MARTIAL AND JUVENAL—OYSTERS 145 
For in this same epigram and many others the poet is fain 
“‘ Ante focum plenas explicuisse plagas, 
Et piscem tremula salientem ducere seta.” 
To him these rank among the chief delights of country life, 
which life he, though an admirable /ldneur, places higher than 
all else. 
He ends his vivid sketch of it with the passionate burst— 
“Let not the man who loves not this life, love me, and let him 
go on with his city life—white as his own toga!” ! 
Martial’s charming picture of a Roman homestead, of its life, 
live-stock, of its pursuits, and of its fishing,? contrasts vividly 
with his fawning eulogies of Emperors, and his savage satire 
on foes. It must be confessed, however, that some of his 
prettiest appreciations of country life were written in or about 
the large villas with which his rich patrons had studded, too 
closely to be really rural, Baiz and the Bay of Naples. 
His pleasure in this part of the coast was increased by the 
nearness of the baths of Baiz, and the Lacus Lucrinus, the home 
of the famous Roman oyster. 
These oysters held, I think, the highest place in Martial’s 
gastronomic affections. Constant his references to them, 
frequent his assertions or assumptions that they excelled all 
other.3 His well known lament for a beautiful little slave girl, 
who died when only six, employs as a term of highest praise 
1 The client had to be at his patron’s house in the morning and attend him, 
there or anywhere, all day if necessary. It was an act of disrespect to appear 
before his patron without donning the toga. Cf. Juvenal, VII. 142, and 
VIII. 49; also I. 96 and 119, and X. 45, and Martial, Ep., X. 10. In prose the 
most caustic description of the client-and-patron institution may be found in 
Lucian, Nigrinus, 20-26. In Ep., XII. 18, to poor Juvenal dancing attendance 
in Rome on his patron and sweating in the requisite toga he recounts the many 
delights of his home in Spain: among them “‘ ignota est toga,”’ a blazing fire 
of oak cut from the adjoining coppice, and lastly the venator or keeper, whose 
attractions in lines 22-3 do not appeal to the modern sportsman. I draw 
attention to these lines, because they reflect quite casually, but quite clearly, 
the decadent vices of the age: remember, they are not quotations from some 
obscure, if obscene, versificr, but were written (and published !) by the second 
poet to the first poet of that generation. It has been pointed out that in the 
epigrams of Martial with which Juvenal is connected some obscenity usually 
creeps in. Cf. Ep., VII. 91. 
2 Ep., IIL., 58, 26, 
‘Sed tendit avidis rete subdolum turdis 
Tremulave captum linea trahit piscem ’”’ 
3 Cf. Ep. VI. 11, 5, and III., 60 3, and XII, 48, 4. 
