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Updated: April 30, 2025
The strong men bathed in horse urine to harden their muscles. Their only luxury consisted in weapons. They admired as priceless jewels the bronze swords brought from the north of the Peninsula, and those of steel made by the people of Bilbilis and tempered in the sands of their famous river.
By no means a poet of the first rank, hardly perhaps a poet at all according to any strict definition, he has yet a genius of his own which for many ages made him the chief and almost the sole model for a particular kind of literature. Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Augusta Bilbilis in Central Spain towards the end of the reign of Tiberius.
He had lived at Rome in great splendour and affluence, as well as in high esteem for his poetical talents; but upon his return to Bilbilis, it is said that he experienced a great reverse of fortune, and was chiefly indebted for his support to the gratuitous benefactions of Pliny the Younger, whom he had extolled in some epigrams.
Its Moorish name means the "Castle of Ayûb" or Job the nephew of Mûsa, who used the ancient Bilbilis as a quarry whence to obtain stones for its construction. The Dominican convent of Calatayud has a glorious patio with three galleries rising one above another, and a portion of the exterior is enriched with pseudo-Moorish work like the prisons at Guadalajara.
Only look you here, it is all virgin silver; and observe, I beseech you, this dragon’s neck and the sibilant head that holds the rowels; they are wrought to the very life with horrent scales, and erected crest; beautiful! beautiful!—and the rowels too of the best Spanish steel that was ever tempered in the cold Bilbilis. Good spurs indeed! they are well worth three aurei.
It is no small encomium to observe, that, considered as extemporaneous productions, the meanest in the collection is far from meriting censure, either in point of sentiment or expression; and many of them contain passages which command our applause. The poet MARTIAL, surnamed likewise Coquus, was born at Bilbilis, in Spain, of obscure parents.
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