Following this view we find him often sarcastic, but not personal, the names being fictitious, or if not, those of well known public men. In a few instances he is a little ill-natured, and writes, "Laugh, if thou art wise, girl, laugh, said Ovid, but he did not say this to all girls, not, for instance, to Maximina, who has only three teeth, and those the colour of pitch and boxwood. Avoid the pantomimes of Philistion and gay feasts. It befits you to sit beside an afflicted mother, and a wife lamenting her husband. Weep, if thou art wise, girl, weep." Martial often uses the figure called by the Greek grammarians "contrary to expectation." The point of the whole epigram lies in the last word or line, which changes the drift of the whole. "His funeral pile was strewn with reed, His tearful wife brought fragrant myrrh, The bier, the grave, the ointment were prepared, He named me as his heir, and he--got well." "Sorry is Athenagoras not to send the gifts, Which in mid-winter he is wont to send; Whether he be sorry I shall shortly see, But sorry he has certainly made me." "You feast so often without me, Lupercus, I've found a way by which to pay you out, I am incensed, and if you should invite me, What would I do, you ask me? Why--I'd come." The growing appreciation of this kind of writing had already led Meleager, a cynic philosopher of Gadara, to form the first collection of Greek epigrams, which he prettily termed the anthology or bouquet. Martial has been commended at the expense of the Greeks, but he borrowed considerably from them in form and matter. His epigrams were more uniformly suggestive and concentrated than those of any previous writer, and he largely contributed to raise such compositions from being merely inscriptive into a branch of literature. He opened a new field, and the larger portion of these productions in Greek were written about this time. They are not generally humorous, with the exception of a few from Philo and Leonidas of Alexandria who lived about 60 B.C., from Ammianus in 120 B.C., and from Lucilius, a great composer of this kind, of whose history nothing is known but that he lived in the reign of Nero. The following are from the last-mentioned. "Some say, Nicylla, that thou dyest thy hair, which thou boughtest most black at the market." "All the astrologers prophesied that my uncle would be long-lived except Hermocleides, who said he would not be so. This, however, was not until we were lamenting his death." The following are free translations from the same writer. "Poor Cleon out of envy died, His brother thief to see Nailed near him to be crucified Upon a higher tree." On a bad painter. "You paint Deucalion and Phaeton, And ask what price for each you should require; I'll tell you what they're worth before you've done, One deserves water, and the other fire."