[In the following lecture, originally delivered at Oxford University in 1855, Conington discusses Persius's life, influences, writings, and philosophy.]

It is my intention for the present to deliver general lectures from time to time on the characteristics of some of the authors whom I may select as subjects for my terminal courses. To those who propose to attend my classes they will serve as prolegomena, grouping together various matters which will meet us afterwards as they lie scattered up and down the course of our expository readings, and giving the point of view from which they are to be regarded: to others I trust they may not be without their use as Sketches Historical and Literary, complete in themselves, in which an attempt will be made to bring out the various features and circumstances of each author into a broad general light, and exhibit the interest which they possess when considered independently of critical minutiae.

The writer of whom I am to speak to-day is one who, as it seems to me, supplies ample materials both for detailed study and for a more transient survey. It is a very superficial criticism which would pretend that the reputation of Persius is owing simply to the labour which has been spent upon him: still, where the excellence of an author is undoubted, the difficulties of his thought or his language are only so many additional reasons why the patient and prolonged study of him is sure to be profitable. The difficulties of Persius, too, have the advantage of being definite and unmistakable—like those of Aeschylus, not like those of Sophocles—difficulties which do not elude the grasp, but close with it 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 memoir¹, 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 two inscriptions which have been discovered there², 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 Flavus 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 with respect³, 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 Brundisium, 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 Scholiasts⁴, 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 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 an 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 such the men with whom he lived. The sixth satire gives us some information about his habits of life, though not more than we might 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 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 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 novelities 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 were only so many registers of his sins of omission. There was, in truth, no encouragement to pursue a different course. Seneca's attempt to seat philosophy on the throne by influencing the mind of Nero, had issued only in his own moral degradation as the lying apologist of matricide, and the receiver of a bounty which in one of its aspects was plunder, in another corruption; and though his retirement, and still more his death, may have sufficed to rescue his memory from obloquy, they could only prove that he had learned too late what the more consistent members of the fraternity knew from the beginning. From such a government the only notice that a Stoic could expect or desire was the sentence which hurried him to execution or drove him into banishment. Even under the rule of Vespasian the antagonism was still unabated. At the moment of his accession, Euphrates the Tyrian, who was in his train, protested against the ambition which sought to aggrandize itself when it might have restored the republic. Helvidius Priscus, following, and perhaps deforming, the footsteps of his father-in-law Thrasea, ignored the political existence of the emperor in his edicts as praetor, and asserted his own equality repeatedly by a freedom of speech amounting to personal insult, till at last he succeeded in exhausting the forbearance of Vespasian, who put him to death and banished the philosophers from Italy. A similar expulsion took place under Domitian, who did not require much persuasion to induce him to adopt a policy recommended by the instinct of self-preservation no less than by Nero's example. Meantime the spirit of Stoicism was gradually undergoing a change. The theoretic parts of the system, its physics and its dialectics, had found comparatively little favour with the Roman mind, and had passed into the shade in consequence: but it was still a foreign product, a matter of learning, the subject of a voluminous literature, and as such a discipline to which only the few could submit. It was still the old conception of the wise man as an ideal rather than a reality, a being necessarily perfect, and therefore necessarily superhuman. Now, however, the ancient exclusiveness was to be relaxed, and the invitation to humanity made more general. ‘Strange and shocking would it be,’ said Musonius Rufus, the one philosopher exempted from Vespasian's sentence, ‘if the tillers of the ground were incapacitated from philosophy, which is really a business of few words, not of many theories, and far better learnt in a practical country life than in the schools of the city.’ In short, it was to be no longer a philosophy but a religion. Epictetus, the poor crippled slave, as his epitaph proclaims him, whom the gods loved, turned Theism from a speculative dogma into an operative principle, bidding his disciples follow the divine service, imitate the divine life, implore the divine aid, and rest on the divine providence. Dependence on the Deity was taught as a correlative to independence of external circumstances, and the ancient pride of the Porch exchanged for a humility so genuine that men have endeavoured to trace it home to a Christian congregation. A Stoic thus schooled was not likely to become a political propagandist, even if the memory of the republic had been fresh, and the imperial power had continued to be synonymous with tyranny—much less after the assassination of Domitian had inaugurated an epoch of which Tacitus could speak as the fulfilment of the brightest dreams of the truest lovers of freedom. Fifty years rolled away, and government became continually better, and the pursuit of wisdom more and more honourable, till at last the ideal of Zeno himself was realized, and a Stoic ascended the throne of the Caesars, and the philosophy of political despair seemed to have become the creed of political hope. The character of Marcus Aurelius is one that is ever good to dwell on, and our sympathies cling round the man that could be rigorously severe to himself while tenderly indulgent to his people, whose love broke out in their fond addresses to him as their father and their brother: yet the peace of his reign was blasted by natural calamities, torn by civil discord, and tainted by the corruption of his own house, and at his death the fair promise of the commonwealth and of philosophy expired together. Commodus ruled the Roman world, and Stoicism, the noblest of the latter systems, fell the first before the struggles of the enfeebled yet resisting rivals, and the victorious advances of a new and living faith.

It is not often that a poet has been so completely identified with a system of philosophy as Persius. Greece had produced poets who were philosophers, and philosophers who were writers of poetry; yet our first thought of Aeschylus is not as of a Pythagorean, or of Euripides as of a follower of the Sophists; nor should we classify Xenophanes or Empedocles primarily as poets of whose writings only fragments remain. In Lucretius and Persius, on the other hand, we see men who hold a prominent place among the poets of their country, yet whose poetry is devoted to the enforcement of their peculiar philosophical views. The fact is a significant one, and symptomatic of that condition of Roman culture which I have noticed on a former occasion. It points to an age and nation where philosophy is a permanent, not a progressive study—an imported commodity, not an indigenous growth,—where the impulse that gives rise to poetry is not so much a desire to give musical voice to the native thought and feeling of the poet and his fellow-men, as a recognition of the want of a national literature and a wish to contribute towards its supply. At first sight there may seem something extravagant in pretending that Persius can be called the poet of Stoicism in the sense in which Lucretius is the poet of Epicureanism, as if there were equal scope for the exposition of a philosophy in a few scholastic exercises and in an elaborate didactic poem. On the other hand, it should be recollected that under the iron grasp of the Roman mind, Stoicism, as was just now remarked, was being reduced more and more to a simply practical system, bearing but a faint impress of those abstruse cosmological speculations which had so great a charm for the intellect of Greece even in its most sober moments, and exhibiting in place of them an applicability to civil life the want of which had been noted as a defect in the conceptions of Zeno and Chrysippus⁵. The library and the lecture-room still were more familiar to it than the forum or the senate; but the transition had begun: and though Persius may have looked to his seven hundred volumes for his principles of action, as he did to Horace for information about the ways of the world, the only theory which he strove to inculcate was the knowledge which the founders of his sect, in common with Socrates, believed to be the sole groundwork of correct practice. Using the very words of Virgil, he calls upon a benighted race to acquaint itself with the causes of things: but the invitation is not to that study of the stars in their courses, of eclipses, and earthquakes and inundations, of the laws governing the length of days and nights, which enabled Lucretius to triumph over the fear of death, but to an inquiry into the purpose of man's being, the art of skilful driving in the chariot-race of life, the limits to a desire of wealth and to its expenditure on unselfish objects, and the ordained position of each individual in the social system. Such an apprehension of his subject would naturally lead him not to the treatise, but to the sermon—not to the didactic poem, but to the satire or moral epistle. But though the form of the composition is desultory, the spirit is in the main definite and consistent. Even in the first satire, in which he seems to drop the philosopher and assume the critic, we recognize the same belief in the connection between intellectual knowledge and practice, and consequently between a corrupt taste and a relaxed morality, which shines out so clearly afterwards when he tells the enfranchised slave that he cannot move a finger without committing a blunder, and that it is as portentous for a man to take part in life without study as it would be for a ploughman to attempt to bring a ship into port. It is true that he follows Horace closely, not only in his illustrations and descriptions of manners, but in his lessons of morality—a strange deference to the man who ridiculed Crispinus and Damasippus, and did not even spare the great Stertinius; but the evil and folly of avarice, the wisdom of contentment and self-control, and the duty of sincerity towards man and God, were doctrines at least as congenial to a Stoic as to an Epicurean, and the ambition with which the pupil is continually seeking to improve upon his master's felicity of expression shows itself more successfully in endeavours to give greater stringency to his rule of life and conduct. In one respect, certainly, we may wonder that he has failed to represent the views of that section of the Stoics with which he is reported to have lived on terms of familiar intercourse. There is no trace of that political feeling which might have been expected to appear in the writings of a youth who was brought into frequent contact with the revolutionary enthusiasm of Lucan, and may probably have been present at one of the banquets with which Thrasea and Helvidius used to celebrate the birthdays of the first and the last of the great republican worthies. The supposed allusions to the poetical character of Nero in the first satire shrink almost to nothing in the light of a searching criticism, while the tradition that in the original draught the emperor was directly satirized as Midas receives no countenance, to say the least, from the poem itself, the very point of which, so far as we can apprehend it, depends on the truth of the reading given in the MSS. The fourth satire does undoubtedly touch on statesmanship: but the tone throughout is that of a student, who in his eagerness to imitate Plato has apparently forgotten that he is himself living not under a popular but under an imperial government, and the moral intended to be conveyed is simply that the adviser of the public ought to possess some better qualification than those which were found in Alcibiades—a topic about as appropriate to the actual state of Rome as the schoolboy's exhortation to Sulla to lay down his power. Thus his language, where he does speak, enables us to interpret his silence as the silence not of acquiescence or even of timidity, though such times as his might well justify caution, but rather of unworldly innocence, satisfied with its own aspirations after moral perfection, and dreaming of Athenian licence under the very shade of despotism. On the other hand, it is perfectly intelligible that he should have seen little to admire in Seneca, many as are the coincidences which their common philosophy has produced in their respective writings. There could, indeed, have been but little sympathy between his simple earnestness and that rhetorical facility—that Spanish taste for inappropriate and meretricious ornament—that tolerant and compromising temper, able to live in a court while unable to live in exile, which, however compatible with real wisdom and virtue, must have seemed to a Stoic of a severer type only so many qualifications for effectually betraying the good cause. So, again, he does not seem to exhibit any anticipation of the distinctly human and religious development which, as we have seen, was the final phase of Stoicism. His piety is simply the rational piety which would approve itself to any Roman moralist—the piety recommended by Horace, and afterwards by Juvenal—pronouncing purity of intent to be more acceptable in the sight of Heaven than costly sacrifice, and bidding men ask of the gods such things only as divine beings would wish to grant. In like manner his humanity, though genial in its practical aspect, is still narrowed on the speculative side by the old sectarian exclusiveness which barred the path of life to every one not entering through the gate of philosophy. In short, he is a disciple of the earlier Stoicism of the empire—a Roman in his predilection for the ethical part of his creed, yet conforming in other respects to the primitive traditions of Greece—neither a patriot nor a courtier, but a recluse student, an ardent teacher of the truths which he had himself learnt, without the development which might have been generated by more mature thought, or the abatement which might have been forced upon him by a longer experience.

We have already observed that the character of Persius' opinions determined his choice of a poetical vehicle for expressing them. With his views it would have been as unnatural for him to have composed a didactic treatise, like Lucretius, or a republican epic, like Lucan, as to have rested satisfied with multiplying the productions of his own boyhood, tragedies and pilgrimages in verse. And now, what was the nature and what the historical antecedents of that form of composition which he adopted as most congenial to him?

The exploded derivation of satire from the Greek satyric drama is one of those infrequent instances where a false etymology has preserved a significant truth. There seems every reason to believe that the first beginnings of satire among the Romans are parallel to the rudimental type from which dramatic entertainments were developed in Greece. ‘When I am reading on these two subjects,’ says Dryden, in his admirable essay on Satire, ‘methinks I hear the same story told twice over with very little alteration.’ The primitive Dionysiac festivals of the Greek rustic populations seem to have answered with sufficient exactness to the harvest-home rejoicings of agricultural Italy described by Horace, when the country wits encountered each other in Fescennine verses. Nor did the resemblance cease at this its earliest stage. Improvised repartee was succeeded by pantomimic representation and dancing to music, and in process of time the two elements, combined yet discriminated from each other, assumed the form of a regular play, with its alternate dialogues and cantica. Previous to this later development there had been an intermediate kind of entertainment called the satura or medley, either from the miscellaneous character of its matter, which appears to have made no pretence to a plot or story, or from the variety of measures of which it was composed—a more professional and artistic exhibition than the Fescennine bantering-matches, but far removed from the organized completeness of even the earlier drama. It was on this narrow ground that the independence of the Roman genius was destined to assert itself. Whether from a wish to take advantage of the name, or to preserve a thing, once popular, from altogether dying out in the process of improvement, a feeling which we know to have operated in the case of the exodia or interludes introduced into the representation of the Atellane plays, Ennius was led to produce certain compositions which he called satires, seemingly as various both in character and in versification as the old dramatic medley, but intended not for acting but for reciting or reading—in other words, not plays but poems. All that we know of these is comprised in a few titles and a very few fragments, none of which tell us much, coupled with the fact that in one of them Life and Death were introduced contending with each other as two allegorical personages, like Fame in Virgil, as Quintilian remarks, or Virtue and Pleasure in the moral tale of Prodicus. Little as this is, it is more than is known of the satires of Pacuvius, of which we only hear that they resembled those of Ennius. What was the precise relation borne by either to the later Roman satire with which we are so familiar can but be conjectured. Horace, who is followed as usual by Persius, ignores them both as satirists, and claims the paternity of satire for Lucilius, who, as he says, imitated the old Attic comedy, changing merely the measure; nor does Quintilian mention them in the brief but celebrated passage in which he asserts the merit of the invention of satire to belong wholly to Rome. This silence may be taken as showing that neither Ennius nor Pacuvius gave any exclusive or decided prominence to that element of satire which in modern times has become its distinguishing characteristic—criticism on the men, manners, and things of the day; but it can scarcely impeach their credit as the first founders of a new and original school of composition. That which constitutes the vaunted originality of Roman satire is not so much its substance as its form: the one had already existed in perfection at Athens, the elaboration of the other was reserved for the poetic art of Italy. It is certainly not a little remarkable that the countrymen of Aristophanes and Menander should not have risen to the full conception of familiar compositions in verse in which the poet pours out desultory thoughts on contemporary subjects in his own person, relieved from the trammels which necessarily bind every dramatic production, however free and unbridled its spirit. That such a thing might easily have arisen among them is evident from the traditional fame of the Homeric Margites, itself apparently combining one of the actual requisites of the Roman medley, the mixture of metres, with the biting invective of the later satire—a work which, when fixed at its latest date, must have been one of the concomitants, if not, as Aristotle thinks, the veritable parent, of the earlier comedy of Greece. In later times we find parallels to Roman satire in some of the idylls of Theocritus, not only in those light dialogues noticed by the critics, of which the Adoniazusae is the best instance, but in the poem entitled the Charites, where the poet complains of the general neglect into which his art has fallen in a strain of mingled pathos and sarcasm which may remind us of Juvenal's appeal in behalf of men of letters, the unfortunate fraternity of authors. But Greece was not ordained to excel in everything; and Rome had the opportunity of cultivating a virtually unbroken field of labour which was suited to her direct practical genius, and to her mastery over the arts of social life. There can be no question but that the conception of seizing the spirit of comedy—of the new comedy no less than the old—the comedy of manners as well as the comedy of scurrilous burlesque—and investing it with an easy undress clothing, the texture of which might be varied as the inward feeling changed, was a great advance in the progress of letters. It would seem to be a test of the lawful development of a new form of composition from an old, that the latter should be capable of including the earlier, as the larger includes the smaller. So in the development of the Shaksperian drama from the Greek, the chorus is not lost either as a lyrical or as an ethical element, but is diffused over the play, no longer seen indeed, but felt in the art which heightens the tone of poetry, and brings out the moral relations of the characters into more prominent relief. So in that great development which transcends as it embraces all others, the development of prose from poetry, the superiority of the new form to the old as a general vehicle of expression is shown in the expansive flexibility which can find measured and rhythmic utterance for the raptures of passion or imagination, yet give no undue elevation to the statement of the plainest matters of fact. And so it is in the generation of satire from comedy: the unwieldy framework of the drama is gone, but the dramatic power remains, and may be summoned up at any time at the pleasure of the poet, not only in the impalpable shape of remarks on human character, but in the flesh-and-blood fulness of actual dialogue such as engrosses several of the satires of Horace, and enters as a more or less important ingredient into every one of those of Persius. Or, if we choose to regard satire, as we are fully warranted in doing, in its relation not only to the stage but to other kinds of poetry, we shall have equal reason to admire it for its elasticity, as being capable of rising without any ungraceful effort from light ridicule to heightened earnestness—passing at once with Horace from a ludicrous description of a poet as a marked man, to an emphatic recognition of his essential greatness; or with Juvenal from a sneer at the contemptible offerings with which the gods were commonly propitiated, to a sublime recital of the blessings which may lawfully be made objects of prayer. This plastic comprehensiveness was realized by the earlier writers, as we have seen, by means of the variety of their metres, while the latter were enabled to compass it more artistically by that skilful management of the hexameter which could not be brought to perfection in a day. But the conception appears to have been radically the same throughout; and the very name satura already contains a prophecy of the distinctive value of Roman satire as a point in the history of letters.

If, however, the praise of having originated satire cannot be refused to Ennius, it must be confessed as freely that the influence exercised over it by Lucilius entitles him to be called its second father. It belongs to one by the ties of birth—to the other by those of adoption and education. Unlike Ennius, the glories of whose invention may well have paled before his fame as the Roman Homer and the Roman Euripides, Lucilius seems to have devoted himself wholly to fostering the growth and forming the mind of the satiric muse. He is thought to have so far departed from the form of the old medley as to enforce a uniformity of metre in each separate satire, though even this is not certainly made out; but he preserved the external variety by writing sometimes in hexameter, sometimes in iambics or trochaics, and also by a practice, seemingly peculiar to himself, of mixing Latin copiously with Greek, the language corresponding to French in the polite circles of Rome. It is evident, too, both from his numerous fragments and from the notices of the early grammarians, that he encouraged to a large extent the satiric tendency to diversity of subject—at one moment soaring on the wing of epic poetry and describing a council of the gods in language which Virgil has copied, the next satirizing the fashion of giving fine Greek names to articles of domestic furniture,—comprehending in the same satire a description of a journey from Rome to Capua, and a series of strictures on his predecessors in poetry, whom he seems to have corrected like so many school-boys;—now laying down the law about the niceties of grammar, showing how the second conjugation is to be discriminated from the third, and the genitive singular from the nominative plural; and now talking, possibly within a few lines, of seizing an antagonist by the nose, dashing his fist in his face, and knocking out every tooth in his head. But his great achievement, as attested by the impression left on the minds of his Roman readers, was that of making satire henceforward synonymous with free speaking and personality—he comes before us as the reviver of the Fescennine licence, the imitator of Cratinus and Eupolis and Aristophanes. There seems to have been about him a reckless animal pugnacity, an exhilarating consciousness of his powers as a good hater, which in its rude simplicity may remind us of Archilochus, and certainly is but faintly represented in the arch pleasantry of Horace, the concentrated intellectual scorn of Persius, or of the declamatory indignation of Juvenal. Living in a period of political excitement, he plunged eagerly into party quarrels. The companion of the younger Scipio and Laelius, though a mere boy, and himself of equestrian rank, he attacked great consular personages who had opposed his friends: as Horace phrases it, he tore away the veil from private life and arraigned high and low alike—showing no favour but to virtue and the virtuous—words generally found to bear a tolerably precise meaning in the vocabulary of politics. It was the satire of the republic, or rather of the old oligarchy, and it was impossible that it could live on unchanged into the times of the Empire. But the memory of its day of freedom was not forgotten: the ancient right of impeachment was claimed formally by men who intended no more than a common criminal information; and each succeeding satirist sheltered himself ostentatiously under an example of which he knew better than to attempt to avail himself in practice.

It was to Lucilius, as we have already seen, that Persius, if reliance is to be placed on the statement of his biographer, owed the impulse that made him a writer of satire. Of the actual work which is related to have produced so remarkable an effect on its young reader, the tenth book, scarcely anything has been preserved; while the remains of the fourth, which is said to have been the model of Persius' third satire, comparatively copious and interesting as they are, contain nothing which would enable us to judge for ourselves of the degree of resemblance. Hardly a single parallel from Lucilius is quoted by the Scholia on any part of Persius: but when we consider that the aggregate of their citations from Horace, though much larger, is utterly inadequate to express the obligations which are everywhere obvious to the eye of a modern scholar, we cannot take their omissions as even a presumptive proof that what is not apparent does not exist. On the other hand, the Prologue⁶ to the Satires, in scazon iambics, is supposed, on the authority of an obscure passage in Petronius, to have had its prototype in a similar composition by Lucilius; and it is also a plausible conjecture that the first line of the first satire is taken bodily from the old poet—two distinct proclamations of adhesion at the very outset, in the ears of those who could not fail to understand them. There is reason, also, for believing that the imitation may have extended further, and that Persius' strictures on the poets of his day, and in particular on those who affected a taste for archaisms, and professed to read the old Roman drama with delight, may have been studied after those irreverent criticisms of the fathers of poetry, some of which, as the Scholiasts on Horace inform us, occurred in this very tenth book of Lucilius. On the ethical side we should have been hardly prepared to expect much similarity: there is, however, a curious fragment of Lucilius, the longest of all that have come down to us, containing a simple recital of the various constituents of virtue, the knowledge of duty no less than its practice, in itself sufficiently resembling the enumeration of the elements of morality which Persius makes on more than one occasion, and showing a turn for doctrinal exposition which was sure to be appreciated by a pupil of the Stoics. So there are not wanting indications that the bold metaphors and grotesque yet forcible imagery which stamp the character of Persius' style so markedly may have been encouraged if not suggested by hints in Lucilius, who was fond of tentative experiments in language, such as belong to the early stages of poetry, when the national taste is in a state of fusion. The admitted contrast between the two men, unlike in all but their equestrian descent,—between the premature man of the world and the young philosopher, the improvisatore who could throw off two hundred verses in an hour, and the student who wrote seldom and slowly,—may warrant us in doubting the success of the imitation, but does not discredit the fact. Our point is, that Persius attempted to wear the toga of his predecessor, not that it fitted him.

The influence of Horace upon Persius is a topic which has, in part, been anticipated already⁷. It is a patent fact which may be safely assumed, and I have naturally been led to assume it as a help towards estimating other things which are not so easily ascertainable. Casaubon was, I believe, the first to bring it forward prominently into light in an appendix to his memorable edition of Persius; and though one of the later commentators has endeavoured to call it in question, cautioning us against mistaking slight coincidences for palpable imitations, I am confident that a careful and minute study of Persius, such as I have lately been engaged in, will be found only to produce a more complete conviction of its truth: nor can I doubt that an equally careful perusal of Horace, line by line and word by word, would enable us to add still further to the amount of proof. Yet it is curious and instructive to observe that it is a point which, while established by a superabundance of the best possible evidence, that of ocular demonstration, is yet singularly deficient in those minor elements of probability to which we are constantly accustomed to look in the absence of anything more directly conclusive. The memoir of Persius mentions Lucilius, but says not a word of Horace: the quotations from Horace in the commentary of the pseudo-Cornutus are, as I have said, far from numerous: while the difference of the poets themselves, their personal history, their philosophical profession, their taste and temperament, the nature and power of their genius, is greater even than in the case of Persius and Lucilius, and is only more clearly brought out by the clearer knowledge we possess of each, in the possession of the whole of their respective works. The fact, however, is only too palpable—so much so that it puzzles us, as it were, by its very plainness: we could understand a less degree of imitation, but the correspondence which we actually see makes us, so to speak, half incredulous, and compels us to seek some account of it. It is not merely that we find the same topics in each, the same class of allusions and illustrations, or even the same thoughts and the same images, but the resemblance or identity extends to things which every poet, in virtue of his own peculiarities and those of his time, would naturally be expected to provide for himself. With him, as with Horace, a miser is a man who drinks vinegar for wine, and stints himself in the oil which he pours on his vegetables; while a contented man is one who acquiesces in the prosperity of people whose start in life is worse than his own. The prayer of the farmer is still that he may turn up a pot of money some day while he is ploughing: the poet's hope is still that his verses may be embalmed with cedar oil, his worst fear still that they may furnish wrapping for spices. Nay, where he mentions names they are apt to be the names of Horatian personages: his great physician is Craterus, his grasping rich man Nerius, his crabbed censor Bestius, his low reprobate Natta. Something is doubtless due to the existence of what, to adopt a term applied by Colonel Mure to the Greek epic writers, we may call satirical commonplace, just as Horace himself is thought to have taken the name Nomentanus from Lucilius; or as, among our own satirists, Bishop Hall talks of Labeo, and Pope of Gorgonius. So Persius may have intended not so much to copy Horace as to quote him—advertising his readers, as it were, from time to time that he was using the language of satire. But the utmost that can be proved is, that he followed prodigally an example which had been set sparingly, not knowing or not remembering that satire is a kind of composition which of all others is kept alive not by antiquarian associations, but by contemporary interest—not by generalized conventionalities, but by direct individual portraiture. We can hardly doubt that a wider worldly knowledge would have led him to correct his error of judgment, though the history of English authors show us, in at least one instance, that of Ben Jonson, that a man, not only of true comic genius but of large experiences of life, may be so enslaved by acquired learning as to satirize vice and folly as he reads of them in his books, rather than as he sees them in society.

But time warns me that I must leave the yet unfinished list of the influences which worked or may have worked upon Persius, and say a few words upon his actual merits as a writer. The tendency of what has been advanced hitherto has been to make us think of him as more passive than active—as a candidate more for our interest and our sympathy than for our admiration. But we must not forget that it is his own excellence that has made him a classic—that the great and true glory which, as Quintilian says, he gained by a single volume, has been due to that volume alone. If we would justify the award of his contemporaries and of posterity, we may be prepared to account for it. It was not, as we have seen, that he was an originating power in philosophy, or a many-sided observer of men and manners. He was a satirist, but he shows no knowledge of many of the ingredients which, as Juvenal rightly perceived, go to make up the satiric medley. He was what in modern parlance would be called a plagiarist—a charge which, later if not sooner, must have told fatally on an otherwise unsupported reputation. I might add that he is frequently perplexed in arrangement and habitually obscure in meaning, were it not that some judges have professed to discover in this the secret of his fame. A truer appreciation will, I believe, be more likely to find it in the distinct and individual character of his writings, the power of mind and depth of feeling visible throughout, the austere purity of his moral tone, relieved by frequent outbreaks of genial humour, and the condensed vigour and graphic freshness of a style where elaborate art seems to be only nature triumphing over obstacles. Probably no writer ever borrowed so much and yet left on the mind so decided an impression of originality. His description of the wilful invalid and his medical friend in the third satire owes much of its colouring to Horace, yet the whole presentation is felt to be his own—true, pointed, and sufficient. Even when the picture is entirely Horatian, like that of the overcovetous man at his prayers, in the second satire, the effect is original still, though the very varieties which discriminate it may be referred to hints in other parts of Horace's own works. We may wish that he had painted from his own observation and knowledge, but we cannot deny that he has shown a painter's power. And where he draws the life that he must have known, not from the descriptions of a past age but from his own experience, his portraits have an imaginative truth, minutely accurate yet highly ideal, which would entitle them to a distinguished place in any poetical gallery. There is nothing in Horace or Juvenal more striking than the early part of the third satire, where the youthful idler is at first represented by a series of light touches, snoring in broad noon while the harvest is baking in the fields and the cattle reposing in the shade, then starting up and calling for his books only to quarrel with them—and afterwards as we go further the scene darkens, and we see the figure of the lost profligate blotting the background, and catch an intimation of yet more fearful punishments in store for those who will not be warned in time—punishments dire as any that the oppressors of mankind have suffered or devised—the beholding of virtue in her beauty when too late, and the consciousness of a corroding secret which no other heart can share. Nor would it be easy to parallel the effect of the sketches in the first satire, rapidly succeeding each other,—the holiday poet with his white dress and his onyx ring tuning his voice for recitation; a grey and bloated old man, giving himself up to cater for the itching ears of others; the jaded, worn company at the table, languidly rousing themselves in the hope of some new excitement; the inferior guests at the bottom of the hall ready to applaud when they have got the cue from their betters—all flung into a startling and ghastly light by the recollection carefully presented to us that these men call themselves the sons of the old Romans, and recognise poetry as a divine thing, and acknowledge the object of criticism to be truth. Again we see the same pictorial skill and reality, though in a very different style, toned down and sobered, in those most sweet and touching lines describing the poet's residence with his beloved teacher, when they used to study together through long summer suns and seize on the first and best hours of the night for the social meal, each working while the other worked and resting while the other rested, and both looking forward to the modest enjoyment of the evening as the crown of a well-spent day. Persius' language has been censured for its harshness and exaggeration: but here, at any rate, he is as simple and unaffected as an admirer of Horace or Virgil could desire. The contrast is instructive, and may perhaps suggest a more favourable view of those peculiarities of expression which are generally condemned. The style which his taste leads him to drop when he is not writing satire, is the style which his taste leads him to assume for satiric purposes. He feels that a clear, straightforward, everyday manner of speech would not suit a subject over which the gods themselves might hesitate whether to laugh or to weep. He has to write the tragi-comedy of his day, and he writes it in a dialect where grandiose epic diction and philosophical terminology are strangely blended with the talk of the forum, the gymnasia, and the barber's shop. I suggest this consideration with the more confidence, as I find it represented to me, and, as it were, forced on me by the example of a writer of our own country, perhaps the most remarkable of the present time, who, though differing as widely from Persius in all his circumstances as a world-wearied and desponding man of the nineteenth century can differ from an enthusiastic and inexperienced youth of the first, still appears to me to bear a singular resemblance to him in the whole character of his genius—I mean Mr. Carlyle. If Persius can take the benefit of this parallel, he may safely plead guilty to the charge of not having escaped the vice of his age, the passion for refining still further on Augustan refinements of expression, and locking up the meaning of a sentence in epigrammatic allusions, which in its measure lies at the door even of Tacitus.

I have exhausted my time and, I fear, your patience also, when my subject is still far from exhausted. I am glad, however, to think that in closing I am not really bringing it to an end, but that some of my hearers to-day will accompany me to-morrow and on future days in the special study of one who, like all great authors, will surrender the full knowledge of his beauties only to those who ask it of him in detail.

Notes

1. [The memoir is printed in Bücheler's edition of Jahn's Persius (Berlin, 1886), pp. 54-56.]

2. [In Gori's collection. Quoted by Jahn (1843), Prolegg. p. iv. A T. Persius is mentioned in an inscription found at Turin, C. I. L. 5. 7101.]

3. [Institutio Oratoria 3. 1. 21, 3. 6. 45, 7. 4. 24, 11. 3. 126.]

4. [The Scholia to Persius have been edited, after the Berne MSS., by Dr. E. Kurz, in three programmes, dated 1875, 1888, and 1889.]

5. Cic. Legg. 3. 6.

6. [Rather, the Epilogue: see Preface to the Third Edition, p. v.]

7. [Perhaps owing to this fact, or perhaps because of the identity of their cognomen Flaccus, Horace and Persius were sometimes confused by the grammarians. Persius is called simply Flaccus by Diomedes, p. 327 Keil. He is quoted as Horace by Charisius, according to the Neapolitan MS., p. 202, and by Consentius, p. 348; conversely, Horace is quoted as Persius by Servius on Georgic 3. 363.]