I have read through about a fifth of Martial’s epigrams today, and in reading the book I was struck by several patterns in it. For one, the book dealt with a consistent set of concerns. There were admonitions to people who stole Martial’s rhymes as if they were their own, without paying him for it. There were comments about slaves and clients, about people angling for dinner invitations, about the humiliation of being refused favors by friends and owing so much to creditors, and groveling before the emperor for favors as well as a kind eye in censorship. There are comments about decadent eating and grooming habits and a lot of jabs about people marrying sick but wealthy women or consorting with prostitutes or fathering large amounts of “slave knights” with servant girls. This all combines to make a picture of a decadent society, even if the author shows examples of a touching compassion for a deceased former slave who had been given his freedom in his terminal illness. All of the wit and good humor of the author cannot clean the corruption of his times, or temper his immense cynicism about the wickedness of his world, even as he seeks to make his way in it.

When I was an undergraduate student, one of the courses I took for my minor in history was a course on the French Revolution. During that course, we watched a movie called “Ridicule” in which the hero, a socially-minded nobleman from a peripheral region of France, came to Paris to seek official help in draining the swamps of his area, only to find himself caught up in a decadent world of intrigue and wit. Between the courtesans and the masquerade balls, between the infidelity and the love of finding the cleverest thing to say, the earnest and straightforward and decent hero simply does not fit in, is humiliated, and his request is denied. He ends up finding love, finding the help of an eccentric inventor, and goes home to drain the swamps himself, his decency allowing him to escape the horrors of the Revolution despite being a noble. Meanwhile, most of the decadent crowd end up losing their heads, literally, in the violence that comes after 1789, and those who survive are forced into an unpleasant exile. All of the witty comments that one could make around a fancy dinner or masquerade ball could not arrest the storm of anger over societal injustice and a failure on the part of France’s elite to rule with the best interests of their people at heart.

In the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde first came to fame for his witty and trenchant statements made as a literary critic and a person famous for being famous and good at witty epigrams. His plays, many of which inhabit a shadowy realm of decadence and moral corruption, as his life did, show the same fondness for witty epigrams that his early life and career did. Make no mistake, Oscar Wilde was an immensely quotable man. He was also an immensely corrupt man who deserved punishment for his sins, even if those sins were widespread in his time and our own. A decadent man in a decadent time could enjoy a rise to fame as a symbol, and then fall because it became convenient to punish him for his faults to scare others into at least the pretension of virtue that they did not possess. Yet no one looking at the Late Victorian or Edwardian period could fail to see there was a great deal of corruption, moral and societal, beneath the veneer of moral probity.

And so it is in our time. Our verbal and written communication, such as it is, favors brevity. Whether we are looking at a 150 character tweet, the small amount of text that will fit on a picture to make a meme, or the sort of language we use while sending text messages, we value witty comments that are immensely short. Even a fairly modest sized personal essay of 1500 words or 2000 words, hardly enough to speak about any subject of substance with anything approaching depth, are immensely forboding to many readers. We live in times where there is a lot that is unjust, yet we are torn between censuring those we see responsible, who are often merely scapegoats in the same struggling position that we are, or we try to laugh our discontent away through cutting but witty statements, hoping that this affection of candor and honesty will win us suppers and good company among those who are as jaded and cynical as we ourselves are. Will we too reap the whirlwind that came upon the decadent societies of the past? Will we have any more heroism and moral courage than those fallen elites did? Or will we too leave nothing behind but the record of our corruption as eternal evidence against us?