SOURCE: "The Poet Martial" in Tacitus and Other Roman Studies, translated by W. G. Hutchison, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906, pp. 248-54.

In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1900, Boissier focuses on Martial's incisive portraits of character types in the fashionable society of his day and on the poet's attitude toward women.

… We possess nothing of Martial's save epigrams, and probably he did not write anything else: he seems to have made a speciality of this form of verse. We know that the word epigram had among the ancients a much wider significance than it has to-day. It was, properly speaking, a short inscription of a few lines, and it denoted the epitaph on a tomb, or the dedication of an altar, as well as some malicious skit scribbled on a wall. With Martial satire predominates in the epigram. It is scarce more in his case...