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Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Marshall.

Marcus Valerius Martialis, hugely prolific poet and creator of scabrous satirical epigrams.

We know him better as Marshall.

He was born in Bilbilis, which is in the Roman province of Hispania Terraconensis, that's northern Spain to us, around the year 40 CE.

So Spain was a wealthy province, well, three provinces, I think, of Rome.

It was rich because of olive oil and because of wine exports, and its people were Roman citizens.

So it produced other celebrated writers and thinkers like Seneca, the philosopher, Lucan,

the epic poet, maybe even Marshall's younger contemporary juvenile.

We know very little about Marshall's childhood, but he was probably quite well to do because

he had a good education and you had to pay for it.

Not only does he write poems, which suggests at the very least literacy,

ideally also skill, but it's never a given, is it? But he has also read everything. He is always

mentioning Virgil, Catullus, Lusilius, Ovid, he's read everything. When he moves to Rome as well,

he hangs out with lots of wealthy friends, which implies that he's from quite polite society himself.

He seems to have become an equestrian, which translates as being sort of solid middle or upper middle class.

The property qualification was 400,000 Cistercies, which, you know, money is really hard to translate through time, but somewhere between 300 and 600,000 pounds today, perhaps.

So when he says in the 13th poem of Book 5, he says,

I admit it, I'm a pauper, and I always was,

we can probably take that as poetic and comedic exaggeration.

And anyway, he goes on in that poem.

He says, I'm not an unknown.

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