'The Things Which Make a Life of Ease'

R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his translation of a well-known epigram by Martial, the Roman master of the pithy form. Bob found it among his papers and doesn’t remember making it. “[T]ranslating something [Ben] Jonson had translated?” he writes in an email. “Not to mention other famous names? I must have had a touch of hubris. (I think the first one I ever read was [Henry Howard, Earl of] Surrey's, back when I was an undergraduate.)” Here is Bob’s version of X.47 by Marcus Valerius Martialis: 

“The things which make a life of ease,

Martial, my dearest friend, are these:

The patrimony’s easy yield;

A thriving fire and fertile field;

Neither the courts nor formal dress;

Good health; a wise judiciousness;

Some friends whose conversation’s able

To dignify your simple table;

A wife with neither forwardness

Nor prudery; deep sleep to press

Over the shadows in swift flight;

Ability to see you’re right

When you’re content; and, with head clear,

Face death without desire or fear.”

 

The epigram is addressed to the poet’s friend, Julius Martialis. It reminds me of the “gratitude list” an old friend urged me years ago to draw up periodically, an exercise to reduce one’s fondness for whining. I’ve experienced many of the things in Martial’s catalog of gifts, at least briefly. That’s remarkable considering he wrote two-thousand years ago. I have no “fertile field,” but do have a flower garden – with accompanying lizards, butterflies, squirrels and hummingbirds -- that I meditate on each morning. I do miss “Some friends whose conversation’s able / To dignify your simple table,” though email and the telephone help.

 

Bob passed along a link to the original Latin of Martial’s epigram and thirty-three translations into English made across almost half a millennium.