Marcus Valerius Martialis was a Roman poet born in Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these poems he satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.
Likeness of Martial, supposedly engraved from an ancient gem
15th-century manuscript of the Epigrams
Pereunt et imputantur ("[the hours] pass away and [yet] are accounted for") is commonly inscribed on clocks, as on this one in Palermo.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Robert Hayman's 1628 book Quodlibets devotes much of its text to epigrams.