[In the following essay, Anderson notes that Persius rejected verbiage that appealed to the senses rather than to the mind, that he never wasted a word, and that his style was harsh, shocking, and effective.]

The poet who dies young after a brief life of dedication to his craft has always been a congenial figure to our imaginations, for we naturally tend to conjecture what might have become of him had he survived to the age of a Sophocles or his modern counterpart, Robert Frost. Aules Persius Flaccus died at 28, long before he had completed his work, leaving a small body of poems which constitute some of the most revolutionary writing in an age of ceaseless literary experiment. What might have happened to Roman poetry, especially Roman satire, had he reached the age of forty or fifty or more, we can never know. Juvenal, the man who gave the ultimate direction to Roman satire, learned much from Persius' work and as a middle-aged man produced satires whose mature art has never been successfully challenged.¹

There are few Roman poets of whom we possess an authoritative biography; Persius is one of those few. Within thirty years of his death, the scholar Valerius Probus had collected a small body of independent data and appended these details to an edition of Persius' works. Persius was born in the city then known as Volaterra, located on the western coast of Italy about midway between Rome and modern Genoa; the year was a.d. 34, late in the reign of Tiberius, a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Volaterra belonged among the early settlements of the Etruscans, and, although the Etruscans had ceased to exert any power or influence in Italy for centuries, those who could trace their Etruscan ancestry, real or imagined, were quick to point the fact out to others less privileged. To judge from the name Aules, Persius may well have belonged among these Etruscans. If so, he knew the emptiness of title: in III, 27 ff. he ridicules the pretensions of “a descendant (number one thousand) of some Tuscan ancestor.” It may be that Volaterra fostered a spirit of political independence in its children. Persius himself never involved himself in the court scandals of his time, and Paetus Thrasea, his compatriot and relative, a Volaterranian who symbolized the best moral ideals of the Neronian Age, courted death rather than the servile life of most Roman senators.

By birth, Persius belonged to the upper classes, unlike the more famous poets of the Augustan Age, Horace and Virgil. His family possessed the property qualifications to make him a knight; besides, he was linked by relationship and marriage to the Senatorial class. Persius' father died when the boy was six; his mother re-married, but this husband soon died also. Although in III, 47 the satirist talks of a father attending his recitation, and not with much respect, this incident seems to be imaginary. The principal influence in Persius' early years accordingly must have been his mother and her family. Thus, it was an important event of Persius' youth when in 42 Caecina Paetus was ordered to commit suicide and Arria, his wife and possibly Persius' aunt, certainly a close relative, gave Caecina a lesson in bravery by stabbing herself and saying: “See Paetus, it does not hurt!” This took place early in the reign of Claudius, ruler throughout Persius' adolescence, a man whom an ascetic like Persius could never respect, especially since as a student in Rome Persius had ample opportunity to observe the emperor's absurdities.

At the age of 12, that is, in 46, Persius went to Rome, to study with the best teachers of the day: the eminent grammarian Remmius Palaemon, who must have communicated to his pupil some of his fanatic love of language; Verginius Flavus, the rhetorician; and finally, the most influential of all his instructors, Annaeus Cornutus. Persius first acquired Cornutus' friendship at the age of sixteen, a dangerous age for most young men, and to judge from the description in V, 30 ff., Persius was no exception. It is generally believed that Cornutus belonged to the household of Seneca, probably as a freedman. We cannot tell whether Cornutus brought Persius into contact with Seneca's family, or whether Persius' circle of friends already included the Annaei and through them he found the man whom he would ever after regard as his master and friend. At any rate, by providing us the date of the friendship (a.d. 49-50), the biography serves to remind us of the new position of Seneca and family in court.

As Tacitus interpreted Claudius' reign, it fell into two parts: from near the beginning to 48, Claudius doddered along, falling more and more under the influence of the sexually perverse Messalina; after Messalina's execution he all too quickly married his niece Agrippina, whose lust centered on power and who eventually disposed of Claudius in 54, to make room for her son and what she fondly expected to be her own dominance of Rome. One of the first acts performed by Claudius after marrying Agrippina in 49 consisted of the recall of Seneca from exile in Corsica, where he had languished for six years after incurring the emperor's wrath. Agrippina had plans for Seneca: he was to change the popular image of the reign, and he was to act as tutor for her son (the later Nero) by an earlier marriage. Thus, Persius meets Cornutus precisely at the point when the star of Seneca, Cornutus' former owner, is rising; and, had his interests been different, he might well have been drawn into the exciting political intrigues with Seneca and his family. Another young man of sixteen in a.d. 50 might well have felt attracted by the masterful scheme of Agrippina, a woman of beauty and intelligence, if devoid of scruples; another young man might have joined the festivities four years later when the news of the “death” of Claudius was announced. Persius shunned politics; his writings are permeated with a loathing for the shallow interests of the court circles. He came to know both Seneca and his brilliant nephew Lucan, but neither won his admiration or friendship.

We tend to think of Seneca as the representative Stoic of his age; his so-called Stoic tragedies exercised an incalculably important influence upon Elizabethan drama. Seneca's Stoicism, like his whole career, consisted of compromises; he was, in fact, a thorough eclectic, and for that very reason one of the most sympathetic of all Stoics to the average reader, but for the same reason one of the least typical Stoics. When he rejected Seneca's political intrigues, Persius also repudiated Seneca's eclectic brand of Stoicism and turned to a much more strict doctrine, as inculcated by Cornutus and lived by such uncompromising friends as Paetus Thrasea. It may perhaps be a mark of his youth, but his surviving writings pulsate with religious enthusiasm for the most extreme and paradoxical tenets of the Porch. By the time of his death, he had amassed some seven hundred volumes of the works of Chrysippus, the most prolific Stoic writer; other treatises he obviously had studied minutely with Cornutus. Committed as he was to Stoicism, Persius set out to communicate his enthusiasm, like an evangelical preacher exposing the errors of mankind and pointing to the one and only Way by which to escape personal disaster. Not an expert philosopher but excited by the metaphysical possibilities of his sect, Persius limited his interest to practical moral lessons, the basic tenets upon which a secure existence may be founded. While we must think of him as a Stoic satirist, we should be careful to distinguish between the philosopher-like Cornutus and the inspired pupil Persius who sets out to popularize a few of the more prominent and immediately apprehensible beliefs of the school. There is nothing original or even striking in the Stoicism that confronts us in the Satires; but Stoic satire like that of Persius is new.

Cornutus enjoyed a reputation in that period as a tragedian rather than as a philosopher. Consequently, the circle of friends which collected around this seemingly irresistible personality consisted about equally of poets and philosophers, or those who combined an interest in Stoicism with poetic talent by producing much of the Stoic poetry that marks the literature of this period. Among the older men, in addition to Cornutus himself and Seneca, we should mention Caesius Bassus, a lyric poet whom a critic like Quintilian would rank second only to Horace; Bassus would one day serve as the literary executor of Persius' Satires. Younger than Persius, but also a pupil of Cornutus, was Seneca's nephew Lucan, one of the most talented poets of all time, like Persius cut off by premature death. Literary discussions, recitations of works, mutual constructive criticism, must have formed as important an element of this circle's existence as its deep concern with Stoicism. We know that Cornutus wrote treatises on orthography and on the allegorization of myth; that Bassus also speculated on orthographical principles; that Paetus Thrasea composed an important biography of Cato; and the wide interests of Seneca emerge in the variety of his many writings. Thus, when we read Satire 1, we can easily imagine ourselves participating in the literary controversies of the time, a member of a close circle of Stoic poets who find the style and material of the court poets utterly offensive. It is almost a manifesto denouncing the taste of Neronian society.

It is most unlikely that Persius composed any of these Satires during the reign of Claudius, who, while he stimulated interest in scholarship and himself could be ranked as a capable historian and Etruscologist, did not promote literature in general, least of all poetry. With the accession of Nero, a change seemed in prospect, for Nero had been trained by Seneca to regard himself as the hope of culture, the introducer of a new Golden Age to rival that of Augustus. The contrast Seneca develops in his Apocolocyntosis between the stuttering pedantry of Claudius and the Apolline inspiration of the new ruler seems to have been part of the propaganda of the time. Indeed, in some respects, the young Nero did react brilliantly against the ways of his step-father, above all in his encouragement of, and participation in, literary endeavors. Around him he gathered a group of young artists, poets, dramatists, and musicians, Roman and Greek, and for a while the court became the center of literary activity. What was missing in all this—and what accordingly gave Neronian literature an inferior place in the total mass of Latin writing—was a moral basis, a dedication to the well-being of Rome, a positive mission in politics as well as in poetry. One could write about the New Age only so long, before the enormities of Nero's licentiousness created the inevitable conflict in one's mind, and one ended either as a servile court poet, like Calpurnius Piso, or as an implacable foe of the ruler, like Lucan and his Stoic companions. A vein of criticism, dissatisfaction, runs through the best literature of the Neronian Age: witness the Satyricon of Petronius, the tragedies of Seneca, the Pharsalia of Lucan, and the Satires of Persius. A poet could not, as in Augustus' day, regret certain features of the new regime, but in general be inspired by the magnificence of the total purpose; nothing in Nero's purpose gave confidence to the men who watched him dallying with poetry, especially when he could so openly humiliate Lucan, a better poet than himself.

Persius must have begun writing his satires near the end of Nero's first five years, around 58 or 59, by which time the spell of youthful brilliance had worn thin and the true perversity of Nero showed through. It is unnecessary to recite the series of ruthless crimes and reckless acts which Nero, now breaking free from his tutors and advisors, committed in these next years; one has only to read Tacitus' account of the murder of Agrippina, then of Octavia, to feel the chill of disappointment. Others began to publish anonymous lampoons against this parricide; Persius divorced himself utterly from specific events and tried to comment on the timeless, but ever timely, human failures such as avarice and luxury, faults that lay heavily upon the nobility and freedmen of his day. He must have been in ill health even then, for much that he writes sounds as though it came second hand, filtered through from his conversations and readings but rendered in that inimitable style of his. Where Seneca describes precisely public activities like the gladiatoral shows, the baths, recitations, and the like; where Petronius abounds in minute details, based on intimate observation, of Trimalchio's and other freedmen's ways, Persius contents himself with a general reference to a typical, not a specific, behavior. Living much in the society of his mother and sister, or that of Cornutus and other Stoic men of letters, he successfully insulated himself from the lurid activity of court and wrote slowly away.

Nero had not yet reached his nadir when Persius died of a stomach ailment in 62. A few years later, the Pisonian Conspiracy would permit the emperor to wipe out the Stoic Circle in which Persius found so much inspiration: Seneca, presumably guiltless, would be forced to commit suicide; his nephew and Persius' fellow pupil, Lucan, quite guilty, would meet the same fate melodramatically; Cornutus, Musonius Rufus, and Demetrius, three of the most influential Stoic or cynic teachers, would be sent into exile. The climax of Nero's murderous career would, in the words of Tacitus, be the attack on virtue herself, namely, the liquidation of Barea Soranus, then of Paetus Thrasea. It is certainly quite possible that, had Persius lived three years longer, he might have shared the fate of his friends; for a tradition persists that remarks against the emperor had crept into his Satires, as they had into the Pharsalia of Lucan. So much we can state or reasonably assume about Persius' life in the times of Claudius and Nero.

Probus' biography provides us a list of Persius' works, a very brief one. As a young man Persius produced a tragedy which has disappeared. Another youthful work in one book also remains lost and titleless because of corruption in our Manuscripts. Then the death of Arria, wife of Caecina Paetus, who gave her husband the example of a brave suicide, as already mentioned, inspired a certain number of verses; these, too, have disappeared, all suppressed by the advice of Cornutus to Persius' mother. We do not definitely know Cornutus' reason, but it seems safe to assume that Persius' juvenilia did him no especial credit as a poet, and his affectionate old master wisely chose to entrust Persius' future reputation to his Satires.

Comparison of the titles of Persius' youthful poetry with those of his contemporary Lucan, on whom we are also well informed, proves instructive. Lucan wrote a great deal more and far more frivolously; he was at first among the poetic circle around Nero, and the titles of his works well illustrate the fact. From the beginning, Persius used his poems to express serious ideas; his tragedy was based on some episode from Roman history, and his verses on Arria must have pulsated with admiration for her moral bravery. Thus, whereas Lucan's gradual withdrawal from the mellifluous insipidity of court poetry to the thundering tones of his Stoic epic represents a definite change—one, in fact, which Probus attributes to the influence of Persius—Persius wrote consistently with a moral severity, though in different genres. It was not, however, until he experimented in satire that he discovered the form which would permit him the maximum poetic development.

Appended to Probus' authoritative biography, obviously later and of uncertain value, are a number of lines which purport to tell how Persius began his career as a satirist. When he left school, the lines say, Persius began to read Lucilius. It was Book X of Lucilius that shook him into action; Lucilius' sardonic comments on the poets of 120 b.c. impelled Persius to write a similar poem, bringing Lucilius up to date and attacking the vapid poetry and rhetoric of Neronian times. The unreliability of these details can be readily indicated: Persius finished “school” at the age of sixteen, a good four years before Nero became ruler and long before the character of his reign could be ascertained; furthermore, scholars do not unanimously agree that Satire 1, the poem in which Persius launches his attack on contemporary literature, is his earliest satire. However, for us there is one important detail which bears further investigation: namely, that Persius' inspiration came from Lucilius and specifically from Lucilius' Book X. Who this Lucilius was and what Roman satire was as it emerged from his hands and those of his capable successor Horace introduces the question: why did Persius find satire so congenial a form for his poetic efforts?

When we today speak of satire, we generally refer to a manner rather than a precise form; contemporary novels and movies are correctly called satires of certain customs or institutions. Almost anything can be satiric if it ridicules. There was a time in early Rome when satura (the Latin equivalent for our term) possessed great vagueness also, but of a quite different nature. Scholars have attempted to determine the origin of the Latin word, on the basis of random comments in later writers and our earliest specimens of satura, with no certain results. The majority favor the theory that satura comes from the adjective satur and originally meant “that which is full”; in other words, it denoted a certain style of writing in which several different forms were mixed, for example, drama and epic, several different meters, or meter and prose. Another more recent, hence less prevalent, theory depends upon the results of efforts to translate the Etruscan language. Less than fifteen years ago, the Etruscan word satr-satir—was deciphered by an Italian scholar as meaning “to say.” Now if satura be regarded as originally an Etruscan word—and good arguments for this can be developed—then we find that the basic conception of the term is one of conversation; and it is certainly true that dialogue and informal discourse constitute its regular manner of poetic presentation. Whether we regard satura as basically a mixture or a conversation, the fact remains that the primary quality which we attribute to satire and which later Romans found in their satura, namely, the element of personal criticism, was not a definitive feature of pre-literary “satire.” Instead, it possessed a loose dramatic, conversational, vaguely metrical form which was capable of, and would eventually receive, considerable development.

The first name to be clearly associated with satura is that of the great early Latin poet Ennius. While achieving fame as a tragedian, creating the form for the Latin epic, and experimenting in many poetic areas where Greek writers had led the way, Ennius wrote several books which, as a collection, were entitled Saturae. From the few fragments—some thirty lines in various meters—surviving, we can hardly describe his achievement. However, to judge from the comments of later critics, Ennius attained little note with his Satires; by comparison with the brilliant originality and fruitfulness of his other works, especially his Annales, the Satires were virtually negligible. Roman writers discussing satura either entirely ignore Ennius or relegate him to a minor place by comparison with Lucilius and Horace. Therefore, while Ennius' satura may have possessed in embryo some features of later satura, in the form of mixture, informality, social criticism, and the like, it lacked that strong personal assertiveness which Lucilius introduced, for which Lucilius is described by Horace as the “inventor” of satire.

Gaius Lucilius inherited a number of literary traditions, from comedy, epic, lyric, diatribe, and the like, and blended them into a new and highly versatile genre, whose most outstanding feature was the strong personal approach of the poet or his persona. Later generations thought of Lucilius, who produced his Satires at the end of the Second Century b.c., as the supreme exponent of invective; the “Lucilian character” became proverbial for the sharp personal attack. Accordingly, Persius in I, 114 ff., reviewing the approaches of his predecessors in this genre, automatically thinks of Lucilius first and describes him as follows:

                                                                                                                                                      Lucilius took
The skin off this city; he flayed you, Lupus, and you,
Mucius, and ground you till his molars broke.

Rutilius Lupus and Mucius Scaevola were two of the most prominent Senators in Rome between 130 and 115 b.c. Now, to attack men of such standing, one must either be their equal or indulge in the type of political lampoon which, even if anonymous, involves one in many dangers. Lucilius belonged to a respectable and wealthy family which achieved senatorial status at least during his lifetime, if not before. His brother became a Senator; Lucilius himself counted Scipio Africanus Minor and Laelius as his closest friends; and his niece allied the family with the ambitious Pompey, father of Caesar's great rival. As the peer of those he attacked, the satirist could afford to exercise his freedom. And this freedom manifested itself in several ways: in the savagery of his invective, as we have said, in the diversity of his interests, in unashamed confessions, and in a relaxed but dignified style. The sum total of these qualities constitutes Lucilian libertas; it was the error of shallow critics to limit Lucilius' contributions and originality to invective.

To return to the passage interpolated in the biography of Persius, we observed that it credited to Book X of Lucilius Persius' inspiration to write Satire 1. A quick reading of the Satire will demonstrate that Persius takes no interest in political topics, and indeed Lucilius X made its topic not politics but the state of literature in contemporary Rome of 120 b.c. Although we possess but a few fragments of Lucilius' poem, we can pretty well assume that the satirist's freedom manifested itself in a sharp commentary on the poets and orators of his day, ending perhaps with an implicit or explicit contrast, as Persius does, in which he stated his own ideal. Politics and literature represent but a small portion of Lucilius' interests: we possess other fragments on history, philosophy, military engagements, comic anecdotes, the latest scandal, etc. Or Lucilius might start from some incident which purportedly belonged to his experiences. We have many poems developing his theories—not altogether consistent, as is the case with many men—on the control and use of one's sexual drive. In the course of these, he frankly gives us details about his various mistresses and the catamites he has known, pronounces a misanthropic verdict on marriage, ridicules a poor henpecked husband; all of which has led some credulous scholars to attribute to Lucilius what his persona states and so define the satirist as a misogynist or libertine, depending on the details selected as evidence. Perhaps this suffices to illustrate the diversity of topics and approaches in Lucilian satire. And this diversity of material was presented in a poetic style unique for its time, a relaxed, informal, supremely lucid style, colloquial but never vulgar, dignified but never grandiose, a witty manner which became known as the Plain Style.

When we combine all these separate features—versatile material, elastically rich style, and strong personal stamp—we have the essence of Lucilian satire: hexameter poetry of personal moral criticism. It must be remembered that poetry was the primary purpose of the satirist. The satura which Lucilius invented aroused admiration and imitation because it was essentially poetry—on permanent moral topics. The ethical criticism which a satirist pronounces rarely reaches beyond the level of insight attained by the moral preachers and philosophers; and so it is a misconception to approach satire as essentially a document of moral protest, or a mirror of society.

In the First Century b.c., when lyric and elegiac, as well as satiric, poetry became the rage, Lucilius was properly regarded as one of the foremost Latin writers. This was at a time when there were many great personal poets; but in the First Century the greatest, beyond question, was Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Horace came from a much lower social stratum than Lucilius, and consequently could not exploit Lucilian freedom. His brief venture into politics as a young man ended in the battle of Philippi, when he fought on the losing side. So he returned to Rome and tried to re-build his life, now that his property had disappeared and his political hopes vanished. Finding a minor but responsible post in the civil service, he spent all his spare time developing a poetic interest which heretofore had received scant attention. Slowly he won the esteem of the patrons and men of letters, and slowly his subjects changed from the outright abuse of the Epodes to the lyric self-control of the Odes. Midway in the scale of his poetic development came the two books of Sermones or Satires, which are the first complete satiric poetry which has survived.

If we pause to reflect on the relative position of satura among Horace's poetic production, we may see confirmed what has been stated: that the hexameter satire of Lucilius struck the observant Romans because of its poetic merits. To voice his personal abuse—or rather the bitter hatreds of the Civil War period—Horace used the iambic epode, not Satire. When he began to see deeper into the moral problems of a convulsed age, he moved into a higher form of poetry, one which permitted mature personal reflection and a tone of serious, but by no means passionate, engagement, with the many opportunities for variation which have always characterized that versatile genre satura. Horace's Satires were the preparation for his inimitable Odes.

We have already cited Persius' reference to Lucilius; the same passage continues with a picture of Horace, also useful for us:

                    And sly Horace
Could tease his way into the guts of his laughing friend
And touch the fault there; he had a trick of sticking out
His nose and hanging people on it.

Despite the curious way Persius chooses to render the image of his predecessor, it is evident that he conceives of Horace as a much gentler critic than Lucilius, one who drives directly to the moral heart without offending his friends. The Horatian manner is defined much more succinctly by Horace himself as “laughingly to tell the truth,” but Persius' comment suffices to show how successful Horace was. If we think of Lucilius as the Roman aristocrat calmly stating his opinions, regardless of possible prejudice or bias, among a group of his equals, we must imagine Horace quite differently: as a Roman Socrates, no aristocrat by birth, but a man of intelligence and moral depth who tries to exploit a natural gift of irony to stir the conscience of others. To attain his goal, Horace set out to delimit the area occupied by Lucilian libertas. He avoided political topics, direct personal attacks of any sort, confessions about love affairs, mere anecdotes, in fact, all subjects which might tend to distort the image of himself which he desired to convey, all subjects which might interfere with the essential moral purpose of his Satires. It often seemed that Lucilius lost sight of his ethical end in his eagerness to denounce a personal enemy; but when Horace explores some fault, it is always obvious that he aims at the fault itself rather than at any particular person who may exemplify it.

In the First Book of his Satires, Horace openly criticized Lucilius and attempted to define the new features of his poetic satura. Lucilian freedom entailed moral irresponsibility at times, and also it incurred the charge of lacking artistic discipline. As an Augustan poet, Horace fulfilled the Classical ideals in many respects: his Satires exhibit that significant blend of poetic craftmanship and moral depth, of personal intimacy and personal restraint, of tolerance and ethical intensity.

When one comes from Horace and begins studying the Latin of Persius, one cannot miss the frequent verbal imitations of Horace's poems; indeed, I would not hesitate to claim that Persius knew the entire body of his predecessor's poetry by heart and must have pondered it constantly as he himself began to work on satura. Scholars have long since collected the passages which seem to owe much to an earlier line or lines of Horace; it would be easy to quote figures, as for instance that in Satire 5 more than fifty places seem reminiscent of Horatian lines. However, the reader of the translation must take this on authority; for him, it is more important to see how whole Satires of Horace—and, in some cases, of Lucilius—have suggested to Persius the general plan of his poems. Satire 1, which is so conscious of Lucilius and Horace, as we have seen, follows the general pattern of the Program Satire invented by Lucilius and improved by Horace. Satire 5, with its theme of moral liberty and assertion that all men but the wise are slaves, quickly reminds one of the ironic use of the same theme by Horace in Serm. II, 7. It would be virtually impossible to understand Persius without knowing Horace; and yet we must immediately add that Persius differs radically from his predecessor.

We may say, then, that Persius took over a poetic form which had reached its ideal Classical height in the Satires of Horace. The basic definition of satura remained unchanged, still permitting a wide variety of talents and moral attitudes: it continued to be hexameter poetry of personal moral criticism. Horace had increased the effectiveness of each element and disciplined the whole into poetic economy. By various ways he improved the plasticity of the hexameter, availed himself of Augustan enjambement and versatile rhythms, and made the verse both interesting and significant, a fundamental part of the poem's meaning. Among his other poetic improvements were verbal economy, avoidance of useless Hellenisms, insistence on wit that contributed to the poem rather than ridicule to conceal the absence of meaning. The persona of Horace lacks the variety and excitement of Lucilius; instead, we feel that we can trust our Roman Socrates to be impartial, to focus impersonally on the truth, without amusing himself or hurting others. Where Lucilius' morality often seemed suspect, it is safe to say that Horace made morality the essential quality of satura, drawing much closer to the philosophic schools than the aristocratic freedom of 120 b.c. would have permited. Because of their Socratic qualities Horace's Satires assume a permanent value that is absent from the work of his predecessor; he talks to all times, to everyone of us. No wonder that in a new age, when poetry was being encouraged again, a young man steeped in Horace and stirred by a different moral outlook as well as divergent artistic theories should set out to write the satura for his day.

We possess six Satires written by Persius, and the biography suggests that Persius died before bringing these to completion. Prior to these six poems in the manuscripts, as has been recently proved by the American scholar W. V. Clausen, there existed fourteen lines which are here entitled “Prologue to the Satires.” These lines remain a source of controversy, even though their position can no longer be questioned. Some manuscripts assign to them the title of Prologue; others provide no title. It has been argued that they cannot be a prologue because they fail to make a point in specific reference to satire; hence, many regard the lines as a fragment of an unfinished poem irrelevant to the Satires but retained by Persius' editors at his death because of their poetic felicities. Others feel that the fourteen lines fall into two unconnected groups of seven lines apiece and that we have here two fragments of Persius' juvenilia. Some find the meter—choliambic instead of the regular dactylic hexameter—disturbing; while opponents point out that Phoenix of Colophon, a diatribal poet of the Third Century b.c., and possible prototype of Persius, characteristically wrote his moral denunciations in the choliambic meter. In my opinion, these lines do not constitute a successful or meaningful prologue. Persius sneers at the formal epic poets and expresses his own modest designs; then he ridicules the inept poets who write from false motives, namely, to earn a sizable profit. But there he stops, leaving it implicit that he himself claims different motives, that he is about to produce a type of poetry which is straight from the heart; but it is uncertain whether the poetry here implied is the satura which we subsequently meet. Nothing in this so-called Prologue conflicts with the material in Satire 1; but nothing in these choliambics really resembles the clarity of a Program Satire. Therefore, it might be safest to regard these lines as an incomplete fragment, possibly designed as a prologue if finished, but also quite possibly unrelated to the hexameter Satires which follow.

No definite criteria have ever been established for determining the order in which Persius wrote his poems, so I shall deal with them in the order in which they appear in the Manuscripts and our translation. Satire 1 functions as the traditional Program Satire; that is, it explains the satirist's conception of his poetic form in answer to a certain number of familiar objections. As we have already noted, Persius may well have started from Lucilius X in this poem. Lucilius, and Horace after him, had used dialogue to enhance the force of their ideas, creating an interlocutor who would voice objections against satura, thereby enabling them to state their satiric theories. Persius also creates an interlocutor (quite imaginary, to judge from the satirist's remarks in I, 44) who attacks him immediately with the question: “Who'll read that sort of thing?” Persius dismisses the concern for a popular audience and counter-attacks, with an onslaught against the general literary public and the conventional poets and orators; this constitutes the major portion of the Satire. Although this general denunciation represents a negative program, it suggests the essential values of satire. To the satirist, the public and its favorites are corrupt, sensuous, materialistic, devoid of artistic and moral standards. Implicitly, then, Persius' poetry aims at different goals. He rejects mere popularity, mere mellifluousness, mere appeal to the jaded tastes of the court, and instead urges sound, well-reasoned matter, genuine poetry of the quality of the Aeneid. When the interlocutor hears this, he retorts with the traditional charge against satire: namely, that its program consists in personal attacks which, even though truthful, do nothing but hurt feelings. Again, Persius presents his program indirectly. He reviews the approaches of his predecessors, Lucilius and Horace, as I have already mentioned, and then deliberately places himself with them. However, just as Horace moderated the notorius “freedom” of Lucilius, so Persius suggests his own modification of Horace. He will, in a certain sense, mutter into his book; that is, he will not deal in personalities even as much as Horace. On the other hand, he starts from a different moral conception than Horace, whose “Golden Mean” and Socratic irony have long constituted the epitome of rational moderation. Where Horace assumed that each individual had faults which were perfectly corrigible, Persius denounces mankind: “There's not one of them who doesn't have ass's ears!” To sum it up, Persius here proclaims his program as follows: to deal unsparingly with the asininity of mankind (avoiding individual attacks) in a pungently direct style which will be the exact opposite of the sensuous nonsense emitted by the court poets.

Satire 2 starts from a particular situation, the birthday of Persius' dear friend Macrinus and the religious ceremonies of thanksgiving which are customary on such an occasion. Normally, the man celebrating his birthday would pour out a libation and make a prayer of thanksgiving for the year of happiness already granted him, then no doubt add a few personal requests, most frequently for long life and prosperity. In such prayers Persius finds his subject. Whereas Macrinus knows how to pray without demeaning himself or debasing the conception of divinity, others constantly involve themselves in blasphemy by their utterly materialistic view of life and of the gods. Here is a basic contrast, the essence of every Satire: in Satire 1 Persius opposed the court poets to himself as satirist, and now he opposes the crassly materialistic prayer to that of someone like Macrinus. It all amounts to the basic conception that mankind in general is hopelessly corrupt—just as it is asinine in its literary tastes—and only the wise man knows how to pray. Look at the others, he says, caught in their own inconsistencies: the fools who pretend to pray for a sound mind but really lust for an inheritance that presupposes the death of a wife or close relative; the superstitious old crone who prays that a newborn baby will make a prosperous marriage, only that; the fool who sacrifices his whole flock while praying for its increase. So it goes on, and the worst of it is that such people contaminate the divine ideal with their diseased conceptions. Confusing materialism for reality, they assume that the gods must of necessity epitomize the material approach to existence, “from our iniquitous flesh,” as Persius admirably puts it, “deducing what would please the gods.” There can be no doubt about the moral lesson in this succinct little poem: the true attitude of prayer, Persius concludes, depends upon possessing “a soul in harmony with the dictates of heaven, a mind pure in its secret places, a generous and honest heart.” These are some of the most famous lines in the Satires, and they may well have influenced the similar conclusion of Juvenal's Tenth Satire: orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano [“… a sound mind in a sound body”].

Again in Satire 3 Persius begins with a concrete situation: it is late in the morning, and a young man, who should be studying, is still indulging lazily in sleep. Scholars do not entirely agree on how the satirist organized the scene, for Persius never makes the persons in his dialogues obvious. Some interpret this as a soliloquy, an internal discussion between the lazy and the conscientious parts of a man, quite possibly the satirist himself. Others find no evidence for such a view and prefer to believe that the young man protests against the criticism of a friend or tutor or ideal Stoic. In any case, Persius has set up his typical contrast between wisdom and folly, here specifically the opposition of serious study and immature self-indulgence. We hear of a number of sad examples of sloth and moral blindness, such as the tyrant (35 ff.), the malingering student (44 ff.), the ignorant centurion (77 ff.); until finally we concentrate on the fool who deceives himself into thinking that his illness, the result of his gluttony, is nothing and who brings on his death by further drinking. Indeed, Persius seems to be exploiting one of the common moral metaphors that equates physical with moral sickness. Horace had amused himself with the possibilities of the Stoic paradox in Serm. II, 3, and now Persius has given the paradox his interpretation: all men but the wise are “sick.” The theme, which is implicit in the description of the tyrant and of the boy's pretended illness, emerges nakedly at the very center of the poem. “Check the ailment,” advises the satirist, “before it's got to you and you won't have to sign away vast sums to the doctor.” In other words, give your attention to genuine values, Stoic values, while you are young; otherwise, you will become so confirmed in your folly, like the tyrant, the centurion, and the self-deceiving invalid, that there will be no possible “cure.”

Satire 4, like Satire 2, is another short poem, in fact the briefest of all the Satires. It also enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most obscene. This time, Persius finds his inspiration for an opening in one of the lesser Platonic dialogues, Alcibiades I. But where Plato represented the discussion between Alcibiades and his revered master Socrates as a serious inquiry into the possibilities of directing the destiny of a city-state without training, Persius assumes our familiarity with the situation and immediately focuses attention on the self-deception of Alcibiades. Socrates bears not the least resemblance to the Platonic figure nor to the Socratic ideal present in Horatian satire; instead, he becomes another Stoic wise man, the precise opposite and utter antagonist of the fool Alcibiades. Persius dismisses this dramatic framework midway through the poem, and, as he did in Satire 3, states his theme here in the center (23-4): “And none tries the descent into himself, no, not one!” Now, there can be no question but that the satirist drives towards the value of self-knowledge. He goes on to illustrate the fact that we can see most clearly the faults of others, hung, as the proverb has it, in a sack on their backs; but we utterly fail to perceive our own perversity. One who is sensuously luxurious can openly despise another's uncouth avarice, without being any better himself. Sometimes, indeed, one can impose upon others, to the extent that one receives general credit for virtues which one does not possess. To swallow such praise from the ignorant masses is the mark of a stupid man. Consider, says Persius at the end (47 ff.) the typical faults of mankind, avarice, lust, and ambition: anybody who pursues these as though they constituted the goal of human life obviously does not know himself or the value of self-sufficiency. The Stoics idealize not the man exalted by the obsequious, brutal herd, but the man standing alone, confirmed in his wisdom by his own conscience. “Live in your own house,” says the metaphorical satirist, “and learn what a bare lodging it is.”

It is generally granted that Satire 5, the longest of the poems, is the finest. Like the previous Satires, it begins with a dramatic situation, a conversation between Persius and his beloved tutor and friend, Cornutus. The subject under discussion, seemingly rather tenuously connected with the theme later announced, concerns the influence which Cornutus has positively exerted on the young satirist and how Persius can honestly describe the enormous importance of Cornutus in his life. Should Persius give way to his emotions and launch into an epic panegyric of his tutor? Cornutus sharply rejects the idea and states a theory of style for Persius which reminds those familiar with Lucilius and Horace of the satirist's program: Persius must avoid highflown diction and stick to the simple ungarnished truth. “You stick to simple fare,” says the tutor, borrowing a typical metaphor, one frequently appearing in Satire 1. At that, Persius proceeds to review his friendship with Cornutus: he tells how as an adolescent he ran the danger of wasting his talents, until he came under the care of Cornutus. Cornutus took charge and, like a craftsman of the soul, he constructed Persius' moral character to be the image of his own. Now they are united, two Stoics aiming at the identical goal: “some powerful affinity knits together our two lives.” Persius has subjected himself to the single purpose of wisdom and in its service has found “freedom.” No longer subordinate to his Master Cornutus, he lives with him as his friend and equal. Unity of purpose, uniformity of style, these represent Stoic values and form a clear contrast to the hundred false voices sought by the epic poets at the beginning of the Satire as well as to the thousand discordant ways of mankind in general, the topic immediately following (52 ff.). Thus, in the thematic contrast between unity and diversity, we can detect the symbolic function of the long opening section of the poem. Just as in Satire 4 the discussion between Socrates and Alcibiades dramatized the importance of self-knowledge, so here the conversation between Cornutus and Persius, Master and pupil also, dramatizes the virtue of moral freedom. These two, identical in their aims, will constitute the permanent pole of opposition to the series of moral slaves who will now occupy our attention.

Most men, far from making good use of their time and pursuing the one worthy end, involve themselves in variegated futilities such as typical avarice, luxury, and lust. What in fact we all desire—and here at last (73 ff.) Persius openly states his theme, almost precisely in the center of the poem—is liberty, genuine moral liberty. It is automatic, however, for the Stoic to exploit the metaphor in liberty and develop his paradox, that all but the wise man are “slaves.” Horace had exposed the fallacy of the paradox in Serm. II, 7; Persius fully accepts the paradox as profound truth. He works his theme out in two directions. First, he takes the emancipated slave, proud of his legal freedom, and shows the difference between the mere title of freedom and genuine moral liberty (73-131). Then, he goes through the canonic faults, avarice, luxury, lust, ambition, and superstition, and reveals each one as a manifestation of “slavery.” The final comment is ironic, confirming the thesis of Persius even as it denies it. A centurion, typically stupid as in III, 77 ff., sneers at the purveyor of such philosophy and, treating him as worse than a slave, refuses to buy a hundred such moralists—Greeks he contemptuously calls them—for a clipped coin. We have reverted to the theme of numeral diversity, but what a difference exists between the hundred mouths of the vapid poets and the hundred true Stoics. It is the centurion who is the slave, not those whom he ignorantly proposes buying.

If any extant poem of Persius remains unfinished, as the biography suggests, it would have to be Satire 6, whose conclusion many scholars consider to be abrupt and unsatisfactory. However, we can make good sense of it as it stands, so that we will not here indulge in conjecture. Suffice it to say that its structure differs considerably from that of the others; the reader may draw his own conclusions. The opening of the poem has an epistolary character, for Persius, writing from Luna (near modern La Spezia), addresses his good friend, the poet Caesius Bassus, at his retreat in the Sabine hills. It is nearly winter, and the two poets have withdrawn from Rome to the comforts of country villas. The introduction expresses the mood of contentment which the poet feels in his modestly comfortable surroundings; it reminds us of the satisfaction which Horace felt with his farm near Tibur. This modest happiness stands as the positive pole, to which is immediately contrasted the grasping discontent of the avaricious. And now the Satire becomes a dialogue between Persius and an assumed heir, as Bassus drops entirely out of consideration. Neither miserly nor luxurious, Persius voices his creed as follows (22 ff.): “As for me, I try to make the most of things.” The heir protests at such principles and argues that Persius should never touch his capital, but always lay some aside and increase his wealth. Teasing the poor fool, Persius makes his first and only allusion to a Roman emperor, referring to the counterfeit triumph which Caligula ordered twenty years previously for his ignominious campaign against the Germans: he proposes to support this “triumph” lavishly. Naturally, the heir cannot protest now, not when Caligula's vicious ways are so familiar. Again, Persius contemplates finding a different heir among the beggar herd near Bovillae, one less particular, less irritating than his natural heir, but conceivably related to himself in the distant past. The point is, his money belongs to him, to use as he desires, and the heir can make no legitimate claims on him to stint himself, not when he merely follows a moderate course of existence. As for the heir and his ilk, those who sell their souls for lucre can never attain the happiness of Persius.

What are the special qualities of Persius' poetry? In considering Persius we must examine both his poetic art and his moral approach.

The language of the satirist had traditionally been free of magniloquence, more likely to approach the direct, picturesque, but relaxed manner of everyday speech. Persius himself comments on the diction of his contemporaries among the court poets in Satire 1, making amply clear that he totally rejects verbiage which aims at the senses, not at the mind. Again, in Satire 5 he reveals a distaste for the counterfeit enthusiasm of the grand poet who requires a hundred mouths to say what might be expressed quite simply and honestly. However, if we were to conclude from these passages that Persius has adopted a style similar to that of Horace and Lucilius before him, we would be mistaken. While scrupulously avoiding the vapid grandeur of epic, our satirist creates for himself a unique style that has always provoked controversy. Basically, the argument may be put as follows: does Persius' style enhance his moral ideas, functioning as the necessary complement to them, or does this ingenious diction interfere with the statement of a simple, uncomplicated ethical system?

Direct and picturesque Persius is, but, because he abandons the relaxed informality of his predecessors, his directness and his picturesqueness take on an entirely new form. Glancing through his poetry, for instance, the reader will immediately observe how carefully each word has been chosen: the verbs carry special force; the adjectives have nothing trite about them, often serving metaphorically; where he can, the poet omits unessential words, especially the verb “to be”; if obscenity can help, he willingly adopts it. In short, Persius' language is among the most vigorous in Latin literature. A passage like I, 4 ff. illustrates this vigor perfectly. The sardonic note in “Dames of Unrelieved Virtue,” the contempt in “dim-witted Rome,” the image in the phrase about straightening corrupt scales, the rhetorical self-interruption as Persius hesitates to denounce current tastes, phrases like “grizzled heads” or “glum customs,” details like those about playing marbles or growing long-faced and avuncular, and finally the long scene describing a poet's recitation and perversely rendering it as sexual intercourse between homosexuals: all this and more exists in the original Latin. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Persius' stylistic contrivances set the translator an impossible task.

When Greek and Latin writers commenced a poetic work, they usually set themselves a specific style which would conform to, and enhance, the ideas which they desired to express. Traditionally, the satirist had utilized the Plain Style because it most closely supported the persona of the satirist as a simple, unassuming, but intelligent and witty conversationalist. Persius violates the canons in his style: he is too direct and uncompromising to fit the Grand Style, yet at the same time he has forsaken simplicity in order to riot in a variety of studied phrases and conceits. The histories of Latin literature, which seem to have been written by men out of sympathy with the studied diction and poetic conceit nowadays so congenial to writers and critics alike, usually set Persius down as a special, but not very commendable, phenomenon in Latin. Following the lead of an erudite commentator named Johannes Lydus, of the Fifth Century a.d., they abandon Persius as quite hopeless and not worth the effort of comprehension, associating him with the Alexandrian poet Lycophron. Lycophron was the epitome of poetic obscurity throughout antiquity: he luxuriated in dark synonyms and periphrases in a lengthy poem called Alexandra, itself an obscure title, purporting to repeat the prophecies of Cassandra about the Fall of Troy and the future of the Trojans. I do not find the comparison between Persius and Lycophron valid, for Lycophron exploited a dramatic situation that justified obscurity—after all, Cassandra was doomed to make true prophecies which nobody would comprehend—and an Alexandrian taste for learned allusions; whereas Persius' studied language has no prototype in Roman satire, no analogue in the Latin literature of Nero's day, and dramatically conflicts with the role of simplicity which Persius seems to announce for himself both in Satires 1 and 5. However, it is useful to know one of the most common verdicts on Persius' style before trying to determine just how successful it can be with a sympathetic audience.

One way of looking at this matter is to compare Persius with his contemporaries among the court poets, at least from the point of view adopted by the poet in his Program Satire. After some space devoted to an indirect characterization of their ways, Persius proceeds in I, 93 ff. to quote the poetasters against themselves, first the clever devices which they use to end lines, then four complete lines of typical nonsense. It has even been suggested by some early commentators that he quotes the works of Nero himself, but we have no way of ascertaining the truth of the theory. In any case, as one reads the passage on the “Mimallonean bellowings,” the prejudice of the satirist and his implicit stylistic purpose begin to take effect. Half the words are utterly superfluous, and to conceal this fact the poet has contrived to make them difficult. If we cut every adjective, we would do no damage to the basic picture of Dionysiac rites; what we would be doing is marring the mellifluous movement and the sensuous mood impressed upon the scene. Now, it is precisely this that Persius attacks and radically alters when he himself writes poetry. There is not a wasted word anywhere in his Satires; if anything, we would appreciate a few additional words to bridge over the ellipses and the compressed series of metaphors and other tropes. Furthermore, Persius has destroyed all empty music in the verse; he loves staccato rhythms, interrupted lines, avoids the enjambement which makes epic so moving, and, when he does rise to a crescendo, infuses the passion of moral fervor in what he says. In short, by contrast with the poetry which Persius quotes, his Satires achieve in their style the ideal by which to shock his day and drive directly to the heart of a moral problem. Finally, it is hardly necessary to note that our satirist scorns all such sensational subjects as Dionysiac rites, whose prime purpose would consist in arousing the prurient feelings of a corrupt generation. Far from “prostituting poetry”—and the metaphor is Persius'—to the perversity of the court, Persius sets out to attack that very perversity and demonstrate how disgusting it really is. For that he requires a style as far removed as possible from the operatic methods of his contemporaries.

Take the matter of obscenity, one of the marked characteristics of Persius' verse from Satire 1 on. Thanks to the translator's frankness, the reader now for the first time has the opportunity to discover this aspect of our satirist; no Victorian translator ever dared to render accurately the many places where specific remarks were made against an opponent's sexuality. But what is the purpose of Persius' directness? Horace had openly avoided any such theme or language, presumably because it tends to interfere with a rational perception of moral problems. However, when Persius writes, he considers the tastes of his own age, not an age of Classical discipline but one of Manneristic license; for him, the literary standards of Nero's court can best be rendered by an obscene metaphor: they amount to effeminacy, to homosexual self-indulgence. I need hardly mention the fact that homosexuality formed a regular part of the pleasures of Nero's circle, that the emperor himself acquired notoriety for “marrying” two of the prominent male performers of Rome, once in the role of the husband, once as the wife. To employ obscenity metaphorically or symbolically, as Persius does, means exploiting one of the most striking features of noble behavior in order to expose the full extent of corruption. For there is a connection between indulging in homosexuality and luxuriating in sensuous poetry on immoral subjects, at least for the moralist. Accordingly, Persius' obscenity constitutes the moralist's reaction to the mellifluous style, the sensational topics, and the generally perverse ways of the court poets and their patrons: it is harsh, makes the topic loathsome, and uses it ethically as the ideal symbol for the contemporary courtier.

If we were to search for the symbols with which the satirist surrounds himself, we would find that they almost universally involve the mental and mechanical processes; that is, while the ignorant and immoral are trapped by their own flesh, most strikingly of course by their sexual perversions, the satirist and the wise Stoics like him devote themselves to the true values of rational control. Accordingly, one of the first metaphors in Satire 1 utilizes the process of weighing, an important and difficult technique in those days, to define the virtue of accurate judgment as opposed to following the crowd. Turning to Satire 5, for example, we note that the description of Cornutus' influence upon Persius in 30 ff. abounds in images of this type: Cornutus is a sculptor, an architect, an artist who forms his product carefully. As for Persius, it would seem that he thinks of himself by preference as a “doctor,” healing the sick souls of humanity. One of his favorite devices for rendering the moral corruption of others is to describe them as drunken, weighed down by excess food, sick, dying, especially in Satire 3, where the “sickness” of mankind constitutes the basic metaphor. When in Satire 1 the satirist's interlocutor criticizes him for his harsh manner, he puts it metaphorically: “But why harrow delicate ears with your cutting truths?” This grotesque picture, doubly effective by reason of its grotesqueness, refers to the current medical practice of cleaning out ears with a mild acid; Roman doctors used vinegar, whereas we often use a form of peroxide for a similar purpose. Persius aims to cleanse the ears of mankind and, through the ears, reach the reason and the soul. In V, 86 he introduces a Stoic speaker to expose the folly of Marcus Dama, the emancipated slave who boasts of his moral freedom; to many a reader it would seem at first sight ridiculous, but the fact is, Persius expects to win sympathy for the Stoic by appending a descriptive phrase: “his ears scoured with caustic vinegar.” The man who himself has purified his ears, that is, his heart, can thereupon proceed to operate on others, using the acid of his tongue to shock his audience, to open their ears otherwise blocked to the voice of reason. It is in this sense that Cornutus talks to Persius earlier in the same Satire and uses the same medical metaphor as occurred in I, 107: radere meaning “scrape” or “harrow.” Persius has been trained like a doctor to scrape the sickly pale manners of his age, and for that he must employ direct language, not the false grandiloquence of the epic poets.

It should be fairly obvious by now that in concept Persius' style does complement his moral approach. He reacts against the effeminate diction of court poets and proceeds to speak directly and harshly, deliberately affronting the tastes of Neronian society by rendering its pleasures nauseating, contemptibly obscene, sickly. He is the doctor of souls, too concerned for the health of people to worry about their tender feelings, indeed convinced that health can only be attained by attacking these very feelings, the source of contemporary sickness. The gluttons among his audience—and this was one of the periods of the notorious Roman banquets—he constantly insults by exploiting the process of cooking and eating as metaphors for the soul; those who live for eating have obviously lost their souls and head for a moral death analogous to the gross end of most self-indulgent people. If we try to visualize the persona of the satirist, we picture a dedicated doctor or missionary, lean to the point of emaciation, unwittingly offensive by his fanatic ways, violent in his hatreds, utterly oblivious of human feelings, and afire with an ideal which somehow, to the cooler brains among us, lacks practicality.

Now, a harsh style contrasting so sharply with the effeminate diction of Neronian poets in general does have merits; its carefully chosen words, sparely used adjectives, totally economic diction, along with contrived phrases that somehow blend the goal of precision and the search for an allegorical significance, its abrupt transitions and open refusal to indulge in extensive dramatization all make their appeal to the mind, not the senses of the reader. He must work with this poetry, not sit back and let it flow meaninglessly but pleasantly over him. It is obvious that the satirist has labored over every word, and it is often necessary for the reader to repeat that labor in order to derive the allegorical significance within each successive phrase.

And yet, the more one exerts those rational responses which seem to be required by Persius' style, the more it becomes apparent that Persius has fundamentally failed to realize his goal. Whether his youth stood in his way or because he was incapable of translating Stoic doctrine into poetry, in any case the fact gradually emerges that the primary appeal of Persius' poetry is not to our mind but to our prejudices.

Persius says in I, 12: “My wit has a mind of its own and makes me laugh.” If one assumed from this that the satirist had adopted as his goal the same purpose as Horace, namely, laughingly to tell the truth, the Latin would quickly disabuse one: Horace's ridere can possess various connotations, but Persius' cachinno means but one thing, to laugh contemptuously and harshly. Thus, the ironic manner of Horace differs markedly from the sardonic attitude of the Stoic Persius; as Persius himself admitted, Horace persuaded his very victims to laugh with him at themselves, something which no reader of Persius ever does. Socratic irony does appeal to the reason, and in Horace's hands irony helps the reader to attain that Socratic ideal of self-knowledge, for Horace admits his own fallibility and assumes it in others, without, however, despairing of the situation. True to the conviction of the Augustan Age, he firmly believes that men are basically rational and so can work out their salvation; he adopts the role of a teacher, slightly more advanced than his pupils, dedicated to the principle that we all can learn to live morally, hence happily. Laughter forms a necessary and pleasant part of this educational process.

Not so with Persius. Everything in his style and his manner, that is, his persona, tends to isolate him from the rest of us. He is the Stoic sage in his private paradise, from which he addresses us with his biting words, convinced, as he asserts in I, 121, that we all have asses' ears. To argue from the premise that all men are fools except for the Stoics involves considerable distortion; still more serious, it tends to antagonize rather than convert the majority. Certainly some men would be shaken by the contempt of the satirist. Most, however, would feel themselves free of the faults imputed to them, or at least able to free themselves. And after all, the symbolic style of the satirist permits him to equate an ordinary human foible with something grotesquely unfair: a reluctant student becomes unformed clay by mere assertion, and a procrastinator becomes the rear axle of a pair of wheels. Instead of using similes or analogies having common points with the folly under discussion, Persius prefers the non-logical method of the metaphor and the symbolic scene. In short, he talks to his audience as though it were composed of Stoics able to comprehend his dogmas, or fools utterly beyond the reach of rational appeal. He never takes one concrete human fault and examines it in depth—for instance, materialism or ambition, as Horace might have done. Instead, he works from the symbolic-allegorical level; adopting some metaphorical theme, he shows how it can be applied to a variety of faults. When he ends, accordingly, the reader remains in possession of a symbol, often a powerful one, to be sure, but not a rational one. Persius' Satires assume a negative attitude: they denounce rather than instruct. Persius says of one poor fool, “You were born without a grain of sense (V, 119)”; for such a man, the satirist offers no hope.

Possibly we might accept the black picture of humanity if we could be sure of the satirist's own wisdom, but Persius does not strike most readers as sufficiently experienced. Compared with Seneca, for all the latter's compromises, Persius is a lost child. Seneca's letters abound in scenes closely observed, filled with exact details noted down by the writer in person; Persius' Satires reflect no such minute observation. One would never realize, for example, the political crisis in Rome or the militant opposition assumed by some Stoics; nor does the economic or social crisis emerge with any clarity. Many examples Persius has drawn not from observation but from his readings, re-working Horace, Lucilius, Terence, and his Stoic sources. Even his picture of Neronian literature, depending indubitably on his own observations, is marred by inaccuracy. Where do Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius fit into this scheme? Perhaps it is true that Persius is interested in the timeless rather than the contemporary, but he must make his statement to his own generation. His generation, like those that have succeeded him, must have judged him essentially as a bookish moralist, well-read but not very profound, a clever stylist rather than a great Stoic satirist.

Although we must rank Persius below both Horace and Juvenal as a satirist and although he lacks the scope and human understanding of contemporaries like Seneca, Persius' work has unique features that justify considerable study. First, he is the only Stoic satirist, among a group of poets who preferred an eclectic type of morality. While he has not succeeded in giving his Satires that spark of inspiration which suffuses the work of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, his severe morality and harsh antagonism against foolish mankind originate as much in Stoicism as in the personality of the satirist; and the question might occur whether such a brand of Stoicism could ever stimulate effective satire. Secondly, Persius stands unique among surviving writers of his period for his uncompromising opposition to the prevailing corruption in court circles. The great writers of the Neronian Age are Seneca, Petronius and Lucan, all of whom lived lives of compromise and wrote literature that incorporates to some extent this spirit of compromise. When we read Persius, we meet at last the hard resistance of a man who knows Nero's court well and utterly refuses to be taken in by its meretricious attractions. Thus, Persius represents an otherwise unknown group of Stoics and men of principles who hated Nero and eventually found in Vespasian a ruler able to promote their ideal for Rome. But perhaps the most unique feature remains the one least likely to emerge in translation: namely, Persius' Latin style. The Stoics can claim no credit for this feature; it is all Persius'. Not only was he unique in his generation—something he apparently desired to be, in order to define his reaction against the “effeminate” poetic style of his contemporaries—but he continued to be unique throughout the succeeding centuries of Latin literature. In the end, he could be compared only with the unique (and truly obscure) Hellenistic poet Lycophron.

This new translation by W. S. Merwin brings out the precision of Persius' language and makes it patent how carefully Persius selected his words; it makes his compressed phrases and curious conceits more lucid, thus rendering comprehensible what in the Latin strikes the reader at first as decidedly obscure. It is one of the great tragedies of Roman literature that Persius, like his contemporary Lucan, did not live long enough to attain a mature style that might capably sustain his moral vision. As it is, we read Persius' style as unique and as one which might have become uniquely great.

The unusual aspects of Persius' Satires provoked controversy even during his lifetime. The Biography tells us one story of their effect. After the satirist had completed one recitation, the young Lucan was heard to remark: “That is real poetry, whereas all that I have written is utter tripe, child's play!” As a result of Persius' influence, it is often conjectured, Lucan turned away from trivial court poetry and began his Stoic epic. We need hardly wonder how the more frivolous members of the court circle received these harsh, unmusical Satires: they would undoubtedly have ridiculed Persius as a child and paid scant attention to his attacks. Whether or not there were allusions to Nero in Satire 1 and elsewhere—and scholars will probably always disagree on this point—the fact remains that Nero took no overt notice and Persius was primarily a poet of and for the small band of Stoics opposing the current of Roman history.

After Persius' premature death, his Satires and other poetic works came into the hands of his beloved tutor Cornutus; the Satires were unfinished, and the other works were so immature as to be not worth saving. Cornutus discussed the matter with Persius' mother and wisely persuaded her to suppress all but the Satires. In their unfinished condition, these latter required editorial labor, which another of Persius' former friends, the eminent lyric poet mentioned in Satire 6, Caesius Bassus, willingly assumed. The Biography tells us that a number of verses were dropped from one poem, which poem we do not know. Otherwise, it is difficult to estimate the editorial achievement of Bassus. Because the tendency of ancient editors seems to have been to remain closely faithful to the original text, scholars estimate that we now possess the Satires essentially as Persius wrote them. As soon as the little volume appeared, literary controversy erupted: the Biography states that men immediately took sides and either praised the poetry or tried to tear it apart. A generation later, interest in Persius still continued unabated. Martial, writing in the 90's, produced an epigram in which he favorably compared the terse economy of the Satires with the long-winded nonsense of a popular epic poet; precisely the type of recognition which the dead poet would have appreciated. Martial's contemporary, Quintilian, knew Persius' works well and cited him carefully, even commenting on the rare form of one of his words; an indication that the scholars had already commenced their seemingly endless task of explicating the satirist. Finally, the Biography stems from this same period of the 90's, a generation after Persius' death, and attests to the fact that the scholars found much in Persius to inspire them. A decade later, Juvenal started publishing his Satires. Few scholars would hesitate to affirm that Juvenal knew the work of Persius, profited by his predecessor's mistakes, and alluded to Persius' poems.

When studying other Latin poets, with the exception of such immediate and eternal favorites as Vergil and Horace, the student invariably finds that he cannot trace the manuscript tradition of the poet back beyond a certain period, usually in the Fourth Century a.d. Persius' Satires belong to the smaller class of works which remained in constant circulation throughout antiquity; our present text depends upon manuscripts whose affiliations can be followed with confidence back to that first posthumous edition produced by Caesius Bassus. Persius won wide distribution for the same reason that he provoked controversy: because he was a difficult poet with a unique style and a healthy moral tendency. By the end of the Second Century a.d. and throughout the next two centuries, the creative spirit had gone out of Latin literature, and writers were occupied in repeating and varying the inventions of their eminent predecessors, with great versatility, true, but without vital significance. Persius struck the tastes of this period admirably. His Satires became a school text forced down the throat of unwilling young boys. Scholars and moralists appropriated the Satires; poets received no inspiration from them. What satire there was assumed the severe, but much more lucid, form of the Juvenalian or Lucilian attack, far from the ingenious but somehow self-contradictory obscurities of Persius.

The young emperor of the early Third Century, Alexander Severus, who had more than the usual share of moralistic education, used to quote reverently II, 69; “dicite, pontifices, in sancto quid facit aurum?” [“As for you, priests, there's one thing I wish / You'd explain. What's gold doing in the sanctuary?” Translation by Merwin]. And we find that throughout the next two centuries the men who refer to Persius belong in one of the two groups, either in the class of school teachers and commentators or in the new set of Christian theologians and Church fathers, whose purpose was somehow to interpret Christian principles to a world steeped in pagan Classical literature and philosophy. We need say nothing more about the commentators, who delighted in a difficult poet, but who also have given us many of the interpretations upon which we still base our understanding of certain portions of the Satires. Among the Church fathers, the one who knew Persius best and quoted him most freely was Jerome, a fine scholar in his own right. It is not difficult to see why the Satires appealed to a Christian apologist: they stem from the very age in which Christianity began, and they thoroughly condemn the pagan environment which Christianity set out to change. The rigidity of the Stoic position commended itself to many Christians, who often attacked Classical culture with the very words used by the Cynic-Stoic preachers before them. Thus, for Augustine in The City of God II, 6, the passage in Satire III, 66-72 could be generally applied to the moral sickness of the pagan world:

discite et, o miseri, causas cognoscite rerum:
quid sumus et quidnam victuri gignimur, ordo
quis datus, aut metae qua mollis flexus et unde,
quis modus argento, quid fas optare, quid asper
utile nummus habet, patriae carisque propinquis
quantum elargiri deceat, quem te deus esse
iussit et humana qua parte locatus es in re.
[Oh wretches, come learn the causes of things—what we are,
What manner of life we were born for, to what station
Brought forth, how and when to ease round the turning point, and
The limitations of wealth, what it's right to wish for,
The uses of new-minted coin, how much should be spent
On your relatives, how much on your country, to what
Calling God has summoned you, and what your position is
In human affairs.

Translation by W. S. Merwin.]

Whether or not Persius would have appreciated the trend of his popularity, we cannot really say; but it seems significant that his Satires exerted their influence as isolated passages rather than integrated poems, to be dissected by the commentators, studied by the lexicographers, and cited out of context by Christian apologists.

Interest in Persius never died out. The manuscript tradition continued unbroken through the Dark Ages on to the Carolingian Renaissance, after which Persius' Satires constituted a regular part of the curriculum. Our earliest complete manuscript, from Montpellier in France, comes from this period in the Ninth Century; and the large number of manuscripts which Clausen has recently collated from this same general time, attest to a widespread acquaintance with our satirist. The Satires were among the earliest printed works, the first edition appearing in Rome in 1470. There have been many translations, nearly sixty, it has been reckoned. Such translations, as for instance the well-known one by Conington in English, have generally incurred the criticism that they have been produced by Latinists rather than poets. It is to be hoped that the present version, achieved by a young poet sympathetic with his material, will succeed in presenting one of Rome's most ingenious and personally enthusiastic poets to the modern mind. In many respects Persius' virtuosity, coupled as it is with such passion, can say more to us and our literary sensibilities than it could to many an age before our time.

Note

1. Line references in the introduction and in the running heads are to the Latin text in the Loeb edition.