By one of the curious accidents of literary history Martial, as the only Latin epigrammatist who left a large mass of work, gave a meaning to the word epigram from which it is only now beginning to recover. The art, practised with such infinite grace by Greek artists of almost every age between Solon and Justinian, was just at this period sunk to a low ebb. The contemporary Greek epigrammatists whose work is preserved in the Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere mass of his work--some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes--as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly to all that was worst in Roman taste--its heavy-handedness, its admiration of verbal cleverness, its tendency towards brutality. Half a century later, Verus Caesar, that wretched creature whom Hadrian had adopted as his successor, and whose fortunate death left the Empire to the noble rule of Antoninus Pius, called Martial "his Virgil:" the incident is highly significant of the corruption of taste which in the course of the second century concurred with other causes to bring Latin literature to decay and almost to extinction. Among the learned Romans of this age of great learning, the elder Pliny, _aetatis suae doctissimus_, easily took the first place. Born in the middle of the reign of Tiberius, Gaius Plinius Secundus of Comum passed his life in high public employments, both military and civil, which took him successively over nearly all the provinces of the Empire. He served in Germany, in the Danubian provinces, in Spain, in Gaul, in Africa, and probably also in Syria, on the staff of Titus, during the Jewish war. In August of the year 79 he was in command of the fleet stationed at Misenum when the memorable eruption of Vesuvius took place. In his zeal for scientific investigation he set sail for the spot in a man-of-war, and, lingering too near the zone of the eruption, was suffocated by the rain of hot ashes. The account of his death, given by his nephew in a letter to the historian Tacitus, is one of the best known passages in the classics.