Persius - Life, Work

Satirist, born of a distinguished equestrian family in Volaterrae, Etruria. He was educated in Rome, where he came under Stoic influence. He wrote fastidiously and sparingly, leaving at his death only six admirable satires, the whole not exceeding 650 hexameter lines. These were published by his friend Caesius Bassus after his death. Dryden and others have translated them into verse.

Persius, in full Aulus Persius Flaccus (AD 34-62), was a Roman poet and satirist of Etruscan origin. In his works, poems and satires, he shows a stoic wisdom and a strong criticism for the abuses of his contemporaries. His works, which became very popular in the middle ages, were published after his death by his friend and mentor the stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus.

Life

According to the Life contained in the manuscripts, Persius was a native of Volterra (Volaterrae, in Latin), a small etruscan city in the province of Pisa, of good stock on both parents' side. At the age of twelve Persius came to Rome, where he was taught by Remmius Palaemon and the rhetor Verginius Flavus. One of the philosopher's pupils, Lucan, became a generous admirer of all Persius wrote.

In his boyhood, Persius wrote a tragedy dealing with an episode in Roman history, and another work, probably on travel; Reading Lucilius made Persius want to write like him, and be set to work on a book of satires. Cornutus suppressed all his work except the satires, to which he made some slight alterations before handing it over to Bassus for editing.

Doubts over his biography

The scholia add a few details--on what authority is, as generally with such sources, very doubtful. The manuscripts say it came from the commentary of Valerius Probus, no doubt a learned edition of Persius like those of Virgil and Horace by this same famous "grammarian" of Berytus, the poet's contemporary. The only case in which it seems to conflict with the Satires themselves is in its statement as to the death of Persius's father. But pater might here mean "step-father," or Persius may have forgotten his own autobiography, may be simply reproducing one of his models. The mere fact that the Life and the Satires agree so closely does not of course prove the authenticity of the former. One of the points of harmony is, however, too subtle for us to believe that a forger evolved it from the works of Persius.

The Life gives an impression it gives of a "bookish" youth, who has never strayed far from home and family. So much better does Persius know his books than the world that he draws the names of his characters from Horace. The sensitive, homebred nature of Persius shows itself perhaps also in his frequent references to ridicule, whether of great men by street gamins or of the cultured by Philistines.Montaigne mentions Persius several times.

Work

The chief interest of Persius's work lies in its relation to Roman satire, in its interpretation of Roman Stoicism, and in its use of the Roman tongue. The influence of Horace on Persius can, in spite of the silence of the Life, hardly have been less than that of Lucilius. Persius strikes the highest note that Roman satire reached; From him we learn how that philosophy could work on minds that still preserved the depth and purity of the old Roman gravitas. Some of the parallel passages in the works of Persius and Seneca are very close, and cannot be explained by assuming the use of a common source. Like Seneca, Persius censures the style of the day, and imitates it. Indeed in some of its worst failings, straining of expression, excess of detail, exaggeration, he outbids Seneca, whilst the obscurity, which makes his little book of not seven hundred lines so difficult to read and is in no way due to great depth of thought, compares poorly with the terse clearness of the Epistolae morales. As of Plato, so of Persius we hear that he emulated Sophron;

Persius's satires are composed in hexameters, except for the scazons of the short prologue above referred to, in which he half ironically asserts that he writes to earn his bread, not because he is inspired. The first satire censures the literary tastes of the day as a reflection of the decadence of the national morals. The description of the recitator and the literary twaddlers after dinner is vividly natural, but an interesting passage which cites specimens of smooth versification and the languishing style is greatly spoiled by the difficulty of appreciating the points involved and indeed of distributing the dialogue (a not uncommon crux in Persius).

The Life tells us that the Satires were not left complete; some lines were taken (presumably by Cornutus or Bassus) from the end of the work so that it might be quasi finitus. This perhaps means that a sentence in which Persius had left a line imperfect, or a paragraph which he had not completed, had to be omitted. The parallels to passages of Horace and Seneca are recorded in the commentaries: in view of what the Life says about Lucan, the verbal resemblance of Sat.

Authorities

The manuscripts of Persius fall into two groups, one represented by two of the best of them, the other by that of Petrus Pithoeus, so important for the text of Juvenal.

The first important editions were: (1) with explanatory notes: Isaac Casaubon (Paris, 1605, enlarged edition by Johann Friedrich Dübner, Leipzig, 1833);

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.