The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii. 77, where, not in the best temper [Sidenote: _Précis of their critical contents._] (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them. Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. _He_ can reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no mere bombast in _his_ book: _his_ Muse is not frounced with senseless tragic train.[335] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise _them_: but they read _me_,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O Martial!] men do _not_ “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation of Corinna.[336] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[337] in epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of literature.