Chapter V: Persius: Stoic Satire

The _Vita_ by Valerius Probus—Persius’s friends—Cornutus, his
Stoic teacher—The six satires—Sources of Persius—Horatian and
Bionean influences—The charge of obscurity—Vivid pictures—Other
features of his style—His hexameter—Did he assail Nero?—Varying
judgements upon him.

PERSIUS

The essential facts of the short life of Aulus[792] Persius Flaccus are preserved in a biography taken from the commentary on the poet by Valerius Probus. Persius[793] was born at Volaterrae in Etruria, and lived nearly twenty-eight years, from December, A.D. 34, to November, 62. Jerome, who felt attracted to his thought, corroborates both dates on the Abrahamic system of chronology. When about six years old, the boy lost his father, a man of equestrian rank; and his mother, who bore the Etruscan name Sisennia, remarried, but lost her second husband Fusius, a municipal knight, a few years later. It is recorded of the youth that he was of gentle and modest character, good-looking, and affectionate to his female relatives, his mother, sister and aunt. Till he was twelve he was brought up in Etruria; his education at Rome began in A.D. 46. First he studied literature under the able but unprincipled Remmius Palaemon, and, even if temperamentally and morally antipathetic to this famous teacher, Persius would at any rate learn the technique of poetry in a school where the authors specially taught included Terence, Horace and Virgil. Later he worked at rhetoric under Verginius Flavus, whose renown for eloquence earned Nero’s hatred and who was banished at the same time as Musonius Rufus, the Stoic. There is little to support Lehmann’s hypothesis[794] that republican tendencies were conveyed by Verginius to Persius; but at least the rhetorical method, practised though it apparently was by Verginius with some modifications, must have influenced Persius through such features as its search for striking phrases, and its introduction of _communes loci_. All the same, Persius had been schoolboy enough to play truant from rhetorical exercises, which he found unprofitable and distasteful: a touch of oil might produce an appearance of weak eyes and enable him to shirk the recitation lesson and so avoid declaiming some fine dying speech of Cato. Dice or a top might be preferable to the _suasoria_.[795]

Among his friends was the lyric poet Caesius Bassus, addressed in his sixth satire, who became his posthumous editor. He respected like a father Servilius Nonianus, ex-consul, orator and historian, who one day by the plaudits of his audience attracted the Emperor Claudius to a reading which he was giving near the Palatine Hill.[796] Persius’s relationship to the younger Arria brought him into touch with the Stoic senator Thrasea, whose _Life of Cato_ was a source for Plutarch, and who, though not in active opposition, wore a look of gravity equivalent to a permanent rebuke for Nero.[797] Neither Thrasea nor Nonianus would necessarily have inculcated upon Persius hatred of the imperial system, and yet one may guess that Thrasea’s conservatism had its influence on his sympathies and tastes. He had composed juvenile verses on the death of the elder Arria; and he mixed in Stoic circles. At sixteen he began a close and uninterrupted friendship with the Stoic teacher Cornutus, and through him became acquainted with two Greek philosophers of the day, Claudius Agathurnus (or Agathemerus) and Petronius Aristocrates, and with the young poet Lucan, like himself one of Cornutus’s pupils. Lucan’s admiration for his friend’s talent was enthusiastic: Persius’s writings, he declared, were genuine poetry, and his own mere sportive pieces (_illa esse uera poemata, sua ludos_). To Seneca, Lucan’s uncle, Persius was not drawn:[798] the courtier’s pliant and adaptable Stoicism evidently did not commend itself to this young devotee. Literature apart, the most vital influence on Persius came from the intimacy and instruction of Cornutus,[799] to whose philosophic power his pupil’s satires are the best surviving testimony. Cornutus was also a tragic poet, grammarian and author of a commentary on Virgil. Already, no doubt, suspect as a professor of Stoicism, he was banished for the suggestion that Nero’s projected epic on Roman history would be too long in 400 books.

Affectionate gratitude towards his master is one of the winning traits in Persius and adds greatly to the human interest of the fifth satire, which is addressed to him. On quitting boyhood, Persius relates he had been welcomed to “the Socratic bosom” of Cornutus, and had all moral twists straightened by a rule applied with subtle skill:

What share, sweet friend Cornutus, of my soul
Thou art, ’tis joy to show. Strike it and test
With care what part rings true, what is but paint
And plaster of the tongue. Here would I ask
A hundred voices to proclaim clear-toned
Thy firm enlodgement in my bosom’s folds
And let my words unseal the secret love
Deep-hid unutterable in my heart....
Just when my way grew puzzling, when, unversed
In life, my ignorance let nervous thoughts
Stray down the branching cross-roads, I consigned
Myself to thee, and thou, Cornutus, tookst
To thy Socratic breast my tender years.[800]

A few lines later he rejoices in their close union in relaxation and toil:

With thee I wore away long sunny days
And with thee culled the early bloom of night
For banqueting, I can recall; we twain
Were one in work, with one set time for rest,
O’er modest board unbending gravity.
Doubt not hereof—our lives by law ordained
Accord, both guided by a single star.[801]

Persius died of an ailment of the stomach on his estate about eight miles out of Rome along the Appian Way. Possessed of considerable wealth (2,000,000 sesterces), he bequeathed a collection of books, including 700 volumes by the Stoic Chrysippus as well as money and silver plate to Cornutus, who accepted the library but renounced the other legacies in favour of his pupil’s relatives. Persius left only a small amount of literary work, for the _Life_ remarks that he wrote seldom and slowly (_scriptitauit et raro et tarde_), as might be inferred from his style. His juvenile works included a _praetexta_, a book of travels[802] (if _Hodoeporicon_ is the true reading in the _Vita_), and his lines already mentioned on the heroic Arria. All these were, after his death, destroyed by the advice of Cornutus, who made slight corrections on the half-dozen satires before entrusting their publication to Caesius Bassus.

There is much to make Persius an interesting study. He was the first Stoic verse satirist of Rome; he was possessed by a moral earnestness almost preternaturally beyond his years, and died comparatively young; with his one book, as Quintilian remarked,[803] he earned genuine glory; he has throughout the ages attracted some and repelled others; he is undoubtedly difficult to understand, and yet has exerted a great influence on thinkers.

His six satires amount only to 650 hexameters: the shortest (iv.) being 52 lines long, and the longest (v.) 191. None but the first, for which it is said he received stimulus from reading Lucilius, can be strictly called a satire: the other five are “sermons,” rather in the modern than in the Horatian sense. Besides, there have come down fourteen choliambic lines appearing in some MSS. as a prologue, in others as an epilogue. They may well be neither, but the single piece saved from Persius’s other poems—a mock-modest disclaimer of inspiration which need not be taken literally as containing solemn misstatements by the poet about himself.[804]

Satire I, on the right and wrong spirit in current literature, is combined with the important secret (_opertum_) that everybody is an ass (_auriculas asini quis non habet?_)—a jocular offgrowth of the Stoic creed that all but the sage adept are fools. This initial attack on the corruption of literature furnished hints for the first satire of Juvenal. Persius in his imagined dialogue with a friend judges decadent literary taste to be a symptom of moral decay, and this stings him to pungent criticisms upon the foppery and ostentation of public recitations by authors who titillate the inward parts of a depraved audience with their licentious poetry. Private dinner-parties end in listening to insipid trash about a Phyllis or a Hypsipyle—but can a host get honest opinions on his poems from his guests? Heroics are attempted by writers who could not describe a simple rural scene, and there is a mania for archaisms and archaic poets, like Accius and Pacuvius.[805] What is the good of artificial oratory and polished antitheses, if there is a plain charge of theft to meet? And surely the manhood of the old Roman past has vanished when poetry apes nerveless stuff like,

Grim horns they filled with Mimallonean booms.[806]

The poet’s friend remonstrates: such unpopular truths may win a chilling reception for him in high society. By way of answer, Persius recalls the outspokenness of Lucilius and Horace’s winning pleasantries at the expense of human foibles.[807] Is it sacrilege for Persius to mutter the truth and confide his little whispered secret, this joke of his own (_hoc ridere meum_), to the safe-keeping of a hole in the earth—“All the world’s got donkey’s ears?” He asks for readers who have drawn an inspiring breath from the masters of the old Greek comedy—Cratinus and Eupolis and the “Grand Old Man” (_praegrandi sene_) of comic drama, Aristophanes. This satire, then, is a manifesto of literary independence in contrast to the prevailing mode and of censorial independence after the example of Lucilius. The remaining five contain his Stoic message to his generation.

Satire II, on praying aright, is a brief disquisition addressed to a learned friend, Macrinus, on a similar theme to that in Juvenal’s tenth Satire. If Persius cannot rival Juvenal’s brilliant rhetorical skill and force, he at least surpasses him in the impression which he leaves of moral dignity and almost religious fervour. Condensed and scathing in its denunciation of the immorality and foolishness of petitions brazenly offered to the gods though unfit to be overheard by men, the poem rises to a noble elevation at its close upon the spiritual value of true worship:

O souls bent earthward, with no heavenly spark,
What good to take our human thoughts to prayer,
Judging God’s pleasure from this sinful flesh?...
It sins, flesh sins, yet gains by sin; but say,
Ye priests, what profits gold in holy place?
As much as maiden’s dolls at Venus’ shrine!
Give we the gods what from his lordly plate
Messala’s blear-eyed scion could not give—
Duty to God and man in soul well blent
And stainless inmost thoughts and noble heart
In honour steeped—these let me to the shrine
Convey and humble meal will win my prayer.[808]

Satire III, on right living and right thinking, expostulates with laziness which childishly fails to face the serious purposes of life. It opens with a concrete picture of lounging: “already bright morning enters the windows, widening the narrow chinks with light,” and yet we go on snoring off last night’s debauch. Is it not a scandal to pass an unworthy existence like a Natta?—Only, his vice is ingrained hopelessly:

He feels no guilt; knows not his loss; deep-drowned
He makes no bubble at the surface more.[809]

May the Great Sire inflict on monsters of wickedness no other punishment than a revelation of virtue as she is:

Let them see Virtue—pine for Her they’ve lost.[810]

Then the poet commends the wisdom derivable from true philosophy in spite of the guffaws of the unsympathetic soldier:

Learn, hapless ones; the causes grasp of things;
Grasp what we are, what life we’re born to live;[811]

and from the same Stoic system one must learn the way at turning-points in one’s career, the limits of wealth and of desire, the claims of fatherland and kin, and the part God has ordained one to play.

Satire IV, on the right knowledge of oneself, opens with a brief Socratic examination of the claim made by “great Pericles’s ward” (Alcibiades) to guide the state. Of course, wisdom comes before he has a beard! (_ante pilos uenit_). He ventures to advise the “Quirites” (a Roman touch in what is a Greek situation) on delicate problems of policy, while making mere enjoyment his chief good and having no higher conceptions than those of an old vegetable-woman of the streets (an allusion that recalls the crone in the _Satyricon_, who was Encolpius’s conductress to a haunt of vice).

How few to sound their own true nature try!
Inside the bag of one in front they pry;[812]

and yet the popular estimate of your character is worthless; you must retire within yourself and examine the state of your soul:

Dwell with yourself: learn your scant furnishing.[813]

Satire V, on the right freedom conferred by Stoic principles, has already been cited for its cordial acknowledgement of the poet’s debt to the guidance of Cornutus. The model on which the whole is based is the seventh satire of Horace’s second book. In contrast to the unity of feeling between himself and Cornutus, Persius notes the variety of aims in the world:

Motley is life: thousand the sorts of men.[814]

Men will not learn the one true lesson: they are in perpetual quest after a to-morrow which is never reached. What man needs is freedom—not the merely civic sort granted when a Roman praetor turned a slave into a freedman by formal stroke of the rod, but the true freedom guaranteed by moral reason:

’Twas not a praetor’s task to give to fools
Fine sense of duty or grant power to use
Our fleeting life: you’d sooner teach the harp
To any hulking clown.[815]

Without reason, which enables a man to distinguish good from bad, his every act is sin (one of the hard sayings typical of orthodox Stoicism):

Reason has granted naught to thee: put out
A finger: _that_ is wrong. Yet what so slight?
But never frankincense will win thy prayer
That e’en a short half-ounce of right shall dwell
In fools. God sunders right from foolishness.[816]

And so, if you have passions within that master you, or if you feel the rival claims of avarice and luxury, then you are a slave. The two hooks pull opposite ways. If you escape once, you may still drag your chain. The truly free man is he who can inhibit himself from an evil impulse and disentangle himself from weaknesses like ambition or superstition.

Satire VI, on the right use of wealth, is not so decidedly a Stoic homily as its four predecessors. Wintering at Luna on the Ligurian coast by the Tuscan Sea (_meum mare_), Persius addresses to Caesius Bassus his claim to spend money on reasonable objects, supporting it by an argument with a supposed heir who desires to have the fortune saved intact. The statement by the biographer that some lines were removed from the last book (_uersus aliqui dempti sunt ultimo libro_) is best understood to imply that this final satire is incomplete.[817]

The subject of the sources of Persius is one of considerable complexity. His material was largely provided by his education, associates, and his own tastes. Stoic by training and conviction, he was more orthodox and more dogmatic than most Romans, and so took over and restated with scant argument some of the extreme paradoxes of the School. His studies under rhetoricians who preferred the classic Augustan models account for the opposition which he displays in his first satire to the revived Alexandrinism of Rome, and for his borrowings from Virgil, and beyond all others from Horace. Along with Horace he adopted for imitation Horace’s outspoken master in satire, Lucilius.[818] His Horatian debts are visible everywhere, in reminiscent word or phrase or idea, all retaining the mark of their origin despite Persius’s inveterate habit of contorted involution, which of set purpose departs from Horace’s clear straightforwardness. Thus, the simple rule of pathos in the _Ars Poetica_, “If you would have me weep, you must yourself grieve first,” is by Persius elaborated into

He who would bow me down with woeful plaint
Must shed true tears, not tears prepared o’ernight.[819]

The reappearance of Horatian names gives an added effect of imitation, _e.g._ Pedius (i. 85), Nerius (ii. 14), Natta (iii. 31), Craterus (iii. 65), Bestius (vi. 37). Even a partial consideration of Persius’s sources shows that his aim was to express Stoic thought in language largely Horatian—a _tour de force_ bound to fall short of perfect success; for no writer could hope to wed the suppleness of Horace to Stoic rigidity. Jahn emphasized the influence of the mime on Persius in addition to that of Horace; and there is a possibility that the dramatic realism of mime-writers like Sophron acted on the satires.[820] To these must be added the influences of rhetoric and of the Cynico-stoical disputations. Rhetoric accounts for many of the diverse elements in his style, such as literary reminiscence, academic common-place, and argumentative artifice. Stoic preaching, which had for long been abandoned either to professional orators or to popular speakers, was now brought by Persius into literature. He might easily have imbibed the style of the Stoic diatribe (διατριβή), or polemic disputation, from Cornutus; and at Thrasea’s house he could have heard expositions by a Stoic like Musonius or by a Cynic like Demetrius.[821] Cynic inspiration had already operated on Roman literature through Varro’s Menippean satires, and Horace alludes to the bitter wit of Bion.[822] The Bionean diatribe, given to blending learned argument with forceful words from popular speech, was likely to win attention from a writer fired, like Persius, almost to proselytizing ardour; and Greek Cynic literature had itself inherited and in turn bequeathed elements from Socratic dialogue and drama and rhetoric which contributed to the vigorous presentation of a philosophical argument. Just as the argumentative manner of certain of St. Paul’s epistles is affected by the Stoic diatribe, so Persius keeps up a similar tradition when he develops a theme by answering an objector implied or definitely introduced.[823]

Worked on by influences thus complex, enamoured of condensation, of allusiveness, of subtle borrowings, jerky in his management of dialogue so that a change of speaker is sometimes difficult to detect, Persius developed a crabbed manner of expression which makes him the hardest of Latin poets to read. Enjoyment is apt to vanish amidst the toil of disentanglement. Conscious as he was of the mission to proclaim salutary truths, he yet seems to have forgotten the effective force of clearness, and his curiously laboured style is certainly not that of the Cynico-stoic disquisition. The failure to support by connected argument dogmatic tenets, in themselves possibly intelligible enough, and the departure from a logical order of thought in the structure of some satires further contribute to his obscurity. Strictures upon him date from ancient times. Johannes Lydus, whose record of Persius’s imitation of Sophron, though challenged, has some facts in its favour, added that Persius surpassed the obscurity of Lycophron.[824] In the time of Louis XIV Nicolas Chorier in his _Aloisia_ imagined a letter apostrophizing Persius: “You wrapped yourself in blind night.... You did not want to be understood, perchance you too did not understand!... You lurked inside yourself, lest the painstaking sagacity of learning might discover you. You were your own envelope.”[825]

The obscurity often lies in expression. A notoriously difficult line occurs at iv. 49.

_si puteal multa cautus uibice flagellas_,

which, even supposing it is to be translated “if craftily you scourge the exchange with many a lash,” still leaves the sense cryptic. Excessive compression may prove puzzling, as “While I pluck forth old _grandams_ from your breast,”[826] meaning “grandmotherly notions”; or, on testing the true meaning of applause, “Shake out thoroughly all this ‘_bravo_!’ (_belle hoc excute totum_); what does it not hold inside?” Another example turns on Janus’s luck in having two faces so that he cannot be mocked behind his back by imitation of a stork’s bill, or of the ears of an ass, or by shooting out the tongue:

O Janus, whom the stork ne’er pecks behind,
Nor hand that nimbly apes white donkey-ears,
Nor tongue as long as parched Apulian dog’s,[827]

where strangely enough the essential key-notions of mockery and of putting out the tongue are omitted. Occasionally an idiom may pull the reader up, for example his liking for infinitives in substantival meanings.[828] Thus it is not at first obvious either to readers or commentators that _iratus mammae lallare recusas_ is intended to signify “pettishly refuse your nurse’s lullaby.” Elsewhere the difficulty may lie in the disconnected course of his thought and the suddenness of his transitions; so that one is kept on the alert by what is no light reading for tired heads.

There are, however, compensations. The test is whether under a cloud of difficulties there remains something real and sincere. Immediate delight is not obtainable from Persius: there are no flights of pleasant fancy, no ideal scenes, no passages of sheer beauty; and, if the reader is transported to no ideal world, he may be tempted to doubt—some critics have doubted—whether the world of the young satirist is a real world, whether his exposure of human weakness smacks more of Stoic books than of actual life. Persius did not write for the crowd: he in particular does not yield his secret except to the intimacy and sympathy of a thinking mind. His very obscurity is a fruit of a half-cloistered delicacy which shrank from revealing itself in ordinary modes of expression, and therefore adopted a composite style in which Lucilius and Horace, the mime and the argumentative Stoic diatribe are all ingredients. At the same time there has too often been a disposition to regard him mainly as a youthful zealot, fanatically fervent in his Stoicism, who had not mixed with his fellow-men. Sometimes it is forgotten that while he can be provokingly obscure, he can also be vivid, and, though his range is not wide, can show a power of observing life around him.

Among his sketches memorable for realism are those of the affected reciter;[829] the laziness of the debauchee snoring as the sunshine pours through the shutter-chinks and the shadow touches the fifth line of the sun-dial;[830] the fretful struggle to get to work with book and ink and pen;[831] the truant’s games;[832] the centurion’s idea of philosophers as

lugubrious Solons
With head bent down, pinning their eyes to earth;[833]

a national holiday on the occasion of a victory over the Germans;[834] a shipwrecked friend who

Lies on the beach himself, with gods hard by—
Huge figures off the vessel’s stern—and ribs
Of his maimed ship now in the seagulls’ path;[835]

or the funeral of a Roman master by whose last will and testament his favourite slaves have been emancipated:

Doorwards he stretches heels now stiff and cold;
Then cits, made yesterday, in freedom’s cap
Shoulder the corpse.[836]

Vigour also characterizes his metaphors. A warning against offending high society by outspokenness is given thus:

Beware, please, lest the doorsteps of the great
Turn cool to you (_limina frigescant_).[837]

A kindred vigour produces violent expressions like “purveying titbits for other people’s ears” (_auriculis alienis colligis escas_), or the forcible personification of money spent on costly sacrifices in an unrewarded pursuit after wealth:

Till the last coin, now hopeless and befooled
At the purse-bottom heaves its sigh in vain.[838]

A passage in the fifth satire[839] is illuminating as to Persius’s own opinion of his style. There Cornutus is imagined to tell the poet that his forte lies not in mouthing high-flown tragedy, nor in foolish cawing (_cornicaris_) of mysterious nonsense, nor in straining his puffed cheeks with rhetoric till they go bang with a _pop_,[840] but, as he declares in Latin words which intentionally echo Horace, “Nay, you follow the language of ordinary life, dexterous in the subtlety of your phrase-making” (_iunctura callidus acri_); or, in other terms, it was for Persius to cultivate plain satire instead of dramatizing any mythological supper of horrors. The words _iunctura callidus acri_ provide a clue both to his merits and to his defects; for his phrase-making, at times strikingly successful, at other times overleaps itself and becomes one factor in his Browningesque obscurity.

The ring of Persius’s hexameters differs from that of Horace’s, which were constructed without regard to the high-sounding epic tradition and designedly lowered in tone to suit the half-conversational character of his _sermones_. It is natural that Persius, who interpreted his Stoic message as lofty and severe, should not write with so easy a movement, but should adopt a more mechanical structure and more conventional cadence. There is in Persius a smaller number of spondaic words, a different management of _caesurae_, and a rarer use of monosyllabic endings; but, like Horace, he freely admits elision, and so presents a contrast with one of the features of the hexameters parodied in his first satire, as well as of the contemporary verse of Calpurnius Siculus, of the Einsiedeln eclogues and of the _Laus Pisonis_.

A hypothesis maintained with different degrees of detail by different commentators would make Persius not merely a mouthpiece of Stoicism but a political satirist who ventured to assail Nero. In the _Vita_ a closing paragraph of unsettled authenticity affirms that in his fulminations against the modern school of literature he included an attack on the emperor.[841] This contained the expression _auriculas asini Mida rex habet_, which Cornutus altered for safety to _auriculas asini quis non habet?_ to prevent Nero from thinking he was aimed at. Then the scholia gave varying accounts of the source of the hexameters in the first satire at which Persius jests, but one view was that they were Nero’s; and so ancient commentators began to see throughout the satire a series of allusions to the emperor. Casaubon maintained that in Satire IV Alcibiades, the would-be statesman, stands for Nero, and though Jahn does not follow him here, as he does regarding Satire I, Casaubon has had supporters in Pretor and others.[842] Lehmann has gone further. He has claimed to find covert but stinging allusions to Nero in Satire V, the very satire which to most readers must appear remarkable in that, while it handles freedom, it avoids all political aspects of the question. The more the hypothesis grows by accretion of hitherto unrecognized allusions, the weaker it seems. Why should Nero alone be attacked? Why should the author have been so unphilosophical as to single out for constant censure an individual when all the world fell far short of Stoic perfection? Might not Persius well remember that Horace, his model, left politics on one side? And are we to be asked to believe that Cornutus took the trouble to alter the words “King Midas” to avoid giving possible offence to the emperor, and yet left in the text not merely copious hits at his Majesty more or less veiled, but actually lines of Nero’s own composition of which the satirist made fun?

Opinions have varied greatly concerning Persius. His fellow-student Lucan, as already mentioned, praised him whole-heartedly, and his satires on publication won immediate esteem.[843] He was popular with the Fathers of the Church for his strong advocacy of virtue and his _anima naturaliter Christiana_, and he has attracted enthusiastic commentators since the days of Valerius Probus in his own century. Isaac Casaubon wrote of his own unsparing labours on him: _in Persio omnem ingenii conatum effudimus_. On the other hand, Joseph Scaliger remarked sarcastically about that same commentary: _au Perse de Casaubon la saulce vaut mieux que le poisson_. It is common literary knowledge that he left his mark on Rabelais and Montaigne, on Ben Jonson and Boileau, which argues in him something deeper than what Nisard saw—the knack of reproducing servilely in verse ready-made philosophical ideas. Simcox thinks he improves upon every reading, and a French editor[844] declares _je quitte Perse avec un sincère regret et comme on quitte un vieil ami_; whereas a German scholar is delighted to lay him down: _mit Freuden legen wir den Dichter aus der Händen_,[845] and another writer discovers in the satires a sea of darkness.[846] It may be a half-cynical suggestion that editors come to love Persius in proportion to the toil which he has cost them, but one may fairly take leave to doubt whether an exponent of doctrines with which he hopes to better his fellowmen is justified in being so far from plain. It is true that a recent editor sought to acquit him of obscurity, arguing that he is difficult but not obscure.[847] Most students will hold that he is both, and that it must be largely a matter of disposition whether a reader will resent or not the trouble involved. Even that very earnestness in preaching morality which has gained him champions may appear to others the priggishness of a bookish young recluse. Still, in justice to Persius, it should be remembered that his lack of knowledge of the world may be easily overstated: his very education in rhetoric would open his eyes to evil; he had travelled; and many of his pictures show that he had observed life.

Persius set himself the task of presenting Stoic homilies in Horatian guise—a task perhaps harder, perhaps involving more incompatible elements even than that which Lucretius undertook when he wedded Epicureanism to the heroic hexameter. But whatever their obstacles, Lucretius attained his goal triumphantly, whereas Persius cannot be said to have won that perfect mastery over form and material which begets the greatest literature. Yet, obscurities notwithstanding, his voice has influenced the world and its thinkers; for it has at least been understood that there breathes through Persius no light-hearted complaisance with the frivolities of life, but a stern urgency always beckoning towards an austere ideal.