_Grammaticis placeant, et sine grammaticis._ Footnote 345: _V._ the only remaining fragment in Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi. 370. The satirical piece, usually printed with Juvenal and assigned to a Sulpicia, _may_ be hers: but at any rate Martial was not thinking of anything of the kind. He varies his own conceit in vii. 69 on a certain Theophila. The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper (for the _Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_[346] have been dealt with so far as the little that they have concerns us, and the _Liber de Specta culis_ is out of the question), are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for us, though by no means immaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus, the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like “Luceili columella heic situ’ Metrophanes” is better to him than all Homer, and he worships _terrai frugiferai_ and all the jargon of Attius and Pacuvius. Footnote 346: It ought, however, perhaps to be added that these include a considerable batch of inscription-distichs for presents of books from Homer and Virgil downwards. Most of these are decorative but conventional: that on Lucan (194), “There are those who say that I am not a poet; but my bookseller thinks me one,” is keen with a double edge. The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three years’ silence (it would appear that for a considerable time Martial had produced a book yearly), due to the poet’s return to Spain. He had been, as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work “not merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple.”[347] In the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation (which Thackeray would have translated impeccably) to his book to revisit the dear old places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the crown of style— “Quid titulum poscis? Versus duo tresve legantur, Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum.”