The great Latin epigrammist's twelve subsequent books capture the spirit of Roman life—both public and private—in vivid detail. Fortune hunters and busybodies, orators and lawyers, schoolmasters and street hawkers, jugglers and acrobats, doctors and plagiarists, beautiful slaves, and generous hosts are among the diverse characters who populate his verses.Martial is a keen and sharp-tongued observer of Roman society. His pen brings into crisp relief a wide variety of scenes and events: the theater and public games, life in the countryside, a rich debauchee's banquet, lions in the amphitheater, the eruption of Vesuvius. The epigrams are sometimes obscene, in the tradition of the genre, sometimes warmly affectionate or amusing, and always pointed. Like his contemporary Statius, though, Martial shamelessly flatters his patron Domitian, one of Rome's worst-reputed emperors.D. R. Shackleton Bailey now gives us, in three volumes, a reliable modern translation of Martial's often difficult Latin, eliminating many misunderstandings in previous versions. The text is mainly that of his highly praised Teubner edition of 1990.

    Icy blues of snow- and oceanscapes show a frozen moment of nature's ungraspability. Then, out of the blue, literally, you make out a face in a large snowball--and not just any face, but Karl Marx's. A vague surfer rides roiling swells around the Statue of Liberty, and the cliff face that climbers are scaling is as impossibly angled as an Escher staircase. Now we realize we're in the same intellectual and often very funny terra infirma of Tansey's earlier quasi-conceptual works, as when he reimagined Picasso and Braque as the Wright brothers trying to get their Cubist plane off the ground. That old and new Tansey territory, a land of slippery perceptions, makes up this survey of an important contemporary American painter.

    Quotations by Native American leaders inspire us with their wisdom.