Persius

Persius (AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS), third in the line of Roman satirists, being later than Lucilius and Horace and earlier than Juvenal, was in some respects the ablest, certainly the most dramatic, of the four. Born of a distinguished equestrian family, 4th December 34 A.D., at Volaterræ in Etruria, he lost his father when six years old, was educated till twelve in his native town, and thereafter in Rome under the grammarian Remmius Palæmon and the rhetorician Verginius Flavius. In early manhood he came under the ennobling influence of the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, who imbued him with the tenets of his school and gave his mind and character an impress which ever deepened and strengthened. But he died before completing his twenty-eighth year (62 A.D.). The admiration and affection entertained by the master for his pupil was shared by the friends of the latter—Lucan, Cæsius Bassus, the lyric poet, and other contemporaries of light and leading, among whom, however, Seneca had little attraction for the young author. The noble and virtuous Pætus Thrasea accompanied him on several tours through Italy, finding a kindred soul in the modest, prepossessing youth, whose integrity and piety were conspicuous in his worldly as in his family relations. The austere discipline of Cornutus affected the style of Persius, who in consequence wrote fastidiously and sparingly, leaving at his death six brief satires, the whole not exceeding 650 hexameter lines. These, slightly corrected by Cornutus and edited by Cæsius Bassus, enjoyed, even through the early mediæval darkness till the Renaissance and down to our own day, the highest esteem, fathers of the church like Augustine and Jerome, humanists like Buchanan and Casaubon, anticipating later schools of literature in evolving and interpreting the poet's pregnant, if sometimes obscure, ridicule of the rapidly degenerating life of 1st-century paganism. The best satire is, on the whole, the first, on the prevailing false taste in poetry. 'Probably no writer ever borrowed so much and yet left on the mind so decided an impression of originality,' says Conington, who further indicates the striking resemblance between the genius of Persius and that of Carlyle. He has had many editors, of whom the most helpful have been Casaubon (1605), Otto Jahn (1843-68), and Conington, whose edition, revised by Nettleship (Oxford, 1878), gives text, prose translation, and notes embodying the best results of previous criticism. He has had a host of translators in the chief modern languages—that of the Italian Sacchi of Faenza surpassing all others, not excepting the English versions by Dryden and Gifford.