The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread, and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume (probably Thalia, certainly not one of the _Musæ severiores_), upbraids him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen, arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire. This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line— “Sint[339] Mæcenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones”— and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no, perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue on Tibullus— “Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua Tibulle”— with two or three other fragments, we possess.[340] And the same doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73. Footnote 339: Some MSS. and edd. read _sunt_: but _sint_ is so clearly required that this seems mere perversity. Footnote 340: Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi. 346-348. Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm of the name[341] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then adds— “Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetæ, Sed Græci, quibus est nihil negatum Et quos Ἄρες ἄρες decet sonare: Nobis non licet esse tam disertis, Qui Musas colimus severiores.” Footnote 341: