This is one of three poems that Martial (born in Bilbilis, Spain, about 40 CE; died there c.104 CE) wrote on the occasion of the death of his little slave girl Erotion (see also Epigrammata 5.37 and 10.61, all written after 87 CE), a departure into mournful elegy for the often biting and scurrilous satiric poet. Scholarship has rejected for lack of corroboration the interpretation that the parents addressed in the first line of the poem are his own. The poem is written in elegiac couplet, which consists of two lines of poetry in dactylic meter: the first hexameter, the second pentameter (see scansion of elegiac couplet; comment on word order).