"A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere"
About this Quote
Martial’s line lands like a travel warning from the ancient world: roam too widely and you end up spiritually homeless. It’s a neat epigrammatic trap door - “everywhere” sounds expansive, enviable, even imperial, until the punchline snaps shut with “nowhere.” The intent isn’t to condemn movement so much as to ridicule a certain kind of Roman performative cosmopolitanism: the person who collects places the way others collect patrons, always visible, never rooted.
As a poet of the city, Martial writes from within Rome’s social machinery, where belonging is a currency. His targets are often the status-chasing networker, the hanger-on, the man who’s always at someone else’s table. “Lives everywhere” can mean incessant travel across the empire, but it also reads as a life spent in other people’s spaces - villas, baths, dinner parties - a man dispersed into obligations. The subtext is class and dependence: if you don’t have a stable home (or the power to claim one), you become a guest in perpetuity, which is just another form of precarity dressed up as sophistication.
Context matters: Martial lived under emperors who made Rome a magnet for ambition and a stage for reputation. In that world, a fixed address signaled standing; constant motion suggested either exile, hustle, or anxious self-invention. The line works because it refuses to romanticize mobility. It treats “everywhere” as a symptom, not a prize: a life spread thin across rooms and roads, leaving no place - and no self - that’s fully inhabited.
As a poet of the city, Martial writes from within Rome’s social machinery, where belonging is a currency. His targets are often the status-chasing networker, the hanger-on, the man who’s always at someone else’s table. “Lives everywhere” can mean incessant travel across the empire, but it also reads as a life spent in other people’s spaces - villas, baths, dinner parties - a man dispersed into obligations. The subtext is class and dependence: if you don’t have a stable home (or the power to claim one), you become a guest in perpetuity, which is just another form of precarity dressed up as sophistication.
Context matters: Martial lived under emperors who made Rome a magnet for ambition and a stage for reputation. In that world, a fixed address signaled standing; constant motion suggested either exile, hustle, or anxious self-invention. The line works because it refuses to romanticize mobility. It treats “everywhere” as a symptom, not a prize: a life spread thin across rooms and roads, leaving no place - and no self - that’s fully inhabited.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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