A. PERSIUS FLACCUS

Persius was born, if not to great wealth, at least to an ample competence. His father died when the poet was but six years old, and his education was conducted at Volaterrae under the superintendence of his mother and her second husband, Fusius. For the proper appreciation of the career of Persius, it is a fact of great significance that he seems to have been very much under the influence of the women of his household. To this influence he owed the purity of his habits; but feminine training is not without its disadvantages for the conduct of life. For social refinement there is no better school; but the pet of the home circle is apt to make the grossest blunders when he ventures into the larger world of no manners, and attempts to use the language of outside sinners. And so, when Persius undertakes to rebuke the effeminacy of his time, he outbids the worst passages of Horace and rivals the most lurid indecencies of Juvenal.

The social circle in which Persius moved was not wide. The mark of the beast called Coterie, which is upon the foreheads of the most plentifully belaurelled Roman poets, is on his brow also. But it must be said that the men whom he associated with belonged to the chosen few of a corrupt time, albeit they would have been of more service to their country if they had not recognized themselves so conspicuously as the elect. The Stoic salon in which Persius lived and moved and had his being reminds M. Martha of a Puritan household; it reminds us of the sequestered Legitimist opposition to the France of yesterday. We are so apt to see parallels when we are well acquainted with but one of the lines—or with neither.

Let us pass in review some of the associates and acquaintances of Persius.

To Thrasea’s influence Jahn ascribes Persius’s juvenile essays in the preparation of praetextae, or tragedies with Roman themes, and it is not unlikely that a poetical description of his travels (ὁδοιπορικῶν) referred to some little trip that he took with Thrasea. Thanks to Cornutus, this youthful production—which doubtless was nothing more than a weak imitation of Horace, or haply of Lucilius—was suppressed after the death of the author, and with it his praetexta, and a short poem in honor of the elder Arria also.

The purity of Persius’s morals, and the love which he bore his mother, his sister, his aunt, stand to each other reciprocally as cause and effect; and the occasional crudity of his language is, as we have already seen, the crudity of a bookish man, who thinks that the sure way to do a thing is to overdo it. Persius was a man of handsome person, gentle bearing, attractive manners, and added to the charm of his society the interest which always gathers about those whom the gods love.

He died on his estate at the eighth milestone on the Appian Road, vitio stomachi, eight days before the kalends of December, A.U.C. 815—A.D. 62—in the twenty-eighth year of his age.

The first and last charge brought against Persius is his obscurity. Admitted by all, it is variously interpreted variously excused, variously attacked. Now it is accounted for by the political necessities of the time. Now it is attributed to the perverse ingenuity of the poet, which was fostered by the perverse tendencies of an age when, as Quintilian says, Pervasit iam multos ista persuasio ut id iam demum eleganter dictum putent quod interpretandum sit. Some simply resolve the lack of clearness into the lack of artistic power; others intimate that the fault lies more in the reader than in the author, whose dramatic liveliness, which puzzles us, presented no difficulties to the critics of his own century. But the controversy is not confined to the obscurity of the satires, Persius is all debatable ground. Some admire the pithy sententiousness of the poet; others sneer at his priggish affectation of superiority. Some point to the bookish reminiscences, which bewray the mere student; others recall the example of Ben Jonson, of Molière, to show that in literature, as in life, the greatest borrowers are often the richest men, and bid us observe with what rare and vivid power he has painted every scene that he has witnessed with his own eyes. To some he is a copyist of copyists; to others his real originality asserts itself most conspicuously where the imitation seems to be the closest. Julius Scaliger calls him miserrimus auctor; Mr. Conington notes his kindred to Carlyle.

To the end of the study of Persius, it is best to look away from the conflicting views of the critics, and to abandon the attempt to distinguish between the weight of facts and the momentum of rhetoric in the balanced antitheses of praise and blame. The position of the poet will be most accurately determined by the calculation of the statics of his department and his age.

Yet another form of the comic drama was the Mime, and we have the explicit statement of Joannes Lydus that Persius imitated the famous mimographer, Sophron; and although the fragments of Sophron are so scanty that this statement can not be verified, it is not without its intrinsic probability. The mimetic power of Sophron is notorious, and Persius might well have taken lessons from the man whom Plato acknowledged as his master. The dialogue, thus borrowed from the mime, became the artistic form of philosophic composition, and, as Persius’s Satires are essentially moral treatises, it is not surprising that he should have made large use of the same machinery. Plato himself furnished the movement for two of his essays, and we can detect a community of models between Persius and some of the later Greek writers. Lucian, the mercurial, and Persius, the saturnine, often work on the same theme, each in his way; and when the dialogue is dropped, and the bustle of the drama is succeeded by the effects of the scene-painter’s craft, we are reminded of another group of copyists, and find all the picturesque detail for which Persius is so famous in the letters of Alkiphron and Aristainetos, themselves far-off echoes of the New Comedy.

Besides this, we may boldly say that reminiscence is no robbery. The verses, the phrases, the arguments that we know by heart often become so wholly ours that they weave themselves unconsciously into the texture of our speech. We use them as convenient forms of expression, without the least thought of plagiarism. We quote them, thinking that they are as familiar to others as they are to ourselves. They constitute, as it were, a sympathetic medium between men of culture. And so Persius repeated group after group of the words of Horace as innocently as the Augustan poets translated their Greek models, and thought no more harm than did the Emperor Julian when he Platonized, or Thackeray when he transfused the classics that he learned at the Charter House into his own matchless English. That he did it to excess is not to be denied. He never learned the lesson of Apelles—what is enough.

Tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex?

What line sinks deeper than the sombre verse,

Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta?

We have seen that Persius was not slavishly dependent on Horace, assimilated the material that he derived from him, raised the worldly wisdom of Horace to the ideal standard of the Stoic, and followed a different canon of dramatic art. To this we may add that Persius, with a certain aristocratic disdain of conventionalities, goes deeper into the current of vulgar diction than the freedman’s son dared. Persius felt that he could afford to talk slang, and he talked it; and the commentators have found it necessary to hold Petronius in the left hand, as well as Horace in the right.

* In this section of the Introduction I follow Zeller’s Essay on Marcus Aurelius (Vorträge u. Abhandlungen) so closely that some special acknowledgment seems to be necessary.

The object of Stoicism is by means of virtue and knowledge to make men independent of all without them, and happy in that independence. It is a pantheism: God revealed in every thing; God’s law recognized in every thing; God the substance from which every thing proceeds, to which every thing returns; the Original Fire, from which every thing is born again. God is the all-pervasive Spirit, Fate, Providence. Obedience to his eternal laws constitutes virtue and happiness. Good and evil are to be measured by this standard. All that brings us toward this is Good; all that carries us away from it is Evil. Every thing else is indifferent.

In Grace or out of Grace, says the Christian; or, as Calvin expresses it in his nervous language, Qui Christum dimidium habere vult, totum perdit. In Virtue or out of Virtue, says the Stoic. There is nothing between. The wise are perfectly wise; the foolish are totally foolish. ‘There is not a half-ounce of rectitude in the fool.’ The vicious man is as mad as Orestes—nay, madder.

The difference between human beings is slight. Alkibiades, the high-born and the handsome, is no better than shriveled old Baukis, who makes her livelihood by selling greens. All external distinctions sink into utter insignificance by the side of this great contrast of knowledge and ignorance into which virtue and vice are resolved.

But it is to be observed that the Stoicism of Persius, like the Stoicism of Marcus Antoninus, was of a softer, milder, more religious character than that of Zeno and Chrysippus; and when the Stoic discourses on the nothingness of all earthly things, the ills of life, man’s moral weakness, and his need of help, we hear language that reminds us now of the epistles of the New Testament, now of the doctrines of Buddha. ‘The philosopher,’ says Zeller, ‘is a physician for the soul, a priest and servant of the Deity among men, and this he shows by the most unlimited, devoted, unreserved philanthropy.’ And not only so, but the Stoic does not disdain to make life brighter in the social circle; and the Sixth Satire of our author, which Nisard considers to be a youthful escapade of the poet—qui s’évertue comme un écolier qui sort de classe—is no less truly Stoic than the high-strung Third.

The manuscripts of Persius are remarkable for their age, their number, and the stupid bewilderment of the transcribers. The best is the Codex Montepessulanus, or Montpellier manuscript, with which the Codex Vaticanus closely coincides; but, in the words of Jahn, Nullus Persii codex tantae auctoritatis est ut in rebus dubiis eius vestigia tuto sequaris sed semper inter complures optio eaque non raro incerta datur.