SOURCE: "Varied Strains in Martial" in Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Edward Kennard Rand, edited by Leslie Webber Jones, Books for Libraries Press, 1938, pp. 87-99.

In this essay, Duff stresses—and commends—Martial's realism, which he regards as the primary impulse behind the poet's variety of tone, perspective, and subject matter. Duff sees further evidence of Martial's realistic viewpoint in the poet's acknowledgment of his artistic limitations.

In an author like Martial who makes the true assertion that his writing smacks of mankind (hominem pagina nostra sapit), there must inevitably be a wide variety of persons and themes. This clever Spaniard of the first century A.D. had only to use his well-nigh unsurpassed faculty of keen observation in the cosmopolitan Rome where he spent thirty-four years of his life to find infinite material for the epigrams, largely but by no means entirely satiric, in which...