However, Pliny was wrong in his prediction of Martial's poetic oblivion, for the epistolographer's desire to confer immortality upon his friend with this tribute proved unnecessary.
Martial's entire corpus consists of around 1,560 epigrams, not including some verses expurgated from book 10 and lost from the shortened book 12. There was a long and thriving tradition of epigrammatic composition preceding Martial. Following in the tradition of the original genre that had been popular in Greece for many centuries, many of his epigrams are single couplets, have only one subject, and conclude with a witty or clever turn of thought; some are translations of Greek epigrams. They were written to be put on tombstones, to accompany gifts and other special purposes, and to celebrate occasions. The popularity of the epigram in the Latin literary tradition is well attested, since poets such as Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Petronius wrote them. At the time Martial began composing epigrams, the topical and metrical scope of the genre had already widened considerably, embracing virtually every imaginable subject in a variety of meters, but there were still certain conventions and requirements that an epigrammatist was expected to follow.
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