These twelve books bring Martial's ordinary mode of life between the age of five-and-forty and sixty very fully before us. His regular home for five-and-thirty years was Rome. He lived at first up three pairs of stairs, and his "garret" overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He had a small villa and unproductive farm near Nomentum, in the Sabine territory, to which he occasionally retired from the bores and noises of the city (ii. 38, xii. 57). In his later years he had also a small house on the Quirinal, near the temple of Quirinus. At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to Cisalpine Gaul, in weariness, as he tells us, of his unremunerative attendance on the levées of the great. For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (iv. 25) he contemplates the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of Aquileia and the Timavus. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society was too great; even the epigrams sent from Forum Corneli and the Aemilian Way ring much more of the Roman forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated. So too his motive for his final departure from Rome in A.D. 98 was a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and apparently the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (x. 96); and he looks forward to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (xii. 18) shows that for a time his ideal was realized; but the more trustworthy evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to book xii. proves that his contentment was of short duration, and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome. The one consolation of his exile was the society of a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather as if she were his patroness--and it seems to have been a necessity of his being to have always a patron or patroness--than his wife or mistress.
During his life at Rome, although he never rose to a position of real independence, and had always a hard struggle with poverty, he seems to have known everybody, especially every one of any eminence at the bar or in literature. In addition to Lucan and Quintilian, he numbered among his friends or more intimate acquaintances Silius Italicus, Juvenal, the younger Pliny; and there were many others of high position whose society and patronage he enjoyed. The silence which he and Statius, although authors writing at the same time, having common friends and treating often of the same subjects, maintain in regard to one another may be explained by mutual dislike or want of sympathy. Martial in many places shows an undisguised contempt for the artificial kind of epic on which Statius's reputation chiefly rests; and it seems quite natural that the respectable author of the _Thebaid_ and the _Silvae_ should feel little admiration for either the life or the works of the Bohemian epigrammatist.