lO UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



native town and continued in some neighboring city. This education 

 would not differ in any essentials from that of a boy trained at Rome, for 

 Spain had devoted herself enthusiastically to the same culture as that of 

 the imperial city, and was already sending thither successful teachers. At 

 this period Rome had the same attraction for a youth "suffering from 

 Hterary aspirations " that Paris or London or New York has so often exer- 

 cised on his modem counterpart; and this attraction would be all the 

 stronger for Martial by reason of the number of influential Spanish 

 houses already estabhshed at the capitol. To Rome, then, he went as a 

 sanguine youth in 64 A. D., and in most respects became more of a city 

 man than his contemporaries who first saw the hght in the Bowery of 

 Rome, the fervens Subura. Of the earher years spent there we know 

 httle. He doubtless prepared for work as an advocate, and very prob- 

 ably wrote poems, some of which may have been revamped for publica- 

 tion after he acquired vogue. In the year 80 a. d., however, when the 

 great Flavian amphitheater, now known as the Colosseum, was dedicated 

 with spectacles on a stupendous scale, he came into prominence with 

 some suitable epigrams; and from this year on we can gather many 

 details of his round of hfe. For a time he hved in rented quarters which 

 learned commentators have felt justified in describing as "poor and 

 humble," because the poet playfully states that they are "three flights 

 back." But during the last four or five years of his sojourn in the 

 m^tropohs he was the respectable proprietor of his owti dwelUng. He 

 owned a httle estate at Nomentum which he wittily derides in pleasantries 

 that must not be taken as legal evidence. He was always importuning 

 his friends for money or goods, and was always impecunious, probably as 

 a result of generous Bohemian expenditure rather than of an oppressively 

 meager income. At any rate, he managed to live the life of a fashionable 

 man of letters, thoroughly after the manner sung of in Goethe's " Genial- 



isch Treiben. " 



Bald ist es Ernst, bald ist es Spass. 

 Bald ist es Lieb, bald ist es Hass. 

 Bald ist es dies, bald ist es das. 

 Es ist ein Nichts, und ist ein Was. 



[Now it is earnest, now it is jest. Now it is love and now it is hate. Now it is 

 this, and now it is that. It is a nothing and it is a something.] 



