Martial is read about 708 times a day, in 55 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?Martial wrote short, sharp poems that skewered Roman social climbers, adulterers, and phonies with a precision that still stings two millennia later. His epigrams - 1,561 survived - set the template for the form: brutal, funny, and over before you see the blade.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
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In their own words 8
, Stop abusing my verses, or publish some of your own.
You complain, friend Swift, of the length of my epigrams, but you yourself write nothing. Yours are shorter.
I do not love thee, Sabidius, nor can I say why; this only I can say, I do not love thee.
In their orbit
About this person
Born in Bilbilis, a provincial town in what's now Spain, sometime between 38 and 41 AD, Marcus Valerius Martialis migrated to Rome and spent decades observing the capital's vanities and vices. Between 86 and 103 AD, under three emperors - Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan - he published twelve books of epigrams that alternated between satirising the scandalous doings of city acquaintances and romanticising the simpler life he'd left behind. Most of his 1,561 surviving poems are elegiac couplets, compact enough to deliver a punchline in two lines. He died sometime between 102 and 104, but the form he perfected - witty, caustic, merciless - has outlasted the empire that fed it.
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