Aulus Persius Flaccus
Encyclopedia
Persius, in full Aulus Persius Flaccus (Volterra
Volterra
Volterra, known to the ancient Etruscans as Velathri, to the Romans as Volaterrae, is a town and comune in the Tuscany region of Italy.-History:...

, 34-62), was a Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and satirist of Etruscan
Etruscan civilization
Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany. The ancient Romans called its creators the Tusci or Etrusci...

 origin. In his works, poems and satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

s, he shows a stoic
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...

 wisdom and a strong criticism for the abuses of his contemporaries. His works, which became very popular in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, were published after his death by his friend and mentor the stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, , a Stoic philosopher, flourished in the reign of Nero , when his house in Rome was a school of philosophy.-Life:He was a native of Leptis Magna in Libya, but resided for the most part in Rome...

.

Life

According to the Life contained in the manuscripts, Persius was born into an equestrian family at Volterra
Volterra
Volterra, known to the ancient Etruscans as Velathri, to the Romans as Volaterrae, is a town and comune in the Tuscany region of Italy.-History:...

 (Volaterrae, in Latin), a small Etruscan city in the province of Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, of good stock on both parents' side. When six years old he lost his father; his stepfather died a few years later. At the age of twelve Persius came to Rome, where he was taught by Remmius Palaemon and the rhetor Verginius Flavus. During the next four years he developed friendships with the Stoic
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...

 Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, , a Stoic philosopher, flourished in the reign of Nero , when his house in Rome was a school of philosophy.-Life:He was a native of Leptis Magna in Libya, but resided for the most part in Rome...

, the lyric poet Caesius Bassus
Caesius Bassus
Caesius Bassus was a Roman lyric poet, who lived in the reign of Nero.He was the intimate friend of Persius, who dedicated his sixth satire to him, and whose works be edited . He is said to have lost his life in the eruption of Vesuvius . He had a great reputation as a poet; Quintilian Caesius...

, and the poet Lucan
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus , better known in English as Lucan, was a Roman poet, born in Corduba , in the Hispania Baetica. Despite his short life, he is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period...

. Lucan would become a generous admirer of all Persius wrote. He also became close friends with Thrasea Paetus
Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus
Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus, Roman senator, lived in the first century CE. Notable for his principled opposition to the emperor Nero and his interest in stoicism, he was the husband of Arria the daughter of A...

, the husband of Arria
Arria
Arria was a woman in ancient Rome. Her husband Caecina Paetus was ordered by the emperor Claudius to commit suicide for his part in a rebellion but was not capable of forcing himself to do so. Arria wrenched the dagger from him and stabbed herself, then returned it to her husband, telling him that...

, a relative of Persius's; over the next ten years Persius and Thrasea Paetus shared many travels together. Later, he met Seneca
Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...

, but was not impressed by his genius.

In his boyhood, Persius wrote a tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...

 dealing with an episode in Roman history, and another work, probably on travel (although this would have been before the travels with Thrasea Paetus). Reading the satires of Lucilius
Lucilius
Lucilius is the nomen of the gens Lucilia of ancient Rome.*Gaius Lucilius, satirist 2nd century BC. Lucilius was credited by Horace and others with originating the genre of satire.*Lucilius Junior, friend and correspondent of the younger Seneca....

 made Persius want to write like him, and he set to work on a book of his own satires. But he wrote seldom and slowly; a premature death (uitio stomachi) prevented him from completing the book. He has been described as having "a gentle disposition, girlish modesty and personal beauty", and is said to have lived a life of exemplary devotion towards his mother Fulvia Sisenna, his sister and his aunt. To his mother and sister he left his considerable fortune. Cornutus suppressed all his work except the satires, to which he made some slight alterations before handing it over to Bassus for editing. It proved an immediate success.

Doubts over his biography

The scholia add a few details--on what authority is, as generally with such sources, very doubtful. The Life itself, though not free from the suspicion of interpolation and undoubtedly corrupt and disordered in places, is probably trustworthy. The manuscripts say it came from the commentary of Valerius Probus
Marcus Valerius Probus
Marcus Valerius Probus, of Berytus, was a Roman grammarian and critic, who flourished during the Flavian dynasty.He was a student rather than a teacher, and devoted himself to the criticism and elucidation of the texts of classical authors by means of marginal notes or by signs, after the manner...

, no doubt a learned edition of Persius like those of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

 and Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

 by this same famous "grammarian" of Berytus
Beirut
Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

, 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. The declaiming of a suasoria in his presence (Sat. 3.4 sqq.) implies a more mature age than that of six in the performer. But pater might here mean "stepfather," 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 the impression of a "bookish" youth, who never strayed far from home and family. This is also the picture drawn by the Satires; many of the characters that Persius creates have the same names as characters found in Horace.

A keen observer of what occurs within his narrow horizon, Persius does not shy away from describing the seamy side of life (cf. e.g. such hints as Sat. iii.110); he shows, however, none of Juvenal's undue stress on unsavoury detail or Horace's easy-going acceptance of human weaknesses. Perhaps the sensitive, homebred nature of Persius can also be glimpsed in his frequent references to ridicule, whether of great men by street gamins or of the cultured by Philistines
Philistines
Philistines , Pleshet or Peleset, were a people who occupied the southern coast of Canaan at the beginning of the Iron Age . According to the Bible, they ruled the five city-states of Gaza, Askelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath, from the Wadi Gaza in the south to the Yarqon River in the north, but with...

. 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 Latin tongue. The influence of Horace on Persius can, in spite of the silence of the Life, hardly have been less than that of Lucilius. Not only characters, as noted above, but whole phrases, thoughts and situations come direct from him. The resemblance only emphasizes the difference between the caricaturist of Stoicism and its preacher. Persius strikes the highest note that Roman satire reached; in earnestness and moral purpose he rises far superior to the political rancour or good natured persiflage of his predecessors and the rhetorical indignation of Juvenal
Juvenal
The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD.Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a...

. 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. A curious contrast to this tendency is presented by his free use of "popular" words. As of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, so of Persius we hear that he emulated Sophron
Sophron
Sophron of Syracuse was a writer of mimes.Sophron was the author of prose dialogues in the Doric dialect, containing both male and female characters, some serious, others humorous in style, and depicting scenes from the daily life of the Sicilian Greeks. Although in prose, they were regarded as...

; the authority is a late one (Lydus
Lydus
Lydus was the third king of Maeonia in succession to his father Atys. He was the third and last king of the Atyad dynasty. According to Herodotus, Maeonia became known as Lydia after Lydus's reign.-See also:*List of Kings of Lydia...

, De mag. I.41), but we can at least recognize in the scene that opens Sat. 3. kinship with such work as Theocritus
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...

' Adoniazusae and the Mimes of Herodas
Herodas
thumb|The first column of the Herodas papyrus, showing Mimiamb 1. 1–15.Herodas , or Herondas , was a Greek poet and the author of short humorous dramatic scenes in verse, written under the Alexandrian empire in the 3rd century BC.Apart from the intrinsic merit of these pieces, they are...

.

Persius's satires are composed in hexameter
Hexameter
Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Greek mythology, hexameter...

s, 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 theme of Seneca's 114th letter is similar. 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 remaining satires handle in order (2) the question as to what we may justly ask of the gods (cf. Plato's second Alcibiades
Alcibiades
Alcibiades, son of Clinias, from the deme of Scambonidae , was a prominent Athenian statesman, orator, and general. He was the last famous member of his mother's aristocratic family, the Alcmaeonidae, which fell from prominence after the Peloponnesian War...

), (3) the importance of having a definite aim in life, (4) the necessity of self-knowledge for public men (cf. Plato's first Alcibiades), (5) the Stoic doctrine of liberty (introduced by generous allusions to Cornutus' teaching), and (6) the proper use of money.

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 same authority says that Cornutus definitely blacked out an offensive allusion to the emperor's literary taste, and that we owe to him the reading of the manuscripts in Sat. i.121,--"auriculas asini quis non (for Mida rex ) habet!" Traces of lack of revision are, however, still visible; cf. e.g. v.176 (sudden transition from ambition to superstition) and vi.37 (where criticism of Greek doctores has nothing to do with the context). The parallels to passages of Horace and Seneca are recorded in the commentaries: in view of what the Life says about Lucan
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus , better known in English as Lucan, was a Roman poet, born in Corduba , in the Hispania Baetica. Despite his short life, he is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period...

, the verbal resemblance of Sat. iii.3 to Phars.
Pharsalia
The Pharsalia is a Roman epic poem by the poet Lucan, telling of the civil war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the Roman Senate led by Pompey the Great...

x.163 is interesting. Examples of bold language or metaphor: i.25, rupto iecore exierit caprificus, 60, linguae quantum sitiat canis; iii.42, intus palleat, 81, silentia rodunt; v.92, ueteres auiae de pulmone reuello. Passages like iii.87, 100 sqq. show elaboration carried beyond the rules of good taste. "Popular" words: baro, cerdo, ebullire, glutto, lallare, mamma, muttire, obba, palpo, scloppus. Fine lines, etc., in i.116 sqq., ii.6 sqq., 61 sqq., 73 sqq., iii.39 sqq.

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. Since the publication of J. Bieger's de Persii cod. pith. recte aestimando (Berlin, 1890) the tendency has been to prefer the tradition of the latter.

The first important editions were: (1) with explanatory notes: Isaac Casaubon
Isaac Casaubon
Isaac Casaubon was a classical scholar and philologist, first in France and then later in England, regarded by many of his time as the most learned in Europe.-Early life:...

 (Paris, 1605, enlarged edition by Johann Friedrich Dübner
Johann Friedrich Dübner
Johann Friedrich Dübner , German classical scholar , was born in Horselgau, near Gotha....

, Leipzig, 1833); Otto Jahn
Otto Jahn
Otto Jahn , was a German archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music.He was born at Kiel...

 (with the scholia and valuable prolegomena, Leipzig, 1843); John Conington
John Conington
John Conington was an English classical scholar.He was born at Boston in Lincolnshire, and is said to have learned the alphabet at fourteen months, and to have been reading well at three and a half...

 (with translation; 3rd ed., Oxford, 1893), etc.; but there are several modern editions.

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