Promotes this man, and renders its rewards to his glorious toil. This certainly seems to be a concern of the general himself, That he who shall be brave, the same may be most happy, That all should be glad with trappings, and all with collars. 60 valour, and which tend to its encourage. ment. Quis enim virtutem amplectitur ipsam, præmia si tollas? See sat. x. 1. 141, 2. Having now finished my task, as far as JUVENAL is concerned, I have to lament, that it has not been in my power to represent this great poet in all the beauty and excellence of his composition; these can only be known to men of letters, who can read and understand him in the original. If the homely dress, in which he must necessarily appear in a literal translation, shall be found to have its use in leading my readers to a correct interpretation of the Latin, I may venture to suppose that I have done all that can be expected from it; taste and genius must do the rest; these alone can assimilate the imagination to that of the poet, so as to enable the reader to enter fully into the propriety, elegance, and beauty of his language; as a real inclination to what is right and commendable can alone dispose us to embrace that system of virtuous conduct, which is so highly commended, and to shun, with indignation and abhorrence, that system of vice and profligacy, so strongly delineated, and so severely reprobated in the preceding Satires. PREFACE. AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS was born at Volaterræ, in Etruria (now Tuscany), about the twentieth year of the emperor Tiberius, that is to say, about two years after the death of Christ. Flaccus, his father, was a Roman knight, whom he lost when he was but six years of age. His mother, Fulvia Sisennia, afterward married one Fusius, a Roman knight, and within a few years buried him also. Our poet studied, till the age of twelve years, at Volaterra; he then came to Rome, where he put himself under the instruction of Remmius Palamon, a grammarian, and Virginius Flaccus, a rhetorician; to each of which he paid the highest attention. At sixteen he made a friendship with Annæus Cornutus, (by country an African, by profession a Stoic philosopher,) from whom he got an insight into the Stoic philosophy. By means of Cornutus he became acquainted with Annæus Lucanus, who so admired the writings of Persius, that on hearing him read his verses, he could scarcely refrain from crying out publicly, that "they were absolute poems." He was a young man of gentle manners, of great modesty, and of remarkable sobriety and frugality: dutiful and affectionate towards his mother, loving and kind to his sisters: a most strenuous friend and defender of virtue-an irreconcileable enemy to vicc in all its shapes, as may appear from his Satires, which came from his masterly pen in an early time of life, when dissipation, lewdness, and extravagance were cultivated and followed by so many of his age, and when, instead of making them his associates, he made them the objects of his severest animadversion. |