The First Plagiarism Case in History

Learning and applying a literary beating to literary “kidnappers”

Bust of the Latin poet and Spanish-Roman man of letters, Marcus Valerius Martial, in Calatayud (Source: SpaininCulture)

Plagiarism is one of the biggest issues that online content is faced with. Although we have all this great technology to detect plagiarised content and those who have committed such a crime, the scale at which plagiarism is happening is on another level, at least this is the excuse Google uses when faced with such issues. The problem remains ethical but has moved throughout history from a political one to a financial issue.

The curious question that many people in such a predicament ask is, who was the first person to plagiarize? That is a very difficult question due to the lack of historical records as well as technology during the time it happened. However, the first person whose content had been plagiarised was Marcus Valerius Martial (40AD — 104 AD), a well-known Roman poet.

He spent most of his life writing artistic literature and although he didn’t care much about some of his early works, later in his life he became quite prolific and a successful poet around Rome. Poetry itself was a very common form of entertainment for people at the time, so for those who had success, it was a really profitable profession. Without a doubt, you will have people driven by the jealousy of others’ success, which is what pushed the…