You invite me to partake of a wild boar, you set before me a home-grown pig. I'm half-boar, half-pig, if you can cheat me thus. pars maxillarum tonsa est tibi, pars tibi rasa est, pars volsa est. unum quis putet esse caput? (viii. 47). Part of your jaws is shaven, part clipped, part has the hair pulled out. Who'd think you'd only one head? tres habuit dentes, pariter quos expuit omnes, ad tumulum Picens dum sedet ipse suum; collegitque sinu fragmenta novissima laxi oris et adgesta contumulavit humo. ossa licet quondam defuncti non legat heres: hoc sibi iam Picens praestitit officium (viii. 57). Picens had three teeth, which he spat out altogether while he was sitting at the spot he had chosen for his tomb. He gathered in his robe the last fragments of his loose jaw and interred them in a heap of earth. His heir need not gather his bones when he is dead, Picens has performed that office for himself. summa Palatini poteras aequare Colossi, si fieres brevior, Claudia, sesquipede (viii. 60). Had you been eighteen inches shorter, Claudia, you would have been as tall as the Colossus on the Palatine. Without wishing to break a butterfly on the wheel, we may well quote against Martial the remark made in a different context to a worthless poet: tanti non erat esse te disertum (xii. 43). 'Twas scarce worth while to be thus eloquent. There is much also which, without being precisely pointless or silly, is too petty and mean to be tolerable to modern taste. Most noticeable in this respect are the epigrams in which Martial solicits the liberality of his patrons. The amazing relations existing at this period between patron and client had worked a painful revolution in the manners and tone of society, a revolution which meant scarcely less than the pauperization of the middle class. The old sacred and almost feudal tie uniting client and patron had long since disappeared, and had been replaced by relations of a professional and commercial character. Wealth was concentrated in comparatively few hands, and with the decrease of the number of the patrons the throng of clients proportionately increased. The crowd of clients bustling to the early morning _salutatio_ of the patronus, and struggling with one another for the _sportula_ is familiar to us in the pages of Juvenal and receives fresh and equally vivid illustration from Martial. The worst results of these unnatural relations were a general loss of independence of character and a lamentable growth of bad manners and cynical snobbery. The patron, owing to the increasingly heavy demands upon his purse, naturally tended to become close-fisted and stingy, the needy client too often was grasping and discontented. The patron, if he asked his client to dine, would regale him with food and drink of a coarser and inferior quality to that with which he himself was served.[675] The client, on the other