SOURCE: Knoche, Ulrich. “Aules Persius Flaccus.” In Roman Satire, translated by Edwin S. Ramage, pp. 127-39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

[In the following essay, Knoche discusses Persius's life, surveys his satires, and analyzes his style.]

Aules Persius Flaccus was born on December 4, 34 after Christ at Volaterrae (modern Volterra) in the northwest part of Etruria. He was the son of respected and very wealthy parents of equestrian rank. The family, which clearly made much of the Etruscan tradition in its history, was related directly and by marriage to the Roman aristocracy. When he was about six years old, Persius lost his father, and soon after this his mother, Fulvia Sisennia, was remarried to a Roman knight whose name was Fusius. But she lost him too a few years later.

Persius received his first instruction in his hometown until he was about twelve years old and then he was sent to Rome where two leading men were selected as his teachers—the eminent grammarian, Remmius Palaemon, who is also known to have been Quintilian's teacher and whose very human habits were certainly the subject of lively and outspoken controversy, and the rhetorician, Verginius Flavus, whom Quintilian also quotes several times in his handbook of rhetoric as an authority in his field. Persius' first efforts at poetry fall in this early period. While still a boy he attempted a praetexta, that is a Roman tragedy, the title of which is indeed lost (perhaps Vescia or Decius). Besides this he had written a poem in one book, perhaps a travel book, and finally a few verses on the elder Arria. All of these youthful pieces were destroyed at the poet's death by his mother on the advice of Lucius Annaeus Cornutus.

Cornutus was a native of north Africa and perhaps a freedman of Annaeus Mela, the father of the poet Lucan. Persius came to know him at the age of sixteen, and Cornutus exerted a profound influence on the course of the young poet's life. In their daily association he filled the youth with an enthusiasm for the Stoic reform of life, and Persius himself, deeply moved by the intense experience, has briefly described it (5.41-51). A short work written by Cornutus in Greek on the allegorical meaning of the old myths of the gods has been preserved and provides just a faint glimmer of this important personality. A circle of students and friends with the same interests gathered around the philosopher, who apparently represented a considerable intellectual power in Rome, for about the year 65 he had to go into exile at the order of Nero.

In this exclusive circle of discriminating men devoted to matters of the intellect, friendships were struck without any regard for rank or origin. Here Persius became acquainted with the young poet Lucan who died early, but he also came to know Claudius Agaturrinus—the conjecture Agathinus seems doubtful—a doctor from Sparta, and Petronius Aristocrates from Magnesia, both of whom were mature men who undertook to live a practical life according to the Stoic ideal. Ties ran from Cornutus to the circle of Caesius Bassus, poet and theorist, who at that time would have been almost sixty years old and who took care of Persius as a fatherly friend. There the young poet may also have become acquainted with Calpurnius Statura who is otherwise unknown. He did not get to know Seneca until later, but no close connection resulted mainly because Persius could not reconcile himself to Seneca's manner.

His formative years show Persius occupied with the subjects he preferred—rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry. There is no indication in the sources that he prepared himself in any way for a government position or one of the other recognized occupations in Rome. As far as material things went, he was completely independent and lived for his self-education alone. This view is confirmed by the information that at his death he had a library of no fewer than 700 volumes. He left these to his friend and teacher, Cornutus, along with a bequest which the latter naturally refused.

Undoubtedly Persius also associated freely with the aristocracy in Rome, as was only natural because of his family background, but even here only men with a distinctly intellectual profile are named. For ten years, probably between 52 and 62 after Christ, he was a frequent visitor at the house of Thrasea Paetus, the husband of the younger Arria who was related to Persius. Paetus was the author of a eulogy on Cato and a leader of the Stoic-republican opposition against Nero. Persius is also said to have become attached to the historian Servilius Nonianus, who died in 59 after Christ, as to a father. Our poet addressed his second satire to a friend of this house, Plotius Macrinus. Persius clearly fostered these human relationships with great devotion, and in the same way, his pietas (dutifulness) toward his family, that is, his mother, sister, and aunt, is also praised in the vita. Besides this we hear about his pleasant appearance, his great gentleness, his almost girlish shyness, and his blameless reputation.

He probably spent most of his life in Rome, but there is mention of occasional trips, of stays on his estates, as at Luna¹ and in a villa at the eighth milestone of the Appian Way where he died from a stomach complaint on November 24, 62, in his twenty-eighth year.

Cornutus was given the job of settling the poet's literary estate. He had Persius' youthful attempts at poetry destroyed and what remained was the small volume of satires which has been preserved for us, and which his reading of Lucilius is said to have spurred him to write. But even this small book was not complete, for Cornutus removed a few verses from the end in order to provide the poems with a definite conclusion, and he undertook several slight alterations within the book as well. It remains uncertain whether these changes include the famous passage (1.121) where Cornutus is said to have replaced the original version, auriculas asini Mida rex habet (“King Midas has the ears of a jackass.”), with the more harmless wording auriculas asini quis non habet (“Who does not have the ears of a jackass?”), so that Nero would not take it to heart. In any case, it is not probable that Persius here or elsewhere in his satires intended to give expression to feelings of antipathy toward Nero, though they certainly may have existed.

Whether the little book contains indications of incompleteness that can still be identified today is a matter of dispute. Self-quotations might be counted among these,² while well-known scholars point to the author's doublets in our Persius text.³ In the same way attempts have been made to apply the hypothesis of incompleteness to such difficult lines as Satire 6.37-41. Further investigations are necessary on this point. The edition of the six satires that Cornutus had revised was then published by Caesius Bassus, certainly before Nero's death in 68, probably before Lucan and Petronius died, and before Cornutus was sent into exile. They perhaps appeared as early as 63 after Christ.

Attached to the six satires of Persius which comprise 650 hexameters is a series of fourteen verses in limping iambics. In the great majority of the manuscripts these appear as a prologue, while in some they are an epilogue. Here Persius presents himself not without a certain irony and along with learned allusions to literature as a simple half-farmer in the realm of poetry. Just as hunger teaches certain birds human speech, he says, so it is the primary motivation for so many poets and poetesses. It should not be doubted that these verses are genuine. But it is less certain whether the little poem is a unit or whether it is put together from two fragments (lines 1-7 and 8-14), whether it is complete or truncated, whether it is a separate composition or whether it stands in some relationship to the satire collection and, if so, what the connection is. The most likely suggestion is that the series of verses is to be taken as a prologue to the satires which is not mutilated at the end, since the last line seems to parallel and echo the first.⁴ W. Kroll explains the lines more cautiously as being rough copy of Persius which Cornutus took as an appropriate introduction to the book.

The first satire presents Persius' justification of his satiric poetry on the basis of Lucilius, Horace, and old comedy with its frankness. In other words, he refers to the specific technical character of Roman satire that had been generally recognized since Horace's time. Modern poetry, which, weakened and corrupted by dilettantes, had degenerated to a mere jangle of words, is rejected, though it is less a matter of the decadence of literature than it is the vanity of the writers and their nullity that have caused this. In contrast to this, Persius' satire aims at being a form of confession and so something genuine. The poet will speak the truth with bite, for he considers human folly as being a subject for laughter, and from the blending of his enthusiasm for the subject with his earnest attention to art, something meaningful for the future should emerge. The poet wants only serious and competent people as his audience, completely certain as he is of his enduring fame. From among his contemporaries two readers or even none at all will satisfy him, he insists in a variation of a very old formula and one taken up again by the Stoics especially.

The first satire presents the poet immediately as a resolute moralist of Stoic fiber with highly capricious ideals of poetry and style. The poem offers in passing very lively glimpses into the literary life of the Neronian period. In this respect it comes closest in character to Horatian satire and even closer to that of Juvenal.

The remaining satires are much more sharply separated from life with its fresh and pulsating activity. The basis throughout is an experience derived from formal education, that is, the Stoic moral philosophy with its popular stamp. These five satires reveal far more than the first one does of the poet's nature that is turned away from life and from the world, and they show that he lacks the plasticity that could prove itself by establishing something solid and separate. The poet is doctrinaire; he is seldom an observer. Horace's ease and agility and his humor are completely lacking in Persius.

Right away in his second satire Persius deals with a theme that was a favorite of the Stoic diatribe. It is one that recurs often in Seneca, for example, and it was treated very extensively by Juvenal later:⁵ the immorality, contradictions, and folly of human wishes as they appear especially in prayers and in the conceptions of the gods that underlie these.

The third satire begins with the lively picture of a late-sleeper who cannot make up his mind to get out of bed. This is used by Persius to introduce his discussion of the human weakness—especially of the educated man—of fully recognizing what is right but doing just the opposite because it is so pleasant. This divergence between knowing and doing had become an important problem, especially for the Late Stoa, in contrast to the Socratic-Platonic teaching that right action follows naturally and spontaneously from correct knowledge. Woven into the satire is an appeal that people not live their lives without a fixed plan but allow themselves to be put on the right track by Stoic ethics, even if the philistines laugh at this. Actually, then, this is a προτρεπτικὸs πρὸs φιλοσοφίαν (persuasion to philosophy). The sick man who behaves contrary to his doctor's orders necessarily dies, and human impulse and emotion are also sicknesses. The unity of this difficult satire is a matter for debate.

The fourth satire is brief and is put together much more clearly; it deals with knowing oneself. Beginning with a charming scene in which Socrates admonishes Alcibiades, Persius comes to the consideration of the general unwillingness of men “to get down into themselves.” Instead of doing this, they would rather criticize others' faults. It ends with the imperative that men struggle through to self-knowledge, personal conviction, and purity without depending on people's opinions.

Next to the first satire, the fifth is the most suitable one for introducing the reader to Persius' poetry. It begins with a dedication to Cornutus which is the most personal statement we have from Persius. This is followed by descriptions of the different wishes and aspirations of men with a contrast drawn between these people and Cornutus who has a firm and philosophic manner of living. The rather lengthy conclusion brings a discussion of man's freedom and of curbing one's desires, once again from the Stoic point of view.

The sixth satire begins in a similarly personal way with its address to Persius' older friend, Caesius Bassus, but the poet soon turns to the general question of the right attitude to wealth and the correct use of possessions. There is a debate as to whether the editor shortened this poem or whether it is complete as it stands. The chronological sequence of the individual poems cannot be established with certainty, for there is a lack both of external testimony and clear references to dated events within the satires, as fits their general nature.

Persius belongs among the most difficult writers of pagan Roman literature, and certainly reading him can give the modern reader no real satisfaction and pleasure. Theodor Mommsen even called him “an ideal example of an arrogant and spiritless young man wrapped up in poetry.”⁶ Generally speaking, it is possible to find a relaxation of the power of composition among the writers of so-called silver Latin as compared with the classical writers, and there is also a conscious turning away from the media of composition used earlier. On the other hand, individuality is developed with great care and remarkable ability. This goes for Persius, too, and in his case there is the added consideration that, as a satirist who wanted to create free conversation in the image of the popular lecture and in very close dependence on Horace, he was dominated by his determination either to conceal his plan of composition in the particular case or to give it up completely. Certainly in the fourth satire he succeeded in working out a clear, tripartite structure. But right next to this he puts a creation like the third satire which organizationally is very obscure and to which scholars like G. Hendrickson have taken exception, and with good reason.⁷

Deficiencies in composition appear everywhere in matters of detail: abrupt transitions, unclear assignment of speakers in the dialogue sections, and more of the like. How far ability or purpose or both are responsible in Persius' case for the obscure organization and the inclination to ramble remains to be decided. On the other hand, Persius' satires do also present many a happy individual scene and many a successful picture. Ancient artistic theory makes Sophron and his influence responsible for that,⁸ and, besides everything else, the mime undoubtedly exerted an occasional influence on Persius' presentation.

The difficulties with Persius' language in the narrower sense can, however, be completely overcome. The poems are, of course, full of colloquialisms, as the satiric style demands, as well as abbreviated expressions, vulgar phrases and words, expressions currently in vogue, metaphors from popular speech, and much more. On the other hand, there are quite a number of archaisms which should perhaps serve as a reminder that Lucilius was one of his models. Like these, the often vague hints at data from the ancient workaday world or at specific conditions of education, all of which are lost to us today, cannot be taken as representing real difficulties.

On the other hand, the style of Persius is extremely difficult and intentionally so. It is reported that scriptitavit et raro et tarde (“He wrote infrequently and slowly.”),⁹ and still today we can easily feel the pretentious obscurity of expression, the phrase that he wants to convey appearing in an affected form, the persistent, rationally anchored, often hypersophisticated aversion to the natural way of expressing something, the passion for putting the simple in new and unusual terms and preferably expressing it in as obscure a manner possible. Persius turns to a pampered public who take delight in advice in riddles, and I have no doubt that definite theories of style guided him in this. To indicate the direction, the ancients themselves used to mention him in the same breath with Lycophron,¹⁰ and Persius apparently considered the obscurity and sparseness of expression as itself being the language of masculine bitterness which alone is suitable for the Stoic censor.

The tendency toward pointed brevity and startling originality is characteristic of Persius' style and reveals itself especially in his skill at creating new iuncturae (rhetorical combinations) and here in turn most clearly in his treatment of epithets and metaphors.¹¹ Kugler has stressed the fact, and rightly so, that Persius has basically tried to enliven his metaphorical expression in a new and thrilling way by “concretization.” With this he stands in the rhetorical tradition which the elder Seneca makes especially clear to us with numerous examples. And so the poet frequently appears as a declaimer who again and again challenges the understanding of his listener and keeps him constantly in suspense with his puzzling, affected, and paradoxical way of putting things—completely different in style from a homo antiquus (a man of the old stamp). For the poet, this results in his not only wanting to twist incidental phrases again and again for the startling effect, but also in his frequently using several metaphors at the same time. Here the result is pictures that overlap with each other and are in conflict, and the unity of expression, thought, and picture is disrupted. A twisting of the ordinary turn of phrase venit tibi in mentem ([whatever] occurs to you) to venit tibi in penem (Sat. 4.48: “[whatever] occurs to your penis”) is original and successful, but a crossing of pictures that are very different from one another as it is found in other passages militates against good taste.¹² Persius' poems are just as far removed from Horace's grace as they are from Juvenal's dazzling vehemence. And there is no depth of conception or concretization of the imagination that can hide the great defects in the formal structure on which their originator worked so diligently.

Persius' versification also shows a high level of artistic skill and an obvious reaching for style. This can be illustrated briefly in a few examples. His model is the satiric verse of Horace. In Persius' poetry too each hexameter is divided by caesura—Jahn's conjecture at Satires 5.19 is for this reason not probable—and Persius shows a decided preference for the male or penthemimeral caesura, going beyond Horace in this respect. The verses which are put together in this way are usually divided by a secondary caesura as well, for the most part after the fourth long syllable or before the fifth longum, and less often also by one after the fourth trochee. The caesura in the third foot is missing in only thirty-four verses, and here the appropriate places are bridged by a heavy word that begins in the fourth longum at least and comes to an end only in the fifth foot of the verse. In five cases the word begins with a long first syllable immediately after the penthemimeral. The verses divided by trithemimeral and hephthemimeral caesuras are far fewer in number, and this concurs with the practice of the contemporary epic poets. There are only four certain examples of the feminine caesura after the third trochee, and each of these verses also has a secondary caesura. According to ancient theory the feminine caesura was considered to be weak, and this is clearly the case with Persius. In the same way the satirist seems to have considered the versus spondiacus (spondaic line) as feeble. There is only a single example, and this is in a verse of a contemporary poet whom Persius quotes as decadent (Sat. [Satires] 1.95).

The poet was fully aware of the rules for the close of the narrative and elegiac hexameter which were set up by the classic poets, refined by Ovid, and very strictly observed by Lucan, among others. But as a satirist Persius adhered to the norm of the Horatian hexameter. And so he did not hesitate to end his line with words of four or even five syllables which no longer were proper names. On the other hand, real monosyllables—among which I am not even counting close word combinations such as hic est, si quid, de me, in re, and so on—were acceptable at the end of the line for him, just as they were for Horace, and this was true when they followed immediately after both monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. Finally, Horace's satiric verse provides the precedent for Persius' ending a hexameter with a word which joins this line very closely with the next one—a relative pronoun, for example (Sat. 1.81), or a conjunction (Sat. 3.109). This is important for the delivery of the verse, for the end of the line is meant to strike the ear differently from epic verse where the verse ending is stressed by a pause. In this too, then, there is an imitatio sermonis (imitation of conversation). All of these characteristics of the satiric hexameter appear again in much the same way later in Juvenal which is an indication that all of this was taught by rules in antiquity. As with his meter, Persius' prosody is very precise and faultless. The only hiatus that has been transmitted, for example, may be explained away (Sat. 3.66). Elisions are also managed carefully.

Persius himself indicates the literary place of his satire by referring to Lucilius whose influence on him was relatively insignificant and to Horace whom Persius imitates everywhere. But in content and way of thinking Persius is perhaps even more in the sequence of Phoenix-Musonius-Epictetus. He no longer sees in satire the topical “battle writing,” but a recognized literary form. His further reference to the old Attic comedy seems to be more a matter of convention than anything else, for he avoided taking a position on topical, especially political, questions of life in Rome to an even greater extent than Horace had. And he also kept completely away from making personal attacks on his contemporaries. In the time of Nero it was hardly possible to do otherwise. The anonymous lampoon had become the safety-valve of satire, with preference given to that in epigrammatic form. With very few exceptions personal themes are completely absent from Persius' satires. The range of his subject matter is on the whole much narrower than that of his predecessors. In a certain sense it is even narrower than that of Juvenal who, because of his powerful attacks on Roman life, became one of the most important sources of all for the history of Roman culture and customs. Instead of this, Persius' satire aims at the universal, closely connected as it is with the Stoic diatribe. It is the folly of man in the general sense that is its concern. On the other hand, the personal point of view of the poet remains firmly fixed. It is that of the Stoic, but there is still a job to be done of showing to what particular tendency of the Stoic school Persius chiefly adhered. Of course, we must be careful not to try to find in Persius an independent philosophical nature. But it was precisely the simplicity of his moral beliefs about life working chiefly on the unphilosophical reader that made him ideally suited to become the progenitor of moralizing poetic satire. Through him too its basically serious tone was fixed for his successors in the genre.

The certainty and strictness of his moral principles, his sincerity of purpose, his constancy and firmness in his battle against vice, superficiality, and inconsistency, the earnest forcefulness of his judgment, and certainly the intricate, difficult, and unique way in which he expressed himself have produced admirers of Persius at widely different times. Right after its appearance the little volume of satires was received with a veritable storm of enthusiasm, and Lucan seems to have been one of its most outspoken eulogists. From the generation immediately following comes the high praise of Quintilian¹³ and Martial.¹⁴ Juvenal, Rome's last great satirist, also read Persius carefully.

Besides this intense interest in the satires of Persius on the part of the reading public, the linguistic care and control that they attracted is to be noted. The eminent grammarian Marcus Valerius Probus probably put together a scholarly edition of the text in the Flavian era which was in full accord with the state of philological knowledge at that time. The text was in all likelihood provided with critical marks according to the Hellenistic pattern to help with oral exegesis. Moreover, the main part of the first-rate life of Persius that has been preserved seems to have had Probus as its author.¹⁵ But it is not likely that Probus himself also produced and published a critical and exegetical commentary of this abstruse poet. Certainly he would have offered oral explication of Persius, and, as I see it, his successors used his explanations and his notes for further interpretation of the text.

It is almost certain, moreover, that Persius' little book was also read and discussed in the schools in the second and third centuries after Christ—by the learned Helenius Acron, for example¹⁶—and it was probably in this period that the matrix of the old commentaries first took shape. It is possible that the allusion of Jerome involves this corpus.¹⁷ This commentary was then surely abbreviated and lengthened over and over again as a school textbook, so that what we have in the so-called older Persius scholia represents the results of work with the author extending over a number of centuries. In these, then, along with the remains of first-rate scholarship and conscientious and accurate philological research, there is also a certain amount of sheer drivel. With the exception of several additions, this final editing probably appeared about 400 after Christ. But, as has already been mentioned, Persius was read and worked on well before this without any interruption, and there can be no doubt that a whole series of old variant readings goes back to that early period.

It can be shown that Persius was read in many parts of the Latin-speaking world at the end of antiquity. He was even known in the Greek-speaking East. And so it follows that the number of Persius manuscripts must have been very great. Many of these old texts were undoubtedly also provided with explanations of words (glosses). Since in the long run, however, all of these manuscripts probably went back to the authoritative edition of Probus, their text was well established. For this reason, the authenticity of the extra verse in the fifth satire, which Kugler defends, is quite unlikely.¹⁸

On the other hand, there must have been considerable differences in the wording of the text. We can see this in the ancient citations and in the differences among our manuscripts. As far as the individual wording is concerned, there are essentially two main forms of the text. The oldest textual evidence, then, that has been preserved is in fragmentary condition and comes from the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century. This is the leaf of a manuscript from Bobbio (Vaticanus Latinus 5750) which shows Persius already linked with Juvenal in the tradition. At about the same time, in the year 402, Flavius Julius Tryfonianus Sabinus put together an edition of the text that was patently the work of a dilettante—sine antigrapho (“without a copy”). This is the so-called Sabinus recension which today is for the most part equated with a. It makes use of older variant material without great independence. As far as the designation of the Sabinus recension is concerned, it should be observed that the corresponding subscription in manuscripts A and B was added later.

The very many Persius manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—which by the way should be examined more closely—probably in the last analysis go back to several manuscripts of late antiquity. And so they provide us with a gratifyingly large section from the tradition belonging to antiquity as it neared its end. Unless appearances are deceiving, then, only a little latitude is left for criticism based on conjecture as far as Persius' satires are concerned. The tradition is sound.

The first completely preserved manuscripts, then, come from the early medieval period, that is, from the ninth century. It is clear that Persius was already being read again in the schools at this time, especially in France, southern Germany, and Switzerland. The satirist was copied, excerpted, and annotated anew for schoolroom purposes. These are the so-called Cornutus scholia which have nothing at all to do with Cornutus himself. Their oldest form, as Wessner recognized, was in the Commentum Leidense from the ninth century. From the tenth century, too, there is a trite commentary that has been preserved. In the eleventh century Persius now appears among the poetae aurei (golden poets), and the mass of manuscript material shows a continual increase. It should be mentioned that men like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio belonged among the devotees of Persius. The high Renaissance next brought a further flood of manuscripts, so that the total number of Persius manuscripts today reaches into the hundreds. It might be pointed out that for practical purposes an eclectic method is advisable for the text critic. In the individual case the genuine tradition is most safely established when the evidence of P (Montepessulanus 125), a (=A, Montepessulanus 212 and B, Vaticanus tabularii basilicae H 36), and Ramorino's recensio emendata (see below) is in agreement. But even this basis for judgment is hardly infallible. For instance, at Satire 1.97 the reading vegrandi is preserved only in the indirect tradition, and Satire 1.111 also presents difficulties. There is more of this kind of thing.

Among the published editions of Persius the text with commentary of the candid and conscientious Isaac Casaubon (first published, Paris, 1605) occupies a place of honor. It has been said of it that here the sauce is better than the fish. The great edition of Otto Jahn represents a further landmark (Leipzig, 1843) with its prolegomena and critical edition of the scholia. Jahn undertook for the first time to master the tradition with its superfluity of manuscripts and bring order to it with good results. A revision on very broad principles is something that is needed. All of the modern editions are based on this one. The small version of Fr. Buecheler comes directly from this one (Berlin, 1886, 1893) and so does that of Leo (Berlin, 1910; anastatic reprint, 1932). The manuscript basis for these is certainly too thin and is not even quoted correctly all the time.

Otherwise the modern editions that might be mentioned, most of them with commentary, are: G. Nèmethy (Budapest, 1903; with an index of words), S. Consoli (3 ed., Rome, 1913), F. Ramorino (2 ed., Turin, 1920), A. Cartault (Paris, 1920). Especially noteworthy are the editions of J. van Wageningen (Groningen, 1911) and Fr. Villeneuve (first published, Paris, 1918). The English edition of J. Conington and H. Nettleship (3 ed., Oxford, 1893) deserves to be recommended. There is also much that is useful in the older commentary of C. F. Heinrich (Leipzig, 1844).

German translations that might be cited are those of F. Passow (Leipzig, 1809), W. E. Weber (Bonn, 1834), F. Hauthal (Leipzig, 1837), W. Teuffel (Stuttgart, 1857), and that of W. Binder (Berlin, 1915). Herder also translated Satires 1, 3, and 5.¹⁹

Notes

1. Persius, Satires 6.6; probably at the end of 61 after Christ.

2. E.g., 3.77-78 resembles 5.189-91.

3. E.g., 1.36-37 and 1.38-39.

4. G. A. Gerhard, “Der Prolog des Persius,” Philologus 72 (1913), 484-91.

5. Esp. Satire 10.

6. Römische Geschichte 1, p. 233 [Eng. transl., W. P. Dickson, New York, 1894 (repr. 1957), 1, p. 301].

7. G. L. Hendrickson, “The Third Satire of Persius,” Classical Philology 23 (1928), 332-42. W. Kugler, Des Persius Wille zu sprachlicher Gestaltung in seiner Wirkung auf Ausdruck und Komposition (Würzburg, 1940, diss.), goes further, following the precedent of N. Terzaghi in Scritti per il XIX centenario della nascita di Persio, Volterra, 1936, pp. 85ff.

8. Lydus, De magistratibus populi Romani 1.41.

9. Life of Persius, in A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis saturae, ed. by W. V. Clausen, Oxford, 1959, p. 33 (Oxford Classical Text).

10. Lydus, De magistratibus populi Romani 1.41.

11. Cf. Satires 5.14.

12. E.g., Satires 1.32-35.

13. Institutio oratoria 10.1.94.

14. Epigrams 4.29.7-8.

15. Life of Persius, in F. Leo's edition, Berlin, 1910, pp. 64-66; also in Clausen's edition (see above, note 9), pp. 31-34.

16. Scholia on Satires 2.56.

17. Adversus Rufinum 1.16.

18. Satires 5.53a = Anthologia Latina 950.8.3.

19. The best general study of Persius to my knowledge is Fr. Villeneuve's Essai sur Perse (Paris, 1918). Also well worth reading are W. S. Teuffel, Studien und Charakteristiken zur griechischen und römischen Literaturgeschichte, pp. 520-34 (2 ed., Leipzig, 1889); D. Nisard, Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence, 1, pp. 199-257 (5 ed., Paris, 1888); G. F. Hering, Persius, Geschichte seines Nachlebens und seiner Übersetzungen in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin, 1935), and the Pauly-Wissowa article of W. Kroll (sup. 7, 972-79).

    [Some work has been done in English. By now W. Clausen's text has superseded all others (Oxford, 1956), although it is without commentary. There are extensive comments of Knoche on this in the supplement on pp. 187-88. This now appears with a shorter apparatus criticus in an Oxford Classical Text combined with Clausen's Juvenal (Oxford, 1959). There is need for an up-to-date edition with English commentary, since what is perhaps the best—that of Conington-Nettleship mentioned above (3 ed., Oxford, 1893)—is by now long out of date. This also contains a translation.

    There are two translations of Persius' satires that should be mentioned. G. Ramsay's in the Loeb Classical Library series (London, 1918; with Juvenal) is still serviceable. More literary is that of W. S. Merwin (Bloomington, 1961).

    There is only one general work on Persius in English: C. Dessen, Iunctura callidus acri, A Study of Persius' Satires (Urbana, 1968). There are also a few articles that are well worth reading. J. M. K. Martin's “Persius—Poet of the Stoics,” Greece and Rome 8 (1939), 172-82, is a well-written appreciation of the poet and provides a good introduction. G. L. Hendrickson's articles on the first and third satires in Classical Philology 23 (1928), 97-112; 332-42, are still helpful. K. Reckford's “Studies in Persius,” Hermes 90 (1962), 476-504, deserves careful reading. Finally, mention should be made of J. C. Bramble's study of Persius' purposes and methods: Persius and the Programmatic Satire (Cambridge, 1974).]