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fairly, and even if they should be still unvanquished, are at any rate palpably felt and appreciated. At the same time he presents many salient points to the general student of literature; his individual characteristics as a writer are sufficiently prominent to strike the most careless eye; his philosophical creed, ardently embraced and realized with more or less distinctness, is that which proved itself most congenial to the best parts of the Roman mind, the Stoicism of the empire; while his profession of authorship, as avowed by himself, associates him not only with Horace, but with the less known name of Lucilius, and the original conception of Roman satire.

The information which we possess concerning the personal history of Persius is more copious than might have been expected in the case of one whose life was so short and so uneventful. His writings, indeed, cannot be compared with the 'votive tablets' on which his two great predecessors delighted to inscribe their own memoirs on the contrary, except in one famous passage, the autobiographical element is scarcely brought forward at all. We see his character written legibly enough in every line, and there are various minute traces of experience with which the facts of his life, when ascertained, are perceived to accord; but no one could have attempted to construct his biography from his Satires without passing even those extended limits within which modern criticism is pleased to expatiate. But there is a memoir, much more full than most of the biographical notices of that period, and apparently quite authentic, the authorship of which, after being variously assigned to his instructor and literary executor Cornutus, and to Suetonius, is now generally fixed, agreeably to the testimony of the best MSS., on Valerius Probus, the celebrated contemporary grammarian, from whose commentary, doubtless an exposition of the Satires, it is stated to have been extracted. Something has still been left to the ingenuity or research of later times to supply, in the way of conjectural correction or illustration, and in this work no one has been more diligent than Otto Jahn, to whom Persius is probably more indebted than to any other editor, with the single exception of Casaubon. I have, myself, found his commentary quite invaluable while preparing my own notes, and I shall have to draw frequently upon his Prolegomena in the course of the present lecture.

Aulus Persius Flaccus was born on the 4th of December, A.D. 34, little more than two years before the death of Tiberius, at Volaterrae in Etruria, a country where antiquity of descent was most carefully cherished, and which had recently produced two men well known in the annals of the empire, Maecenas and Sejanus. His father was of equestrian rank, and his relatives included some of the first men of his time. The connection of the family with his birth-place is substantiated

by inscriptions which have been discovered there, as its memory was long preserved by a tradition professing to point out his residence, and by the practice of a noble house which was in the habit of using his name. That name was already not unfamiliar at Rome, having been borne by a contemporary of Lucilius, whose critical judgment the old poet dreaded as that of the most learned man of the age, as well as by a successful officer in the time of the Second Punic War. Persius' early life was passed in his native town, a time to which he seems to allude when he speaks of himself in his third satire as evading the lessons in which he was expected to distinguish himself by his admiring father, and ambitious only of eminence among his playmates. When he was six years old his father died, and his mother, Fulvia Sisennia, a genuine Etruscan name, found a second husband, also of equestrian rank, called Fusius, who within a few years left her a second time a widow. At twelve years of age Persius was removed to Rome, where he studied under Remmius Palaemon the grammarian, and Verginius Flavius the rhetorician. Of the latter, we only know that he had the honour of being banished by Nero-on account, so Tacitus says, of the splendour of his reputation in the burst of jealous fury which followed the conspiracy of Piso; that he wrote the treatise on rhetoric, to which Quintilian so repeatedly refers as authoritative, and that he made a joke on a tedious rival, asking him how many miles long his speech had been. Of the former an odious character is given by Suetonius, who says that his extraordinary memory and facility of expression made him the most popular teacher in Rome, but represents him as a man of inordinate vanity and arrogance, and so infamous for his vices that both Tiberius and Claudius openly declared him to be the last man who ought to be trusted with the instruction of youth. The silence with which Persius passes over this part of his experience may perhaps be regarded as significant when we contrast it with the language in which he speaks of the next stage in his education. It was, he tells us, when he first laid aside the emblems of boyhood and assumed the toga-just at the time when the sense of freedom begins, and life is seen to diverge into different paths-that he placed himself under another guide. This was Annaeus Cornutus, a Stoic philosopher of great name, who was himself afterwards banished by Nero for an uncourtly speech,-a man who, like Probus, has become a sort of mythical critic, to whom mistake or forgery has ascribed writings really belonging to a much later period. The connection thus formed was never afterwards broken, and from that time Persius seems to have declared himself a disciple of Stoicism. The creed was one to which his antecedents naturally pointed, as he was related to Arria, daughter of that 'true wife' who taught her husband

how to die, and herself married to Thrasea, the biographer and imitator of the younger Cato. His literary profession was made soon after his education had been completed. He had previously written several juvenile works-a tragedy, the name of which has probably been lost by a corruption in the MS. account of his life; a poem on Travelling (perhaps a record of one of his tours with Thrasea, whose favourite and frequent companion he was) in imitation of Horace's journey to Brundusium, and of a similar poem by Lucilius; and a few verses commemorative of the elder Arria. Afterwards, when he was fresh from his studies, the reading of the tenth book of Lucilius diverted his poetical ambition into a new channel, and he applied himself eagerly to the composition of satires after the model of that which had impressed him so strongly. The later Scholiasts, a class of men who are rather apt to evolve facts, as well as their causes, partly from the text itself which they have to illustrate, partly from their general knowledge of human nature, tell us that this ardour did not preclude considerable vacillation: he deliberated whether to write or not, began and left off, and then began again. One of these accounts says that he hesitated for some time between a poetical and a military life—a strange but perhaps not incredible story, which would lead us to regard the frequent attacks on the army in his Satires not merely as expressions of moral or constitutional antipathy, but as protests against a former taste of his own, which may possibly have still continued to assert itself in spite of the precepts of philosophy. He wrote slowly, and at rare intervals, so that we may easily imagine the six Satires which we possess—an imperfect work, we are told to represent the whole of his career as a professed author. The remaining notices of his life chiefly respect the friends with whom his philosophical or literary sympathies led him to associate. The earliest of these were Caesius Bassus, to whom his sixth Satire is addressed— himself a poet of some celebrity, being the only one of his generation whom Quintilian could think of including with Horace in the class of Roman lyrists—and Calpurnius Statura, whose very name is a matter of uncertainty. He was also intimate with Servilius Nonianus, who would seem from an incidental notice to have been at one time his preceptor—a man of consular dignity, distinguished, as Tacitus informs us, not merely by high reputation as an orator and a historian, but by the polished elegance of his life. His connection with Cornutus, who was probably a freedman of the Annaean family, introduced him to Lucan; and dissimilar as their temperaments were, the young Spaniard did ample justice to the genius of his friend, scarcely restraining himself from clamorous expressions of rapture when he heard him recite his verses. At a later period Persius made the acquaintance of Seneca, but

did not admire him. Two other persons, who had been fellow-students with him under Cornutus, are mentioned as men of great learning and unblemished life, and zealous in the pursuit of philosophy—Claudius Agathemerus of Lacedaemon, known as a physician of some name, and Petronius Aristocrates of Magnesia.

Such were his occupations, and The sixth satire gives us some though not more than we might

such the men with whom he lived. information about his habits of life, have been entitled to infer from our knowledge of his worldly circumstances and of the custom of the Romans of his day. We see him there retired from Rome for the winter to a retreat on the bay of Luna, where his mother seems to have lived since her second marriage, and indulging in recollections of Ennius' formal announcement of the beauties of the scene, while realizing in his own person the lessons of content and tranquillity which he had learned from the Epicureanism of Horace no less than from the Stoicism of his philosophical teachers. This may probably have been his last work—written, as some have thought from internal evidence, under the consciousness that he had not long to live, though we must not press the language about his heir, in the face of what we are told of his actual testamentary dispositions. The details of his death state that it took place on the 24th of November, A.D. 62, towards the end of his twenty-eighth year, of a disease of the stomach, on an estate of his own eight miles from Rome, on the Appian road. His whole fortune, amounting to two million sesterces, he left to his mother and sister, with a request that a sum, variously stated at a hundred thousand sesterces, and twenty pounds weight of silver, might be given to his old preceptor, together with his library, seven hundred volumes, chiefly, it would seem, works of Chrysippus, who was a most voluminous writer. Cornutus showed himself worthy of his pupil's liberality by relinquishing the money and accepting the books only. He also undertook the office of reviewing his works, recommending that the juvenile productions should be destroyed, and preparing the Satires for publication by a few slight corrections and the omission of some lines at the end, which seemed to leave the work imperfect— perhaps, as Jahn supposes, the fragment of a new satire. They were ultimately edited by Caesius Bassus, at his own request, and acquired instantaneous popularity. The memoir goes on to tell us that Persius was beautiful in person, gentle in manners, a man of maidenly modesty, an excellent son, brother, and nephew, of frugal and moderate habits. This is all that we know of his life-enough to give the personal interest which a reader of his writings will naturally require, and enough, too, to furnish a bright page to a history where bright pages are few. Persius was a Roman, but the only Rome that he knew by experience was the

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Rome of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero-the Rome which Tacitus and Suetonius have pourtrayed, and which pointed St. Paul's denunciation of the moral state of the heathen world. Stoicism was not regnant but militant-it produced not heroes or statesmen, but confessors and martyrs; and the early death which cut short the promise of its Marcellus could not in such an age be called unseasonable.

It was about two hundred years since a Stoic had first appeared in Rome as a member of the philosophic embassy which Athens despatched to propitiate the conquering city. Like his companions, he was bidden to go back to his school and lecture there, leaving the youth of Rome to receive their education, as heretofore, from the magistrates and the laws; but though the rigidity of the elder Cato triumphed for a time, it was not sufficient effectually to exorcise the new spirit. Panaetius, under whose influence the soul of Stoicism became more humane and its form more graceful, gained the friendship of Laelius, and through him of Scipio Aemilianus, whom he accompanied on the mission which the conqueror of Carthage undertook to the kings of Egypt and Asia in alliance with the republic. The foreign philosophy was next admitted to mould the most characteristic of all the productions of the Roman mind-its jurisprudence, being embraced by a long line of illustrious legists; and the relative duties of civil life were defined and limited by conceptions borrowed from Stoic morality. It was indeed a doctrine which, as soon as the national prejudice against imported novelties and a systematic cultivation had been surmounted, was sure to prove itself congenial to the strictness and practicality of the old Roman character; and when in the last struggles of the commonwealth the younger Cato endeavoured to take up the position of his great ancestor as a reformer of manners, his rule of life was derived not only from the traditions of undegenerate antiquity, but from the precepts of Antipater and Athenodorus. The lesson was one not to be soon lost. At the extinction of the republic, Stoicism lived on at Rome under the imperial shadow, and the government of Augustus is said to have been rendered milder by the counsels of one of its professors; but when the pressure of an undisguised despotism began to call out the old republican feeling, the elective affinity was seen to assert itself again. This was the complexion of things which Persius found, and which he left. That sect, as the accuser of Thrasea reminded the emperor, had produced bad citizens even under the former régime: its present adherents were men whose very deportment was an implied rebuke to the habits of the imperial court; its chief representative had abdicated his official duties and retired into an unpatriotic and insulting privacy; and the public records of the administration of affairs at home and abroad

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