Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice, there is the widest difference between the two writers in their motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a moralist at all; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is “getting over-ripe.” In the power of mere objective description and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted.(358) He knows and can appreciate a good woman;(359) he can love, with the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the poor little Erotion,(360) whom he has immortalised. He can honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pretence.(361) He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the client’s sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish splendour of the capital.(362) Where could one find a fresher, prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers? The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having a holiday, and busy, under the bailiff’s care, with rural toils, or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neighbouring cottages bring in their well-stocked baskets to the villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal.(363) Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful antidote for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush and din of plebeian life at Rome, and where he rests.(364) But when charity or justice has done its best for Martial, and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself, was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest.