does he heave a sigh-even a despairing sigh like that of Lucan 1-over the loss of public liberty. And yet he had two admirable opportunities for suggesting the topic. The opening words of the 4th Satire (Rem populi tractas?) suggest a political discourse. "What are the qualifications," he asks, "with which the budding statesman should provide himself?" But the question is never answered; the Satire turns out to be a purely abstract disquisition on the subject of self-knowledge, dressed up with a pretended application to the case of Alcibiades.

Not less remarkable is the avoidance of all reference to public life in the 5th Satire. The main subject of that poem is that of human freedom, being an expansion of the doctrine of the Stoics that all men (Stoics of course excepted) are slaves. Here, if anywhere, was the opportunity for pointing, directly or indirectly, to the state of political servitude into which Rome had fallen. But no trace of such an idea is to be found. From first to last the subject is treated from the point of view of the schools, the sole question raised being that of the command by the individual of his own soul. Even when the poet touches on the subject of Roman citizenship, it is to dismiss with scorn the idea that it conferred any kind of freedom worth having : :

1

plus est quam vita salusque Quod perit (Pharsalia, vii. 640).

Heu steriles veri, quibus una Quiritem

Vertigo facit! (v. 75.)

Not one word is there in Persius, from beginning to end, that recognises the change that had passed over public life in Rome, or of the results of that change on the morals and intellects of the time.

THE SUPPOSED OBSCURITY OF PERSIUS

It has been the fashion to characterise Persius as obscure, but the epithet is hardly deserved. He is undoubtedly difficult; his mode of expressing himself is often peculiar and fantastic. There is a certain preciosity in his choice of phrases; he is sometimes crabbed and tortuous, and in his desire for compression he occasionally, especially in his many repetitions of Horatian ideas, seeks to obtain extra force by blending two ideas into one without giving full expression to either. He is often elliptical; his dialogue is abrupt and hard to follow. He is certainly difficult as a whole, and his style is one which needs to be wrestled with; but with a little careful attention the sequence of his thought can always be discovered, and, though individual passages may cause embarrassment, he cannot as a whole be justly charged with obscurity. His contemporaries did not find him obscure. The Biography tells us that no sooner was the book

Martial

published than it became the rage (editum librum
continuo mirari homines et diripere coeperunt).
vouches for its popularity :-

Saepius in libro memoratur Persius uno
Quam levis in tota Marsus Amazonide.

IV. xxix. 7-8.

And the careful critic Quintilian, tells us :

Multum et verae gloriae, quamvis uno libro, Persius meruit (Inst. Or. x. i. 94).

If, then, the obscurity of Persius was unknown to his contemporaries, we must look to some other cause for its discovery; and this seems to be provided by what is evidently a spurious addition to the Biography, to the effect that the first Satire of Persius was intended as an attack upon Nero and his poetical efforts. The original text of i. 121, we are told, ran thus:

:

Auriculas asini Mida rex habet;

but alarmed by the boldness of these lines, which seemed to point too plainly to Nero, Cornutus emended the line, making it read (as in the now received text)

Auriculas asini quis non habet?

a reading which, as we have already seen, gives point and meaning to the whole Satire.

JUV.

C

xxxi

But the idea that Nero was the object of attack in the 1st Satire could not be allowed to drop; it was soon developed by the commentators, and became parent of the idea that Persius was obscure. Supposed references to Nero were found to lurk in every line of Sat. i.; and it was even discovered that Nero was also the covert object of attack in the 4th Satire an idea which has not even yet departed from the pages of some of our modern commentators. The height of absurdity was reached by the Scholiast who, when commenting on the four lines ridiculed in Sat. i. 99–103, informs us verba Neronis sunt; to which a more recent annotator added that the lines are taken from a tragedy, supposed to be written by Nero, called the Bacchantes. No such play has ever been heard of; no tragic play that was ever written would contain passages in dactylic hexameters; yet we are actually asked to believe that a critic like Cornutus, so anxious to score out a harmless reference to King Midas for fear that Nero might take it to himself, allowed four whole lines, known by everybody to have formed part of a play of Nero's, to stand uncorrected! Thus the original idea on which the charge of obscurity mainly rested falls to the ground, and we may apply his own motto to the interpreting of his difficulties-nec te quaesi

veris extra.

PERSIUS AND JUVENAL COMPARED

The great difference between Persius and Juvenal is this, that Persius was a poet of the closet, a student, a recluse, full of youthful enthusiasm, living in a retired atmosphere under the shelter of loving female relatives, and with no knowledge of the outside life of the world beyond what could be gathered from the lectures of his Stoic instructors. His world is not the living world of Rome, but the world of books; his incidents, his characters, are chiefly taken from Horace, whose virile expressions he delights to serve up in some novel and recondite form, or from the stock examples of the Schools.

Juvenal, on the other hand, is a realist of the realists; he grapples with the real things of life, and derives all his inspiration from the doings of the men and women of his own day. He belonged to the generation which had suffered from the enormities of Caligula, Claudius and Nero; he had probably himself witnessed the concluding and worst phases of the reign of Nero, and had lived through the whole of the gloomy tyranny of Domitian. He thus knew what Rome was in the period of her worst corruption. Impregnated with the moral teaching of the Stoics, he was no mere repeater of the commonplaces of the Schools. An ardent admirer of the simple and hardy virtues of ancient Rome, he holds up a mirror to every part of the

xxxiii