The apparently random variety of Martial's poetic subjects has puzzled critics, but it is really illusory, as is the current picture of a clownish literary opportunist recording, sometimes sympathetically or, more often, satirically, the life around him in a vast metropolis and then serving up his amusing or melancholy material to his patrons in a sauce of flattery, spiced (or spiked) with obscenity and redeemed only by technical virtuosity and wit. It was nineteenth-century opinion that presented him as a fragmented, if not fundamentally incoherent, poet at the mercy of his personal wants and random prejudices, whether sexual or social, or at best a mercenary poet with a commonplace philosophy, a practitioner of the minor genre of epigram, imitating such acknowledged Roman precursors as Catullus and stealing from unacknowledged Greek poets such as Lucillius.

This superficial reading was partly due to the selective discarding, or ignoring, by different critics of areas of Martial's work which seemed to them offensive, boring, trivial or incomprehensible. In fact almost all of Martial's work is focused by a unified and hierarchical vision of imperial society as it should be, which inspires the eulogist with the ideals against which the satirist judges and condemns the defects and the failings. It is a vision which is coloured by a very personal view of how life should be lived and the Epicurean values it should manifest, a life that is sheltered in the bosom of generous friends with a modest competence secured by a warm acceptance of the ideological status quo (4.77.1–3).