take Horace to Brundusium in an excursion train. There are certain licences which the rules of art forbid, and if those rules be ignored or violated we cannot take the offender seriously. He is merely absurd. Mr. Nixon seems to us lamentably wanting in tact. Though we may commend the patience with which his efforts were received in the lecture-room, still we wonder at it, and the cheerfulness of the Freshmen at Bowdoin College is almost superhuman ; though we should like to know their opinion of the whole matter. The bulk of Mr. Nixon's work resembles the examples which we have shown. They are fair average specimens, taken almost haphazard. We might have chosen others which in their jingling metres are removed still farther from the dignified and weighty verse of Martial.

There are, however, a few stanzas which reproduce some- thing of his neatness and simplicity.

"Caecilianus never dines

Without a boar served whole: Caecilianus alway dines With one congenial soul."

"Non coenat sine apro noster, Tito, Caecilianus : Bellum convivam Caecilianus habet."

One scholiast, however, thinks that the aper here is not a pig,

but the wife-murderer, who is mentioned in another epigram (x. 15).

There is a pretty figure on Mr. Nixon's title-page : a. youth seated piping under a tree, with the motto Tout bien ou rien. The author would have been well advised if he had obeyed

the motto. The judgment on mediocre poetry is uncom- promising.

Nevertheless, though we may not commend his performance, we do praise his motive, and we are grateful to him for draw- ing attention to Martial: a true poet, who is too much neglected, and who is commonly misjudged. There is, so far as our knowledge extends, no recent or adequate edition of him by an English editor; and certainly a good translation of him is much to be desired. Martial is known chiefly as a writer of epigrams, and many of them are coarse. They would be unprintable in literal English, except at the risk of a prosecution. The Delphin editor, who was too honest to mutilate his author, collected this unsavoury crowd into a supplement of its own, as unfit for the eyes of the " Most Serene Dolphin." It was not by such singing that he was to

be lured in quest of scholarship. Both readers and translators, if they choose, may be as fastidious as Le Grand Dauphin. and leave this part of Martial severely alone. The rest of him is well worth knowing. The bulk of his work consists of epigrams. He is the great Roman epigrammatist, though the word has not exactly the same sense as in English. A Latin epigram may be witty, though it need not be. It is

rather a terse and pointed composition in metre, with a sting in it. Brevity and conciseness are among the chief excellences of Latin writing ; and in these Martial has no superior, except Horace. To transfer these qualities into English is not easy, and only the few real artists in our language could succeed. Of living writers Mr. Austin Dobson would probably be the happiest translator of Martial, because in his own verse he exemplifies some of the Roman's finest gifts. If Pope could have left his couplets, without losing his glitter and sting, and have run his verse into a freer mould, he would have been an ideal translator of the epigrams ; though it is possible that Gray might have done even better, with his condenssd style and his acidulated moods.

The epigrams of Martial are not only valuable and interest- ing models of Latin, but they tell as a great deal that we should hardly know otherwise about Roman life. From Horace, Ovid, and Martial we can reconstruct Roman society, as it lived in the city, from Augustus to Nerve, whose wise and refined countenance, as we see him in the great hall of statues

at the Vatican, should warn us not to judge all the Romans, or even their emperors, from the satirists. Martial was one of those many clever and successful Spaniards who came flocking to Rome about the middle of the first century, and one of whom reigned there before it closed. Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Bilbilis (now Bambala, probably, or Calatayud), in the old northern province of Tarraconensis. He was well educated by his parents, whom he called stu/ti later on for enabling him to follow the barren way of literature. The year of his birth was probably A.D. 40. If so it was in the princi- pate of Caligula. He came to Rome at the age of twenty- three in A.D. 63 or 64, and he remained there until 98. He was intended for the Bar, but soon gave himself wholly to writing. Among his friends were Juvenal, Quintilian, and the younger Pliny. He never mentions Tacitus, and he did not love Statius. He subsisted by literature, though it brought him no great reward in spite of persistent begging. He wrote in all fifteen books of epigrams. They reflect the gorgeous life of Rome and some of its darker shadows. We see in them the monstrous shows of Domitian and his gigantic buildings. Few visitors realize perhaps that the whole area of St. Peter's would go easily into one of his rooms on the Palatine. Martial lived on the slopes of the Quirinal, and in describing his walks he enables us to reconstruct many details of the imperial city. The whole busy crowd of patrons, parasites, professional and business men, slaves, gladiators, women of dubious morals and artificial charms, the populace, and the rabble Jews live on through his verse. The best of Rome, we must remember, is left out ; and from these verses we should not be able to reconstruct a very pleasing portrait of Martial himself. His talent, such as it was, is more conspicuous than his nature. He played on the surface of life, and we cannot feel sure that there is much below his own surface. These suspicions must, however, be modified when we think of the other and better Martial, who is almost ignored in the epigrammatist. After thirty-four years in Rome he returned, at about the age of fifty-seven, to Spain, where he lived in comfort on a country estate. In his pictures of country life he shows himself a real poet, at any rate in his art. They have all the minuteness, realism, charm, and life of the cleverest Dutch paintings. Two of these poems, one describ- ing his native Bilbilis and the other a villa in South Italy, have been used most skilfully by Mr. Frederic Manning in his Scenes and Portraits. The opening of " The Friend of Paul" gives a better notion of Martial at his best than any other attempt to render him in English, and there is a very charming imaginary portrait or memoir of him in French, woven out of the Epigrammata by M. Jules Janin in Garnier's Biblioth.eg-ue Latine-Prancaise.

Martial was a man who saw clearly, so far as his vision penetrated; and he knew how to express what he saw with perfect lucidity. He had no illusions even about his own poetry. He says of his epigrams (i. 17) :— " Stint bona, aunt qnaedam mediocria stint main plum, Quae legis : hic aliter non fit, Avite, liber."

Good, mediocre, bad; certainly they are all in his book ; and he knew it as well as any of his critics, which is more than can be said of most authors. If the bad is often exceedingly bad, in every sense, and the mediocre verse is monotonous or dull, the good is excellent and charming of its kind; and we may always think of Martial finally as living out his years and resting in his own "delightful country," as Mr. Manning has paraphrased his words. "High Bilbilis, enriched by arms and horses ; Caunus austere with snows, and the broken hills of Vadevero, the sweet grove of Botrodus which Pomona loves."