SOURCE: "Martial and the Roman Crowd," The Classical Journal, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, January, 1932, pp. 244-54.

In the essay below, Spaeth surveys Martial's depiction of men whose occupations he either scorned as contemptible or envied because they were lucrative—cobblers and booksellers, moneylenders and pawnbrokers, merchants and undertakers, and charioteers and musicians, among others.

The epigrams of Martial have long served as a rich source of supply for those who would seek a more intimate knowledge of life as it was lived at Rome in the first century of the Empire. This is quite as it should be, for Martial was one who freely obeyed his own command to live in the present¹ and at the same time he had been endowed by nature with a keen sense of vision and an agile mind, which he used with unsurpassed success in describing what he saw and experienced. The simplicity...