Martial is famous for his epigrams. He is also notorious as the most ribald poet of the classical world. Too few people know his more extended epigrams, which give an unrivalled picture of daily life in Rome in the first century AD. Though these translations take too many liberties to be called scholarly, they were written out of love of their great originator and as a tribute to his abiding genius. Porter was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, an honour only given to a maximum of ten living writers.