Believing hear, what you deserve to hear: Your birthday as my own to me is dear... But yours gives most; for mine did only lend Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend.

In this epigrammatic compliment, the speaker tells a friend that the friend’s birthday matters more than his own. His own birthday merely “lent” him to the world—an accident of birth—whereas the friend’s birthday “gave” him something chosen and precious: friendship. The contrast elevates social bonds over biological fact and turns a conventional birthday greeting into a meditation on what makes life meaningful. The rhetoric is typical of Martial’s occasional verse: concise, pointed, and designed for recitation or exchange among acquaintances, where wit and emotional warmth can coexist in a few lines.