In Martial we have a poet who devoted himself to the one class of poetry which, apart from satire, the conditions of the Silver Age were qualified to produce in any real excellence--the epigram. In a period when rhetorical smartness and point were the predominant features of literature, the epigram was almost certain to flourish. But Roman poets in general, and Martial in particular, gave a character to the epigram which has clung to it ever since, and has actually changed the significance of the word itself. In the best days of the Greek epigram the prime consideration was not that a poem should be pointed, but that it should be what is summed up in the untranslatable French epithet _lapidaire_; that is to say, it should possess the conciseness, finish, and relevance required for an inscription on a monument. Its range was wide; it might express the lover's passion, the mourner's grief, the artist's skill, the cynic's laughter, the satirist's scorn. It was all poetry in miniature. Point is not wanting, but its chief characteristics are delicacy and charm. 'No good epigram sacrifices its finer poetical substance to the desire of making a point, and none of the best depend on having a point at all.'[651] Transplanted to the soil of Italy the epigram changes. The less poetic Roman, with his coarse tastes, his brutality, his tendency to satire, his appreciation of the incisive, wrought it to his own use. In his hands it loses most of its sensuous and lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier. The epigram must have been exceedingly plentiful from the very dawn of the movement which was to make Rome a city of _belles-lettres_. It is the plaything of the dilettante _littérateur_, so plentiful under the empire.[652] Apart from the work of Martial, curiously few epigrams have come down to us; nevertheless, in the vast majority of the very limited number we possess the same Roman characteristics may be traced. In the non-lyrical epigrams of Catullus, in the shorter poems of the _Appendix Vergiliana_, there is the same vigour, the same coarse humour, the same pungency that find their best expression in Martial. Even in the epigrams attributed to Seneca in the _Anthologia Latina_ [653] something of this may be observed, though for the most part they lack the personal note and leave the impression of mere juggling with words. It is in this last respect, the attention to point, that they show most affinity with Martial. Only the epigrams in the same collection attributed to Petronius[654] seem to preserve something of the Greek spirit of beauty untainted by the hard, unlovely, incisive spirit of Rome.