The beginning of Juvenal's literary career coincided with Martial's later years: the composition of the first satire, which contains a reference to the trial of Marius Priscus in AD 100 was probably contemporaneous with the epigrammatist's retirement to Spain. Juvenal, is less obedient to the rules of his genre and sometimes even anarchic, his language a medley of high and low, his tone contemptuous, and, in any normal sense of the words, unconstructive, negative. Martial never plays the fool, and never makes people think. He is poetic on occasions and the rules remain intact: even Quintilian, perhaps against his will, receives an epigram. Martial is Juvenal's senior, his work covers the twenty years which provided the satirist with the matter for much of his first two books, the twenty-year period during which the satirist still listened. The comparison with Martial's easy life in Spain would hardly be charitable, unless Juvenal's life in Rome were a figment taken from his poetry.