SOURCE: Morford, Mark. “The Style of Persius.” In Persius, pp. 73-96. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Morford praises Persius's style for its memorable metaphors, wide vocabulary, and colorful language.]

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

Style is inseparable from moral values. This is the theme of Persius's first satire, and it is the foundation of the fifth. For the satirist how he expresses himself is integral with what he says. The foregoing survey of the six satires has therefore involved many observations on Persius's style in passing; we may now turn our attention to it both for its own sake and as an instrument for Persius's expression of his character and moral teaching. Persius himself says a good deal about satirical style, especially in the prologue, the first, and the fifth satires, and it is with these that we shall be especially concerned.

Persius has the reputation of being obscure and difficult. In the fifth century the Byantine scholar John of Lydia found him the “darkest” of writers (the Greek word is amauros), and critics have consistently dismissed him as inferior to Horace and Juvenal because of his close-packed metaphors, his strained diction, and his “scabrous and hobbling” verse¹. Some critics patronizingly excuse Persius on the grounds of youth and inexperience, and comparatively few have been generous or patient enough to consider his satire in its integrity, that is, to concentrate as much on the quality of his poetry as a whole as on its component parts. Kenneth Reckford, with a metaphor worthy of Persius himself, has rightly said: “to regard his metaphors as poetic embellishment leads to an unrewarding peeling away of onionskins: those who find nothing within need blame only themselves”².

The most persuasive defender of Persius was also his greatest editor, Isaac Casaubon, whose edition was published in Paris in 1605. Casaubon's Prolegomena to his edition are admittedly so biased as to dismiss the very real difficulties of Persius's style and were easily attacked by Dryden in his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. Yet Casaubon was right to refuse to distinguish between style and content, and any consideration of Persius's style should recognize the value of Casaubon's approach. He begins with a broad definition of the principal constituent parts of Roman satire, which he reduces to two: moral instruction and wit (doctrina moralis, urbanitas et sales). He finds that Persius excels in the former and justifies his use of metaphor as being essential to the creation of an appropriately lofty style, so that his obscurity is incidental to the broader purpose of his poetry. Casaubon fails, as Dryden pointed out, to explain or justify Persius's obscurity, but his general principles of criticism are correct.

In fact, the moral doctrines of Persius are neither original nor arresting. To say, as he does, that sloth or the passions are bad, or that prayer, to be acceptable to the gods, must come from a pure heart, is hardly likely to excite one's hearers. But readers since Persius's time have continually found his doctrines memorable because of the way in which he has expressed them. A true poet can express the deepest truths with a style that transforms the banal into the memorable. When Horace chooses the simple and unobstrusive life over that of the wealthy and powerful, his doctrine is neither new nor exciting, but who can fail to be moved by the picture of Fear and Threats climbing to the top with the successful man, or of black Care sailing on the merchant's ship and sitting behind the horseman³?

Persius deals with a similar theme when he describes the opposing tyrannies of avarice and luxury in Satire 5.132-60. Like Horace, he personifies the abstract principles and dramatizes the dilemma of their victim. He sets the scene: it is morning and the man is still asleep. “Wake up!” cries Avarice and after some lively dialogue prods him into preparing a boat with which to import luxuries from the east. She advises him to raise money for the venture, perjuring himself if necessary. All is made ready and the trader shouts “All aboard!” when suddenly Luxury appears. “Where on earth are you off to, you fool?” she cries. “Why put up with the dangers and discomforts of a sea-voyage, when you could stay here and enjoy yourself at ease? Why sweat to double the return on your capital? Life is short: relax and enjoy it!”

After this Persius typically adds his own commentary by means of two more concrete metaphors. The businessman is pulled in opposite directions by two hooks. When he has for once decided to resist one or the other vice, he is still like a chained dog that escapes, yet drags part of the chain with him.

The whole passage is an elaboration on a very simple theme—the conflicting temptations of greed and sloth. By means of lively dialogue, personifications and direct address, vignettes of dockside scenes and shipboard life, Persius brings to life the basic moral doctrine of his diatribe that only the wise man is free. By the closing image of the chained dog he gives a final, concrete immediacy to the moral servitude of the businessman, who is no more free than the chained animal.

How obscure is this passage? In outline and purpose it is simple. It is made harder by the swift-moving dialogue with frequent changes of speaker; by the kaleidoscopic changes of scene from bedroom, to dockside, to ship, and back to land again; by complex descriptions of psychological states; by technical or unusual words (for example, the archaic obba for a wine jar); finally by the changing series of concrete images: the snoring businessman; the eastern merchandise; the honest man doing no more with his life than licking salt from his fingers and happy to be so poor; the scenes of loading the boat; the imagined shipboard meal taken on deck as the businessman props himself up on a coil of rope; the sour wine that the sailor drinks; the vision of the short life to be enjoyed; the two hooks; the broken chain and the dog. In less than thirty lines there are a dozen concrete images, and this passage is by no means exceptional.

The passage that we have been examining [Satire 5.132-60] is quite representative of Persius's style, and it contains many of the elements that distinguish him from other satirists. Before we consider these in greater detail, we should remind ourselves of the state of the tradition of Latin hexameter satire when Persius began to write. The most obvious consideration is the revolution achieved by Horace. As J. P. Sullivan has aptly said: “Horace … succeeded in reducing a fairly free form, free in terms both of subject and language, into a smooth conversational musing”⁴. The satirist, as we have seen, derived his style in part from comedy and diatribe. Lucilius had brought to these Greek genres his own forceful indignation and a flexible range of subject matter, style, and vocabulary. Horace disciplined the vigorous but comparatively informal qualities of Lucilian satire. In place of abuse, indignation, obscenity, and laughter, he chose the subtler weapons of irony and wit; in place of the frontal attack he chose indirection, speaking through the mask of a subtly changing persona. These methods suited both his character (as far as he ever permits us to see it behind the mask) and his social and political circumstances.

A century later Persius tells us how he perceives his predecessors: “Lucilius cut up the city—you, Lupus, and you, Mucius—and broke his teeth on them. Horace, the rogue, touches every fault in his smiling friend; allowed entry, he plays around the inmost heart, cleverly suspending his public from his fastidiously critical nose” [Satire 1.114-18].

Persius then goes on to admit that he cannot use the indignation of Lucilius and to imply (though he does not say so explicitly) that he will not rival Horace in wit and subtle charm. At the same time he will, he says, uncover the vices of Roman society (as his predecessors had done) by talking, as it were, privately. He uses the images of Midas's barber digging the hole into which to whisper his discoveries of Rome's secret vices [Satire 1.119-23], but he knows also that these private musings will be heard by others. His “public” he has already defined [Satire 1.3] as “one or two people,” and he describes them now as discriminating, familiar with the candor of the Greek comic poets and capable of appreciating satire that is more refined. Persius's style, therefore, is to be subtle and personal. It neither states the obvious nor, to put it his way [Satire 1.127-33], can it be understood by the lout who laughs at the one-eyed man for being one-eyed. He sums it up in the fifth satire: “secrete loquimur” (“we talk privately,” line 21).

But Persius cannot ignore Horace's achievement in making satire conversational, as implied by Horace's title of Sermones (“talks”) for his satires. In the prologue Persius says that his work is not to be ranked as poetry with the divinely inspired and lofty genres of epic, tragedy, and lyric. Nor (he implies) will he be a merely imitative versifier, writing for money. His poetry (carmen nostrum, line 7) is the work of a semi-initiate into the mysteries of poetry, a kind of half-way member (semipaganus) of the guild of poets. In other words, he recognizes the conversational (as opposed to poetic) quality of Horatian satire as an essential part of the tradition. In the first satire he distances himself from the bombast and froth of contemporary poetry, notably epic and tragedy: he sees the rottenness of the literary products in vogue as manifestations of the moral rottenness of Roman society.

We can now outline the problems that Persius faced in developing his satiric style. Like Horace he needed to be conversational yet subtle; like Lucilius he aimed to be critical of the vices of society. Like any poet worth the name he needed technical skill. He wished to appeal to a discriminating audience. Finally, he intended to be honest, true to his moral and artistic principles. In the first satire he staked out his position as a literary and moral critic while in the fifth he explained the making of his style, forged in the fire of Cornutus's teaching [Satire 5.1-29]. A few lines from the latter passage [Satire 5.14-16] are the best summary of Persius's own view of his style (Cornutus is the speaker):

verba togae sequeris iunctura callidus acri, ore teres modico, pallentis radere mores doctus et ingenuo culpam defigere ludo.

“You keep to the words of ordinary Romans; you are skillful with the telling, pointed juxtaposition; your well-rounded speech is not high-flown. You are skilled at scraping away sickly bad habits and at pinning guilt with a gentleman's wit.”

VOCABULARY

There are just short of two thousand different words used by Persius (1,938 out of 4,647 total words). No less than 1,237 (or 63.8 percent) of these are used once only, a sure indicator of the variety of Persius's language⁵. The great majority of words are verba togae, ordinary words, that would not be out of place in prose speech. Equally, very few are words peculiar to the “lofty” styles of epic, tragedy, or lyric, and these are to be found in parodies of those styles, especially at the beginnings of the first and fifth satires. The first line of satire 1 is instructive: the word inane (“empty,” “vain”) has the epic associations of Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura, and the exclamation is both a parody of the epic and philosophic style and a statement of the satirist's own negative feelings about the world he observes. The latter is emphasized by Casaubon, who devotes four pages of commentary to the line; the former is underlined by the immediate interruption of the interlocutor, who pricks the bubble of bombast with “who will read this sort of stuff?” The skillful use of the single word inane, in the emphatic last position in the first line of the satire, is a microcosm of Persius's care in the choice, placing, and associations of his words.

Persius again uses epic diction and vocabulary in Satire 1.93-102, where he is parodying contemporary epic effusions, and in 5.1-4, where the context and purpose are quite similar to the opening of the first satire. In the latter passage the interlocutor (Cornutus himself) again breaks in impatiently to stop the high-flown bombast. He in turn uses epic parody in line 7: “grande locuturi nebulas Helicone legunto” (“let those who will speak in the lofty style gather clouds from Mount Helicon”). The parody lies not only in the sense but also with the quasi-legal imperative legunto⁶, and the heavy epic rhythm of locuturi before the caesura. We have already noted Persius's exact use of epic-philosophical vocabulary in line 3 of satire 6, where the Lucretian phrase “veterum primordia rerum” (“first beginnings of ancient sounds”) is used in describing the creation of a new lyric style by Caesius Bassus.

Amongst the verba togae (“words of ordinary Romans”) Persius uses many words appropriate to everyday speech and unsuitable for the poetry of epic or tragedy. This very fact makes the words seem difficult to us, because our reading of Latin is confined mostly to literary works that exclude “vulgar” words⁷. Yet the words themselves were not necessarily rare or abstruse. An analogy in English might be words such as “businessman,” “carburetor,” “hamburger.” These three words are common enough in three major areas of reference—respectively, daily work, technical terms, eating—but they would not normally appear in poetic contexts, except in parody, comic verse, or for particular effect in serious poetry, (for example, T. S. Eliot's poetry of social criticism). So Persius uses agaso (5.76: “a stable-boy,” compare Horace, Satire 2.8.72); cerdo (4.51: “a common workman”); trossulus (1.82: “a Roman nobleman,” with pejorative overtones, as in Seneca, Epistles, 76.2 and 87.9). Among technical terms he uses cannabis (5.146: “a rope made of hemp”); obba (5.148: “a wine-jar,” but already an archaic, although vulgar, word by Persius's time)⁸; orca (3.50 and 76: “a narrow-necked jar,” also used by Horace, Satire 2.4.66). Of our three areas of reference, eating provides the largest group of vulgar words, for example, artocreas (6.50: either “a meatpie” or “a dish of bread and meat”: the word, like many words in contemporary English usage, was coined from two greek words meaning respectively “bread” and “meat”); perna (3.75: “a ham”: used also by Horace in Satire 2.2.117); tuccetum (2.42: “barbecued beef,” said by the scholiast to be a term used by the Gauls of northern Italy for beef preserved in a special sauce).

So far we have been dealing only with substantives. With other parts of speech Persius is equally sensitive to the difference between the vocabulary of daily parlance and words appropriate to the lofty style of poetry. Adjectives appropriate to the latter appear in passages of epic parody, for example, reparabilis (“repetitive,” in 1.102), or inanis (“empty,” in 1.1) and maestus (“tragic,” in 5.3). The epic word grandis (“vast”) appears eight times, of which four are in passages critical of the turgid epic or rhetorical style [1.14, 68; 3.45; 5.7]; twice it is used in the context of food [2.42 and 3.55], each time with overtones of moral criticism (fattening porridge in 3.55; gross dishes in 2.42). At 5.186 the Galli (priests of Cybele) are grandes, size here being a sign of stupidity, just as three lines later [5.190] the vulgar and coarse man in the street, Pulfenius, is ingens (“huge”), another epic adjective. Finally, grandis is used at 6.22 for the vast estate which the spendthrift heir runs through. Persius's exactness with words is especially noticeable in this passage, in which he is alluding to Horace's description [Epistle 1.15.27] of another spendthrift who had exhausted his inheritance “heroically” (fortiter). Persius's spendthrift is a magnanimus … puer (lit. “a high-souled youth”), an epic phrase, for the virtue of magnanimitas (which is the Latin equivalent of the Greek megalopsychia) was especially appropriate to the epic hero, with its connotations of courage, nobility, and generosity. Further, Persius places the word next to grandia: “hic bona dente / grandia magnanimus peragit puer” (“here a generous youth runs through a vast fortune by chewing”), a collocation of words quite typical of Horace's style. Persius's words keep the style and associations of their Horatian model⁹.

One group of adjectives peculiar to Persius includes those formed as past participles of verbs. There are more than twenty of these, and they add color and variety to Persius's style. Thus his reader's ear is vaporatus (“steamed”) at 1.126. At 4.30-31, “tunicatum cum sale mordens / cepe et farratam pueris plaudentibus ollam …” (“nibbling on a salted onion, skin and all [lit. “clothed in its tunic”] and while his slaves applaud [the hand-out of] a bowl of grits [lit. “a bowl that has been ‘gritted’”]”), the two participles humorously give a touch of grandeur that is quite incongruous with the rich skinflint and the plebeian food. At 1.125 (in the line preceding vaporatus) Persius forms a comparative adjective, from the participle decoctus, which means “boiled down,” a metaphor from boiling away impurities during the making of wine. The comparative decoctius therefore intensifies the idea of something already free from fault and sets up the metaphor of vaporatus (“steamed”) in the next line, to describe vividly the purity of Persius's literary standards.

As might be expected, Persius's verbs show an equally lively range, again with a careful distinction between those appropriate to the lofty style and those suitable for the sermo (“talk”) of satire. The latter group, which is much larger, includes many drawn from everyday life or common speech. For example, the farming term runcare (“to pull weeds”) is used at 4.36 of the homosexual removing body-hair, and the agricultural metaphor continues throughout the passage (through line 41), which, largely because of this device, is saved from being merely obscene. There are onomatopoeic verbs drawn from the children's nursery (lallare, “to say lalla” and pappare, “to cry for pap,” 3.17-18.) In this passage Persius boldly uses the active infinitive forms of the verbs as substantives in his efforts to achieve poetic compression. Some verbs come directly from comedy: for example, the vivid image of laughter behind one's back as the motion of the stork's beak, imitated by the ridiculer's fingers, is found first in Plautus¹⁰. In Persius [1.58] the verb pinsit (“opened and shut”) introduces a brilliant three-line passage in which the ridiculer's gestures are likened to a catalog of animals—the stork's beak, the donkey's ears, and the dog's tongue:

O Iane, a tergo quem nulla ciconia pinsit nec manus auriculas imitari mobilis albas nec linguae quantum sitiat canis Apula tantae.

“O Janus (sc. the two-faced god who could see behind as well as in front), whom no stork “pecked” from behind, nor the gesturing hand quick to imitate the white ears (sc. of the donkey), nor tongues stuck out as far as the thirsty Apulian dog's.”

Persius's verbs are drawn from the whole range of human activity and more than any other group of words give vigor and color to his style. Trutinantur (“they weigh in the scales,” [3.82]) gives an exact picture, in the centurion's scornful speech, of the pedantic weighing of words indulged in by the professors of philosophy. The scales, of course, are two pans suspended from a beam, itself held up by the weigher; this cumbersome process makes the transfer to the realm of words all the more sarcastic, and the picture is made yet more derisive by the exporrecto labello (“pursed lips”) of the professor. Many verbs are taken from sexual and excretory functions, in keeping with the element of obscenity that had been part of the satiric tradition from its Greek beginnings. Often Persius adds an ironic or humorous twist. For example, to describe subjects off-limits to the satirist's criticism, he imagines a picture of two serpents (such pictures still exist, for example, at Pompeii) indicating a sacred spot, and adds the comment: “pueri, sacer est locus, extra meiite” (“boys, the place is holy: piss elsewhere,” 1.113). The simple use of the incongruous term exactly and vividly catches both the spirit and the predicament of the satirist. As a final illustration of Persius's verbs we may choose the expressive word bullire (“to boil, to send up bubbles to the surface”) and its compound ebullire (“to bubble out [one's life],” that is, “to die”). In 3.32-34 the atrophying of the moral sense of the spendthrift hedonist is described as follows: “he is dull from his vice and the rich fat has grown over his heart (sc. as the seat of his thought); he has no conscience; he does not know what he is losing, and sunk in the depths he no longer sends up bubbles to the surface (“et alto / demersus summa rursus non bullit in unda”). The single word bullit vividly and exactly catches the sense of the spendthrift as he sinks to the bottom, drowned in his vices. Persius's choice of the one word bullit is a masterpiece of poetic compression. It has philosophical connotations, for the image of the drowning man was used by Greek and Roman moralists; taken literally it is a vivid image. Finally, it neatly consummates the moral atrophy whose progress has been described in the previous phrases.

An important component of Persius's satiric vocabulary is the group of twenty-six diminutives (of which nineteen are “true” diminutives as opposed to words like puella (“a girl”), which are so common in the diminutive form as not to be remarkable). Diminutives are regularly formed by changing the substantive or adjectival ending to -ellus (-a, -um) or -ulus: For example, liber (“a book”), becomes libellus; rancidus (“sour”), becomes rancidulus. Latin, like modern Italian, is extremely rich in diminutives, and they are especially frequent in comedy and lyric poetry. The soft -ll- sound is often used in passages of tender emotion, often also with alliteration and other forms of word-music. The connotations of smallness are most often also exploited in passages of endearment, but they are a rich source of vocabulary in passages expressive of scorn and derision, and at least half of Persius's diminutives are used in this way. These words invariably defeat the translator of Persius, for English diminutives (the ending -ette, -kin, for example) seldom have the same connotations as Latin, and there are no satisfactory parallels for diminutive adjectives. Again, we find that Persius has exploited the potential of Latin for poetic compression.

The most extended use of a diminutive is in the first satire, where the word auricula (diminutive of auris, “ear”) is a significant motif in establishing the unity of the poem. The diminutive is used for scorn and disapproval. In its first appearance [line 22] it is the means by which Romans “take in” (literally and metaphorically) the degenerate poetry of the day, and it is used at line 108 for the same purpose, where the hearers' “little ears” cannot accept the biting criticism of the satirist. Twice the auriculae are the donkey's ears, imitated by the mocking fingers in line 59, and with reference to the legend of King Midas at line 121. In the latter passage Persius finally gives the answer to the question he had left incomplete at line 8: “Romae quis non … ?” (“Who at Rome does not … ?”), answered in 121 by “auriculas asini quis non habet?” (“Who does not have the little ears of the donkey?”). The intervening appearances of the auriculae [lines 22, 59, 108] give the word its necessary emphasis in 121 as well as contribute to the structural unity of the poem. The contrast is all the more telling, therefore, when Persius uses the nondiminutive auris in line 126, of the good listener vaporata aure (“whose ear is well-steamed”)¹¹. Persius uses auricula once more in the second satire [line 30] for the ears of the gods to whom bribing prayers are offered. Here scorn for the immoral petitioners is here transferred to the gods to whom they pray.

Most of Persius's other diminutives are equally colorful. Twice he uses pejorative diminutives for the skin: in Satire 4.18 cuticula is used for the skin of a specious candidate for political office tanning himself. Here, as with auricula and auris in satire 2, Persius has the diminutive and nondiminutive words for skin in close proximity avoiding the repetition¹². Among Persius's other diminutives the following are worth noting:

(1) Popellus (for populus, people) used pejoratively twice at 4.15 and 6.50. Its synonym, plebecula (for plebs) is used at 4.6, where it expresses scorn for the instability of the mob. The association of the diminutive with comedy is especially noticeable here, since Aristophanes had used the diminutive of demos (“people”), demidion¹³.

(2) Persius coins the Greek form of the diminutive elegidia (“little elegies”) at 1.51 for the lightweight verses of Roman noble poetasters.

(3) The diminutive aqualiculus (from aqualis, “water-container”) is an element in a deliberately grotesque line at 1.57: “pinguis aqualiculus propenso sesquipede extet” (“Your fat beer-belly hangs out half a yard in front”). The diminutive for “stomach” is appropriate, even in a context where large size is emphasized, because it is pejorative, and the ungainly word aqualiculus suits the ponderous sound of the line with its three polysyllabic words. The audience is left no doubt as to what the satirist thinks of “beer-bellies”¹⁴.

(4) Persius uses six adjectival diminutives. For example, rancidulus (“sour”) is used scornfully of the poetic effusions of would-be amateur tragedians at 1.33. Beatulus, which also seems to be Persius's own coinage from beatus (“blessed”), is used at 3.103 of a glutton who has eaten himself to death: “hinc tuba, candelae, tandemque beatulus alto / compositus lecto …” (“hence the funeral trumpet and candles, and finally the ‘loved one’ laid out on the high funeral bier …”). The diminutive adjective precisely catches the mixture of hypocrisy in the mourners' emotions and the satirist's scorn.

This brief survey of Persius's vocabulary is necessarily selective, and it has not covered many important elements in his choice of words—for example, Greek words and constructions, archaic terms, neologisms, and specially coined usages. Enough has been said, however, to give some idea of the richness and accuracy of Persius's vocabulary, and the reader can judge how far his claim to be using verba togae (“words of ordinary Romans”) is justified. Single words can only give a very partial idea of Persius's style, and it is appropriate now to turn to the most distinctive aspect of his style, which he summarizes in the words “iunctura callidus acri” (“skillful with the pointed juxtaposition”). His phrase (which is both an imitation of and a compliment to Horace)¹⁵ covers all aspects of his weaving of words, the most important being his metaphorical language.

METAPHOR

Metaphorical language is perhaps the most important single feature of poetic writing. It achieves an immediacy and vividness that cannot be imparted by colorless abstracts. It may be formalized, as in the similes of epic, a feature of the grand style that is clearly inappropriate to the sermo of satire. There are similes in Persius, but they are introduced informally, and the full epic formula of sicut (or ut: “just as …”) answered by haud aliter (“not otherwise …”) is not used. Persius twice uses a simile introduced by ut (as): at 1.97 the critic of Vergil likens the opening of the Aeneid to the branch of an old cork-tree enveloped in a swollen bark, and in 6.62 the satirist likens himself to the standard representation of Mercury, as the bringer of unexpected gain painted with a wallet full of silver. Yet in this passage the point of the simile (the purse) is not made explicitly. Instead Persius indentifies himself with the god and, by leaving the simile vague, achieves speed and compression: “Sum tibi Mercurius: venio deus huc ego ut ille / pingitur” (“I am Mercury for you: I come here as a god, just as he is painted”). There is also one simile introduced by “non secus ac” (“no differently than”) at Satire 1.66.

Persius, therefore, like his predecessors, prefers to use metaphorical writing as part of the onward flow of his sermo; that is, he prefers image to simile. This technique ensures speed and immediacy; it achieves compression but often also increases obscurity. In the Roman rhetorical handbooks the technique was called translatio (an exact Latin equivalent for the Greek metaphor), that is, the “carrying over” of a word or phrase from one area of meaning to another. Its primary aim is vividness and therefore, as Cicero remarked, it is closely related to the senses, especially the sense of sight¹⁶. Thus it conveys abstract ideas in concrete (usually visual) terms. Horace exploited the richness of Latin imagery that Plautus had first perceived and Lucilius developed. For example, he imagines men gossiping over the recent acquittal of an absent friend. One says: “he's a friend of mine … but I do wonder how he got off”¹⁷. The satirist comments: “hic nigrae sucus lolliginis, haec est / aerugo mera” (“This is the juice of the black cuttlefish, this is unadulterated rust”). The black and corrosive meanness of the false friend could not be described more succinctly.

Horace perfected the technique of the callida iunctura (“skillful joining”) of words and phrases. He seems to have coined the term iunctura, perhaps thinking of the metaphor of carpentry which underlines the Greek word harmonia (“fitting together”). Horace used callida iunctura in the context of giving freshness to a well-used word. Persius's acris iunctura (“pointed juxtaposition”) introduces the notion of sharpness, the Greek critical term being oxys. The English term pointed is appropriate, since “point” is the essential feature of wit, which is itself at the heart of satiric technique. Persius's aim, therefore, was more ambitious than the goal implied by Horace's callida iunctura, for it involved the achievement of surprise and wit. The opposite of the term acris is tener (“soft”), precisely the quality in contemporary poetry and its audience that Persius attacks in the first satire¹⁸. In contrast he aimed at poetry that was spare and tense, its virile quality opposed to the smooth effeminacy of his contemporaries. Here are his comments at lines 63-66:

What is the popular style? What else indeed except poems at last flowing along with soft meter, so that the smooth joints don't allow the critic's nails to find any roughness? The poet knows how to extend his verses just as if he were checking a red line's straightness with one eye.

Seneca, writing three years after Persius's death, criticizes the “virile” quality of writers like Persius who chose the pointed over the smooth style: “They don't want their juxtapositions to be without roughness. They think it (sc. the juxtaposition) is virile and heroic if it strikes the ear by its roughness”¹⁹.

So Persius's phrase acris iunctura (“pointed juxtaposition”) is both descriptive and polemical. It states his opposition to contemporary standards in poetic taste, and it shows where his principal claim to originality lies.

Let us now look at some specific examples. First there are conjunctions of abstract and concrete that are important for a whole passage or are so repeated that they are significant elements in the structure of the whole satire. In the first satire the ears are used in this way, as we have already seen. It is typical of Persius's style, however, that the physiological imagery of one part of the body (the ears) is combined with that of others. Thus at 1.22 the poet “collects tidbits for other men's ears,” and the ears become the means whereby the audience feeds on bad poetry (a metaphor of digestion) and obtains sensual gratification (a metaphor of sexual perversion, lines 19-21). In this same passage the hearers' skin is swollen by the poetry they listen to (a metaphor of disease, in this case dropsy). In the lines immediately following [24-25] the interlocutor picks up on the idea of the body swelling and describes the urge to write bad poetry as fermentum (“yeast”) and as a figtree that must “burst the heart and push itself outside.” In the space of seven lines Persius has taken his basic image, the ears, and combined it with metaphors of sexual gratification, eating, disease, cooking, and trees. The passage is a good example of Persius's metaphorical writing. Johnson's strictures on the metaphysical poet Cowley are a relevant, although not altogether just, commentary:

Wit … may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors (“harmonious disharmony”); a combination of dissimilar images. … Of wit, thus defined they (that is, Cowley and those who wrote like him) have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; … the reader …, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.²⁰

Nor is this all: returning to the recitations of bad poets [lines 32-35], the satirist describes the poet as “straining” the words (eliquat: a metaphor from crushing a grape and filtering its juice) and “tripping them up” (subplantat: a metaphor from wrestling) by his affected pronunciation. Later, after the interlocutor has quoted some lines from contemporary poetry, the satirist returns to physiological imagery [lines 103-6]: such bad poetry is emasculated stuff and its authors are eunuchs [103]; it is lame (delumbe, a metaphor from damaged hips); it is like saliva floating on the lips; it is wet. Yet Persius has not lost control of his imagery, for delumbe in line 104 echoes lumbum (“loins”) in line 20, where the loins were the seat of sexual gratification, so that the attentive reader will be struck forcibly by the irony of the metaphor of impotence in lines 103-4. Again, the metaphor of the lips and saliva in 104-5 should be linked to the preliminary “gargle” of the dressed-up reciter in line 17 and the precious affectations of the equally gaudily dressed poet in 35, where it is the mouth that is the context of Persius's metaphors.

Persius's control is proved further by his return, immediately after lines 103-6, to his original metaphor of the ears [107-8], here “scraped” (radere: the metaphor is of a doctor cleaning an infected area of the skin) by the “biting truth” of the satirist. As we have seen, he makes a climax of his imagery of the ears by reference to the donkey's ears of King Midas [lines 119-21], answering the unfinished question of line 8. Finally, at line 126 he recalls the metaphor of cleansed ears, used earlier at line 107-8, in the “well-steamed” ear (auris, the nondiminutive form used now for the only time in this satire) of the listener capable of appreciating Persius's poetry.

At this stage the reader would be well advised to read through the first satire again. The complexity and apparent perversity of Persius's metaphorical writing will now be seen to be controlled by a certain logic, which rests upon a mastery of deliberate poetic techniques. One should remember also that the first satire is also an apologia, a program. Persius is contrasting his style with the smooth and effeminate stuff of his contemporaries: therefore the style of his poem is as essential as the meaning and the two cannot be separated. Its uncompromising idiosyncrasy is deliberate, the product of a master of poetic technique.

There are other occasions where a particular image gives direction to a whole passage. The last part of the third satire is built around the metaphor of disease [3.88-118], where the physical phenomena of disease are metaphors for the unseen passions of gluttony, avarice, lust, fear, and anger. Thus the union of the corporeal with the moral, of the concrete with the abstract, gives a vivid reality to the Stoic paradox “only the wise man is healthy.” In the fifth satire images of the mouth direct the first twenty-nine lines: the os modicum (“moderate mouth,” line 15) of the satirist is contrasted with the hundred mouths of the bombastic epic and tragic poets [lines 1-4]; in lines 5-6 these mouths are stuffed with “robusti carminis offas” (“gobbets of strong verse”); at line 8 the eating of Procne's son and the banquet of Thyestes continue the metaphor of the mouth as a vehicle for something gross, so that the subjects of tragedy become metaphors for the grotesque horror of contemporary writing; at lines 10-13 the metaphor changes to the mouth blowing (that is, expelling air, as opposed to taking in food), with metaphors of bellows, of the hoarse cawing of a crow, and, finally, of children filling their cheeks and suddenly expelling the air with the sound that Persius imitates with the word scloppo [line 13]. Thus successive metaphors for the mouth introduce the satirist's announcement of his own disciplined style [lines 14-18]: once more the mythological banquet of Thyestes appears [lines 16-17], in contrast to the plebeia prandia (“common meals”) of the satirist's conversational style. The mouth and its associated organs are finally used at 25-28, where “the tongue's painted surface” is contrasted with the vox pura (“genuine voice”) of the sincere poet. The satirist concludes [26-29] that only in telling truthfully of his inmost feelings toward his teacher, could he call for the hundred mouths of the other poets.

Certain metaphors appear repeatedly. For example, since Persius adopts the persona of a literary and moral critic, metaphors for measurement and testing are important. At Satire 1.65-66 the metaphor of the carpenter's joint being tested for smoothness is used of the smooth style of contemporary poetry; it is followed by a simile of the artisan checking the straightness of a line with one eye closed. The metaphor of the carpenter correcting the straightness of a line with his rule (regula) is used with approbation at 5.38 of Cornutus straightening the morals of the young Persius. Here Persius neatly transfers to Latin poetry the Greek philosophical metaphor of the canon (that is, “ruler”) as a measure of straightness. Again, at 4.10-13, the regula appears in a moral context, this time in an example where the philosophical student's judgment is correct even when the regula is itself out of the true (that is, as Casaubon explains, when the rule [regula] of justice needs to be tempered by equity). In this passage the regula is one of a series of measuring metaphors for ethical correctness: weighing in the scales [lines 10-11], the regula [lines 11-12], the condemnatory letter theta (line 13, for thanatos, the Greek word for death), used either by jurymen in written notes or placed in military lists before the names of soldiers killed in action.

Weighing in the scales becomes a metaphor for literary judgment at 1.6, and the same word (examen, “a balance”) is used at 5.101 for measuring out drugs. In the latter passage the metaphor of the professional apothecary is used for the properly trained philosopher²¹. At 5.47 the destinies of Cornutus and Persius are equally balanced under the sign of Libra, while in 4.11-12 the political candidate knows how to weigh justice in the scales, and how to tell if a right-angle is true. At 3.82 professors are said to weigh words in the scale, and at 1.86 the smooth defendant “balances” the charges against him in “well-planed” antitheses: here the metaphors of carpentry and weighing are united.

Another repeated metaphor for testing is the potter's vessel. At 3.21-24 the immature and selfish student is described as follows: “The jar sounds cracked when struck; it does not ring true, with green clay not properly fired. You are wet and soft clay, and now, even now, you should hurry to be fashioned on the turning wheel.” Here Persius has expanded the Greek metaphor, used by Plato, of testing the sound of the potter's vessel, and has combined it with Horace's use of the student as clay to be fashioned²². He uses the metaphor of testing the sound of a jar in a moral context at 5.24-25, where, typically, he combines the metaphor with two others—shaking out the folds of a toga (excutienda, line 22)²³, and a painted stucco surface (“pictae tectoria linguae” [“the covering of a painted tongue,” line 25]). As a result Persius is able to expand his original metaphor (the jar) to refer to literary as well as moral perfection. Finally, he returns to the idea of the teacher as creator (in conjunction with the metaphors of the carpenter's rule) at 5.40, where Cornutus fashions the features of Persius's mind under his thumb—here a striking conjunction of the abstract mind with concrete features, the thumb and the clay.

Finally, here are some random examples of single metaphors that illuminate a particular passage and raise it to a higher poetic level. Sometimes the images are proverbial: at 4.23-24 people always look at the knapsack (that is, of moral faults) on the back of the person in front of them, never seeing their own. This is a variation on the fable (told by Phaedrus, 4.10), in which Jupiter gives all human beings two knapsacks, containing their own faults on their backs and their neighbor's in front. There is a proverbial air, too, about the metaphor at 5.92, where Persius will “pluck the old grandmothers from your heart,” that is, remove the prejudices that his listener has learned as a child from the old women in his family²⁴. Even more striking is the fine metaphor at 5.70-72, where the individual is the rear axle of a cart, never able to catch up with the one in front. The image, which may well be Persius's own invention, admirably compresses the ideas of determinism in the individual's destiny, the onward progress of time never to be recaptured, and the inexorable power of the turning wheels of fortune. Other striking images are the dog dragging its broken chain, for the man still partially enslaved to his vices, at 5.159-60; the relay-race, for the heir succeeding his predecessor, at 6.61; the roses blossoming (in the old woman's prayer) wherever her child walks, at 2.38; the rara avis (“rare bird”) for an impossibility, at 1.46²⁵; the gambler's fingers, gnarled like an old beech-tree at 5.59.

METER AND DICTION

In order to convey a personal style of satire Persius needed to develop the satiric hexameter beyond the conversational usage of Horace. The hexameter is above all the meter of epic, and it was one of the achievements of Lucilius that he adapted its noble dignity to the less lofty style of satire. Horace explains the difference between the two styles of hexameter in the fourth satire of his first book [lines 39-62]. Discussing the conversational styles of Lucilius and himself, he disclaims the title of “poetry” for their verse, on the grounds that except for meter it has nothing in common with the inspiration and grandeur of true poetry. If, he concludes, you take away the meter and jumble up the word-order, you would not have poetry left, whereas lines of Ennius, however butchered, would always show “disiecti membra poetae” (“the limbs of the dismembered poet”). Horace's disclaimer, of course, is part of his satiric persona, and in fact he was a very polished versifier. But he established the appropriately informal usage of the hexameter for satire, and Persius in his prologue accepted the same principles, particularly that the satirist does not claim the inspiration of the Muses or the lofty dignity of the epic poet. Therefore he avoids epic diction and Vergilian rhythms except in passages where he is parodying epic. On the other hand, he goes beyond the Horatian practice in his greater use of dactylic rhythms and his avoidance of elision. It has been shown statistically that his hexameters are closer to the usage of Ovid than to that of Vergil and Horace²⁶. The only spondaic ending (that is — / — in the fifth and sixth feet) is at 1.95, which comes in a passage of epic parody. Although he deplores the smooth style of his contemporaries, he avoids elision (which tends to interrupt the smooth flow of the hexameter), in the manner of Ovid, to a far greater extent than Horace. While he is more dactylic than Horace and Juvenal, he shows less metrical variety than both—for example fewer rhythmic patterns in any given passage, more repeated patterns and more lines in which word stress and metrical stress come together in the fourth foot. The difference from Horace can in part be accounted for by the enormous influence of Ovid, whose Metamorphoses (8 a.d.) appeared sixteen years after the death of Horace and nearly forty years after the completion of Horace's Satires, in part by the poetic conventions of the Neronian age. In sum, we can say that Persius developed a hexameter both vigorous and dignified, appropriate to the goals of his own satire yet in keeping with the conventions established by Horace. It achieves the strength and unity that Persius praised in Satire 1.92-106.

Like Horace Persius has a mastery of diction. He can parody epic; he can write dialogue or conversational sermo; he has passages of near-lyric beauty (for example, 1.39-40; 2.38; 5.41-44), which may, as in the case of the first two of these examples, be punctured immediately by a scornful return to the satiric mode. He offers passages of frank obscenity (for example, 1.87, 4.35-41, and 6.71-3) as well as passages of moral doctrine and literary criticism enlivened by gnomic or epigrammatic utterances (for example, the “one-liners” at 1.13, 1.6-7, 4.42, and 5.52). His comparative lack of metrical variety is amply compensated for by flexibility of style and by skilled and exact use of vocabulary and metaphor.

IRONY AND THE SATIRIST'S PERSONA

Persius's use of irony is neither so frequent nor so subtle as Horace's. In satire the essence of ironic technique is a persona that engages the listener yet gently deceives him, usually into siding unawares with the object of the satirist's attack, so that the satirist can say finally (as Horace did, Satire 1.1.69-70) “de te fabula narratur” (“You are the subject of my tale”). It is found most extensively in the sixth satire, where the satirist unexpectedly attacks frugality and supports the expenditure in moderation of one's goods on present pleasures. Since this is the most relaxed and urbane of the six satires, it is the most Horatian in tone. There is also a certain amount of irony in the third satire, where the satirist plays the part of the doctor and the listener cannot be too sure whether to identify with the satirist or with his patient. This is especially so in lines 107-18, where it is revealed that the listener, however objective he may claim to be, will have a hard time in denying that he too is liable to the passions criticized by the satirist.

In general, however, Persius's satiric persona is not as subtle and varied as that of Horace. On the other hand, it is a mistake to conclude from the persona that Persius was merely an immature young man of limited experience, gleaned mostly from books. The known facts of his life and his friendships disprove this facile estimate, as also does a critical reading of his poems. For the most part he comes on stage as a serious student of philosophy, certain of his Stoic principles, standing apart from the debased moral and literary criteria of his contemporaries, and speaking only to a select audience. He claims to attack without fear and appeals to the example of Lucilius in defense of his social criticism, while invoking also the less indirect methods of Horace [Satire 1.114-18]. For most of the first five satires his persona is fairly constant and generally predictable. What is surprising is the limited range of his Stoic doctrine. He lectures on fairly standard themes: prayer, avoidance of the passions, self-knowledge, true freedom achieved through correct moral philosophy. In the first satire, which in many ways is the most original, he steps outside this narrow circle to deliver a brilliant critique of contemporary literary standards, and in the sixth he uses the persona of a genial friend to lead into the Epicurean disquisition on the proper use of one's wealth. Only in the first part of the fifth satire is the mask dropped to reveal the student and friend of Cornutus.

CONCLUSION

It remains to form a general assessment of Persius's style. He has generally been found obscure, and the great majority of critics have dismissed him as a poet who was too immature to be able to master poetic techniques. The metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley (himself one of the more obscure English poets) epitomizes this school of criticism: “Persius who you use to say, you do not know whether he be a good poet or no, because you cannot understand him, and who therefore [I say] I know to be not a good poet”²⁷.

Few would now adopt so simplistic an approach to poetry. Closer to the truth is Goethe's statement: “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing.” We should allow, at least, that any poet worth the name makes intellectual demands upon the reader. There may be a concatenation of associations, images, symbols, or other indirect means of communication with the reader, and this fact is bound to lead to a measure of obscurity. In any case, the poet who deserves to be taken seriously is one who, first, is saying something worth communicating and, second, is in control of poetic techniques. As Ruskin put it: “The right of being obscure is not to be lightly claimed, it can only be founded on long effort to be intelligible.” Unless one pedantically insists on the long effort (for Persius died young), Persius can justly claim this right. We have seen his precision in the choice words and images, and one need only read the first satire and the first part of the fifth to be assured that his obscurity is that of a master, not that of an immature apprentice.

A well-known passage from Ezra Pound's How to Read is helpful toward understanding the reasons for the difficulty of Persius²⁸. He attempts to define the ways in which language is “charged or energized,” and he distinguishes three “kinds of poetry”:

Melopoeia, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.

Phanopoeia, which is the casting of images upon the visual imagination.

Logopoeia, “the dance of the intellect among words,” that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the words, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music.

It is obvious that the latter two “kinds of poetry” are especially relevant to the techniques of Persius, and it is not surprising to find that he, more than any other Latin poet, has suffered from the same uncomprehending criticism as many “obscure” modern poets. The reason for this is in part explained by Pound in the next passage after the one quoted above. “Phanopoeia,” he says, “can … be translated almost … intact. When it is good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it save by very crass bungling. … Logopoeia does not translate; through the attitude of mind it expresses may pass through a paraphrase.”

A poet who, like Persius, relies heavily on the accurate use of words and metaphors is going to be at a disadvantage with readers from other cultures and languages than his own. Persius did not, admittedly, help his own cause by his desire to appeal only to an elite audience. Pound again has the appropriate phrase, in discussing the French satirist Laforgue: “he writes not the popular language of any country, but an international tongue common to the excessively cultivated”²⁹.

Casaubon may have overstated the case for the superiority of Persius's moral doctrines, but he was closer to the truth than Dryden, who sneered that “his verse is scabrous and hobbling, and his words not everywhere well chosen”³⁰. In Dryden's view “the purity of Latin” was more corrupted in Persius's time than in that of Horace or even of Juvenal. Such criticism is circular: to set up a criterion of perfection (such as Augustan poetry) and then to shoot down those who wrote differently and in different times is to make a valid statement about taste but not a valid criticism of style. Dryden may be right to say (as he does) that Persius “cannot be allowed to stand in competition, either with Juvenal or Horace,” an estimate that the vast majority of readers would agree with, but Persius's achievement in creating a unique style is undeniable. It is less gracious than the urbane satire of Horace, less powerful than the indignation of Juvenal. But at the very least it was a new stage in the development of Roman satire beyond Horace, and it prepared the way for Juvenal. Therefore Persius cannot be overlooked in the history of European satire, and his poetry justifiably asks of its readers the intellectual effort that any difficult literature requires. It is worth the effort to become one of the few for whom Persius was writing.

Notes

1. John Dryden, A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) in John Dryden: Selected Criticism, ed. J. Kinsley and G. Parfitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 247. References in this chapter and chapter 7 are taken from this work. The Discourse is on pp. 208-78: pp. 245-53 and 261-62 for Persius. The magisterial and persuasive prose of Dryden should be tempered, however, by a critical approach; see the excellent remarks of N. Rudd. The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 258-73.

2. In “Studies in Persius,” Hermes 90 (1962):483.

3. Horace, Carmina. 3.1.37-40.

4. J. P. Sullivan, “In defence of Persius,” Ramus 1 (1972):48-62; see p. 57 for quotation.

5. Of the 701 multiple occurrences, 238 occur only twice. Thus only 463 words (23.8 percent) occur three or more times. The figures are based on the tables in P. Bouet and others, Konokordanz zu den Satiren des Persius Flaccus (Hildesheim, 1978).

6. The solemn imperative form -nto is used by Horace in a similar parody, Satire 2.1.8-9.

7. A useful and easily accessible selection is listed in the preface to D. Bo's Lexicon, p. viii. For nonpoetic vocabulary in general a standard work is B. Axelson, Unpoetische Wörter (Lund: Gleerup, 1945), especially chap. 3, pp. 46-97. See also V. Gerard, “Le latin vulgaire et le langage familier dans les satires de Perse,” Le Musée Belge 1 (1897):81-103.

8. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 16.7

9. Persius uses an intensive form vegrandis (“ultralarge”) at 1.97, whose only other occurrence in poetry is in Lucilius, fr. 705 W. Cicero uses the word once, De Lege Agraria 2.34.93: cf. Horace's vepallida (“ultrapale”) at Satire 1.2.129, where the reading is doubtful. Harvey, A Commentary on Persius, and J. R. Jenkinson, Persius: the Satires (Warminster, England 1980), notes to 1.97, prefer “stunted” (that is, vegrandis = “undersized”), and are supported by the Oxford Latin Dictionary (s.v. vegrandis) and by Warmington, note to Lucilius, fr. 705 W. Another intensive compound is praegrandis, used by Persius at Satire 1.124.

10. Plautus, Mercator 416. See the Oxford Latin Dictionary for primary meanings.

11. The idea of the purified ear of the good philosophical disciple is repeated in the fifth satire, lines 63 and 86. Compare Lucilius, fr. 690 W.

12. Pellis (“skin”) is used at 4.14, and its diminutive, pellicula at 5.116. It was used by Horace (also with reference to sunbathing) in Satire 2.5.38. Juvenal imitates Persius's word cuticula in Satire 11.203, again with reference to sunburn but without pejorative connotations.

13. Aristophanes, Equites 726 and 1199.

14. Aqualiculus is technically the lower stomach and is so used by Seneca, Epistle 90.22. According to the seventh century writer, Isidore, the word properly referred to a pig's belly (Origines 11.1).

15. Horace, Ars Poetica 47-48: “dixeris egregie notum si callida verbum / reddiderit iunctura novum” (“you will have spoken with distinction if a cunning juxtaposition makes a common word fresh”).

16. Cicero, De Oratore 3.160.

17. Horace, Satire 1.4.96-100.

18. “Soft” poetry (tenerum) at 1.98; “soft” mouths or ears at 1.35 and 107. The synonym mollis is used of contemporary metrical usage at 1.63.

19. Seneca, Epistle 114.15.

20. S. Johnson, Life of Cowley, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. A. Waugh (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) 1:14.

21. The best-known use of examen is in Vergil's picture of Jupiter holding the scales of Destiny in the Aeneid, 12.725. Persius must have had the epic model in mind as he used the word ironically in Satire 1.6.

22. Plato, Theaetetus 179d; Horace, Epistle 2.2.8.

23. Persius uses excutere eight times, making it one of his commonest verbs. It is used metaphorically of moral or literary criticism at 1.49 and 118 as well as here.

24. This is the obvious interpretation. Casaubon prefers to see the grandmothers as metaphors for pride in one's ancestry (a notorious fault of Roman nobles and attacked by Persius in the fourth satire). Rudd sees a pun on the word avia (a kind of weed) and translates “those weedy old misconceptions.” Both interpretations are too forced to be likely.

25. Juvenal, among others, imitated this phrase, Satire 6.165. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes the phrase to Juvenal. Horace had used it of the peacock, in a nonmetaphorical sense, at Satire 2.2.26.

26. G. E. Duckworth, “Five Centuries of Latin Hexameter Poetry: Silver Age and Late Empire,” T.A.P.A. [Transactions and Proceedings. American Philological Association] 98 (1967):77-150 (pp. 109-15 for Persius, with the table on p. 146).

27. Abraham Cowley, “The Dangers of Procrastination,” in Essays in Verse and Prose, ed. J. R. Lumby and A. Tilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 105. Cowley goes on to quote, as an “odd expression … full of Fancy,” Satire 5.68-69. The quotation from Cowley is the epigraph of the excellent discussion of poetic obscurity by John Press, The Chequer'd Shade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), who also quotes the passages by Goethe and Ruskin (p. 106).

28. Ezra Pound, “How to Read,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), p. 25. Pound's terminology is made up of the Greek roots -poeia (“making”); melo- (“music” or “song”); phano- (“appearance” or “image”); logo- (“word”).

29. Ezra Pound, “Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire,” in Literary Essays, p. 283.

30. Dryden, Discourse p. 247. The whole passage (pp. 247-53) still deserves careful attention.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Texts

A. Persi Flacci Saturarum Liber. Edited by W. V. Clausen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Includes preface in English with discussion of the manuscript tradition.

A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis Saturae. Edited by W. V. Clausen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. The standard modern edition in the Oxford Classical Text series, with Latin preface.

A. Persii Flacci Saturarum Liber; cum Scholiis Antiquis. Edited by O. Jahn. 1843. Reprint. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967. The only available collection of the scholia: revised in the Teubner editions of F. Buecheler (1893) and F. Leo (1910). See W. V. Clausen's criticisms, p. xiv of his 1956 edition and p. viii of his 1959 edition, for the unsatisfactory nature of Jahn's collection.

Editions and Commentaries

Bo, D. A. Persii Flacci Saturarum Liber. Turin: Paravia, 1969. Latin preface and commentary with a good bibliography. The most useful modern edition.

Casaubon, I. A. Persii Flacci Satirarum Liber. 3d ed. Revised and enlarged by Meric Casaubon. London: Flesher, 1647. First published in Paris, 1605. The edition of 1695 was edited and reissued by F. Duebner (Leipzig: Lehnhold, 1833) and later reprinted (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1972). Casaubon's introduction and Latin commentary are the foundation upon which all subsequent commentaries rest. His edition also contains an important comparison of Persius and Horace.

Harvey, R. A. A Commentary on Persius. Mnemosyne, supp. 64. Leiden: Brill, 1981. Full and detailed commentary (without text), which will become the standard English commentary. Generally balanced in its judgments, it discusses the difficult passages clearly and helpfully. Shows more discrimination than its fullest predecessors, Villeneuve and Beikircher (satire 6 only). Good references for sources and parallels. The general introduction is too brief to be helpful.

Translations

Dryden, J. In The Poems of John Dryden. Edited by J. Sargeaunt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910. Often reprinted. Heroic couplets, whose formality is too confining for Persius's style. Although it suffers in comparison to Dryden's translation of Juvenal (whom he found far more congenial) this is still the best verse translation and it set the standard for English translations for two centuries.

Jenkinson, J. R. (see under editions and commentaries). A more modern prose translation than that of Conington, but equally lacking in literary qualities.

Rudd, N. The Satires of Horace and Persius. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. A six-beat blank-verse version by one of the foremost modern scholars in Latin satire. Readable and accurate, with an excellent introduction. The best for readers being introduced to Persius.

Concordances

Bo, D. Auli Persii Flacci Lexicon. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967. Much more useful than the Index Verborum of L. Berkowitz and T. F. Brunner (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967). Lists words with references and Latin definitions, including variant manuscript readings. An indispensable aid to study of Persius.

Bouet, P., Callebat, L., Fleury, P., and Zuinghedau, M. Konkordanz zu den Satiren des Persius Flaccus. Hildesheim: Olms, 1978. Lists words alphabetically with context: contains frequency-counts under grammatical categories of words. Good bibliography. For the standard German bibliographies see p. 9.

Secondary Sources

Books

Rudd, N. The Satires of Horace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. The best book on Horace's satires, containing much that is applicable to satire in general. An appendix has an important essay on Dryden's Discourse which does much to set the record straight after centuries of domination by the views of Dryden.

Warmington, B. H. Nero: Reality and Legend. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969. A good assessment of the age of Nero with a commonsense approach to the problem of separating legend from fact.

Articles

Duckworth, G. E. “Five Centuries of Latin Hexameter Poetry: Silver Age and Late Empire,” T.A.P.A. 98 (1967):77-150. Pages 109-15 for Persius, with tables on p. 146. Gives statistical comparisons of the metrical practices of the satirists.

Gerard, V. “Le latin vulgaire et le langage familier dans les satires de Perse.” Le Musée Belge 1 (1897):81-103. The only adequate treatment of Persius's use of Vulgar Latin: examines vocabulary, syntax, usage, and metaphors derived from common speech and actions.

Reckford, K. J. “Studies in Persius.” Hermes 90 (1962):476-504. Discusses aspects of Persius's use of imagery; his Stoicism; the choliambics. Written with discernment, this article is very informative about Persius's poetic techniques in general, beyond the few passages examined in detail.

Sullivan, J. P. “In Defence of Persius.” Ramus 1 (1972):48-62. A stimulating introduction to Persius with a valuable review of attitudes toward Persius, including those of Casaubon, Dryden, and Donne, and with a fair assessment of some modern scholarship.