An ancient _Vita Persii_, of uncertain authorship, of evident
authenticity, gives all that it is needful for us to know about our
poet-- much more than is vouchsafed to us for the rich individuality of
Lucilius, much more than we can divine for the unsubstantial character
of Juvenal.
Aulus Persius Flaccus was born on the day before the nones of December,
A.U.C. 787, A.D. 34, at Volaterrae, in Etruria. That Luna in Liguria was
his birthplace is a false inference of some scholars from the words
_meum mare_ in a passage of the sixth satire, where he describes his
favorite resort on the Riviera.
The family of Persius belonged to the old Etruscan nobility, and more
than one Persius appears in inscriptions found at Volaterrae. Other
circumstances make for his Etruscan origin: the Etruscan form of his
name, _Aules_, so written in most MSS. of his Life; the Etruscan name of
his mother, Sisennia; the familiar spitefulness of his mention of
Arretium, the allusions to the Tuscan haruspex, to the Tuscan pedigree;
the sneering mention of the Umbrians-- fat-witted folk, who lived across
the Tuscan border. Most of these, it is true, are minute points, and
would be of little weight in the case of an author of wider vision, but
well-nigh conclusive in a writer like Persius, who tried to make up for
the narrowness of his personal experience by a microscopic attention to
details.
Persius belonged to the same sphere of society as Maecenas. Like
Maecenas an Etruscan, he was, like Maecenas, an _eques Romanus_. The
social class of which he was a member did much for Roman literature;
Etruria's contributions were far less valuable, and Mommsen is right
when he recognizes in both these men, so unlike in life and in
principle-- the one a callous wordling, the other a callow philosopher--
the stamp of their strange race, a race which is a puzzle rather than a
mystery. Indeed, the would-be mysterious is one of the most salient
points in the style of Persius as in the religion of the Etruscans, and
Persius's elaborate involution of the commonplace is parallel with the
secret wisdom of his countrymen. The minute detail of the Etruscan
ritual has its counterpart in the minute detail of Persius's style, and
the want of a due sense of proportion and a certain coarseness of
language in our author remind us of the defects of Etruscan art and the
harshness of the Etruscan tongue.
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.
When Persius was twelve years old he went to Rome, as Horace and Ovid
had done before him, for the purpose of a wider and higher education,
and was put to school with Verginius Flaccus, the rhetorician, and
Remmius Palaemon, the grammarian. Verginius Flaccus was exiled from Rome
by Nero, with Musonius Rufus, on account of the prominence which he had
achieved as a teacher, and Quintilian quotes him as an authority in his
profession. Remmius Palaemon, the other teacher of Persius, a man of
high attainments and low principles, was one of the most illustrious
grammarians of a time when grammarians could be illustrious. A freedman,
with a freedman's character, he was arrogant and vain, grasping and
prodigal-- in short, a Sir Epicure Mammon of a professor. But his
prodigious memory, his ready flow of words, his power of improvising
poetry, attracted many pupils during his prolonged life, and after his
death he was cited with respect by other grammarians-- a rare apotheosis
among that captious tribe. The first satirical efforts of ingenuous
youth are usually aimed at their preceptors, and the verses which
Persius quotes in the First Satire are quite as likely to be from the
school of Palaemon as from the poems of Nero.
But the true teacher of Persius, the man to whom he himself attributed
whatever progress he made in that 'divine philosophy' which deals at
once with the constitution of the universe and the conduct of life-- his
'spiritual director,' to use the language of Christian ascetics-- was
Cornutus. Persius is one of those literary celebrities whose title to
fame is not beyond dispute; and while some maintain his right to high
distinction on the ground of intrinsic merit, others seek with perhaps
too much avidity for the accidents to which he is supposed to owe his
renown. If it is necessary to excuse, as it were, his reputation, the
relation of Persius to Cornutus might go far to explain the care which
schoolmasters have taken of the memory of the poet. No matter how
crabbed the teacher may be, how austere the critic, the opening of the
Fifth Satire, with its warm tribute to the guide of his life and the
friend of his heart, calls up the image of the ideal pupil, and touches
into kindred the brazen bowels of Didymus.
Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, of Leptis in Africa, was a philosopher,
grammarian, and rhetorician. It has been conjectured that he was a
freedman of the literary family of the Annaei; and this is rendered
probable by the fact that Annaeus Lucanus, the nephew of Annaeus Seneca,
was his pupil. The year of his life and the year of his death are alike
unknown. He was banished from Rome by Nero because he had ventured to
suggest that Nero's projected epic on Roman history would be too long if
drawn out to four hundred books, and that the imperial poem would find
no readers. When one of Nero's flatterers rejoined that Chrysippus was a
still more voluminous author, Cornutus had the bad taste to point out
the practical importance of the writings of Chrysippus in contrast with
Nero's unpractical project; and Nero, who had a poet's temper, if not a
poet's gifts, sent him to an island, there to revise his literary
judgment. Cornutus was not only a man of various learning in philosophy,
rhetoric, and grammar, but a tragic poet of some note, and perhaps a
satirist. Whether the jumble that bears the name of Cornutus or
Phurnutus, _De Natura Deorum_, is in any measure traceable to our
Cornutus, is not pertinent to our subject. Of more importance to us than
his varied attainments is his pure and lofty character, which made him
worthy of the ardent affection with which Persius clung to his 'Socratic
bosom.' It is recorded to his honor that Persius having bequeathed to
him his library and a considerable sum of money, he accepted the books
only and relinquished the money to the family of Persius. Nor did he
cease his loving care for his friend after his ashes, but revised his
satires, and suppressed the less mature performances of the young poet.
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.
Among his early friends was Caesius Bassus, to whom the Sixth Satire is
addressed: an older contemporary, who had studied with the same master,
next to Horace, by a long remove, among the Roman lyrists. To his
fellow-pupils belong Calpurnius, who is more than doubtfully identified
with the author of the Bucolics; and Lucan (Annaeus Lucanus), the poet
of the Pharsalia, who shared with him the instructions of Cornutus, and
is said to have shown the most fervent admiration of the genius of his
school-fellow. We are told that when the First Satire was recited, Lucan
exclaimed that these were true poems. Whether he accompanied this
encomium with a disparagement of his own performances, or simply had
reference to the modest disclaimer of Persius's Prologue, as Jahn is
inclined to think, does not appear. The anecdote is in perfect keeping
with the perfervid Spanish temper of Lucan and Lucan's family. But this
momentary burst of admiration is no indication of any genuine sympathy
between the effusive and rhetorical Cordovan and the shy, philosophical
Etruscan. Nominally they belonged to the same school-- the Stoic; but
Persius was ready to resist unto blood, Lucan's Stoicism was a mere
parade.
While this anecdote leaves us in suspense as to the relations between
Lucan and Persius, we have express evidence that there was no sympathy
between Persius and Seneca. They met, we are informed, but the poet took
little pleasure in the society of the essayist. This is not the place to
attempt a characteristic of this famous writer, who, like Persius,
leaves few readers indifferent. Once the idol of the moralists-- who of
all old birds are the most easily caught with chaff-- Seneca has fallen
into comparative disfavor within the last few decades; yet sometimes a
vigorous champion starts up to do battle for him, such as Farrar in
England, and, with more moderation, Constant Martha in France; and his
cause is by no means hopeless if the advocate can keep his hearers from
reading Seneca for themselves. It is impossible not to admire Seneca in
passages; it seems very difficult to retain the admiration after reading
him continuously. The glittering phrase masks a poverty of thought; 'the
belt with its broad gold covers a hidden wound.' To Persius, the
youthful Stoic, with his high purpose and his transcendental views of
life, Seneca the courtier, the time-server, the adroit flatterer, must
have appeared little better than a hypocrite, or, which is worse to an
ardent mind, a practical negation of his own aspirations. The young
convert-- and Persius's philosophy was Persius's religion-- in the first
glow of his enthusiasm, must have been repelled by the callousness of
the older professor of the same faith. And yet so strong was the impress
of the age that Persius and Seneca are not so far asunder after all. To
understand Persius we must read Seneca; and the lightning stroke of
Caligula's tempestuous brain, _harena sine calce_, illuminates and
shivers the one as well as the other.
If the family of the Annaei did not prove congenial, there were others
to whom Persius might look for sympathy and instruction. Such was
M. Servilius Nonianus, a man of high position, of rare eloquence, of
unsullied fame. Such was Plotius Macrinus, to whom the Second Satire is
addressed, itself a eulogy. Even in his own family circle there were
persons whose lofty characters have made them celebrated in history. His
kinswoman Arria, herself destined to become famous for her devotion to
her husband, was the wife of Thrasea Paetus, and the daughter of that
other Arria, whose supreme cry, NON DOLET, when she taught her husband
how to meet his doom, is one of the most familiar speeches of a period
when speech was bought with death. Thrasea, the husband of the younger
Arria, was one of the foremost men of his time, and bore himself with a
moderation which contrasts strongly with the ostentatious virtue of some
of the Stoic chiefs. He rebuked the vices of his time unsparingly, but
steadily observed the respect due to the head of the state; and even
when the decree was passed which congratulated Nero on the murder of his
mother, he contented himself with retiring from the senate-house. But
Thrasea's silent disapproval of one crime fired Nero to another, and his
refusal to deprecate the wrath of the emperor was the cause of his
ruin-- if that could be called ruin which he welcomed as he poured out
his blood in libation to Jupiter the Liberator.
That the familiar intercourse with such a man should have inspired a
youth of the education and the disposition of Persius with still higher
resolves and still higher endeavors is not strange. That it sufficed, as
some say, to penetrate Persius with the sober wisdom of maturer years,
and made up to him for the lack of personal experience and artistic
balance, is attributing more to association than association can
accomplish.
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 (+hodoiporikôn+)
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.
Cornutus first revised the satires of his friend, and then gave them to
Caesius Bassus to edit. The only important change that Cornutus made was
the substitution of _quis non_ for _Mida rex_ (1,121), a subject which
is discussed in the Commentary. Other traces of wavering expression and
_duplex recensio_ are due to the imagination of commentators, who
attribute to the young poet a logical method and an exactness of
development for which the style of Persius gives them no warrant. _Raro
et tarde scripsit_, the statement of the Life of Persius, explains much.
The poems of Persius were received with applause as soon as they
appeared, and the old _Vita Persii_ would have us believe that people
scrambled for the copies as if the pages were so many Sabine women.
Quintilian, in his famous inventory of Greek and Roman literature, says
that Persius earned a great deal of glory, and true glory, by a single
book, and here and there the great scholar does Persius homage by
imitating him; and Martial holds up Persius with his one book of price,
as a contrast to the empty bulk of a half-forgotten epic. But it would
not be worth the while to repeat the list of the admirers of Persius in
the ages of later Latinity. It suffices to say that he was the special
favorite of the Latin Fathers. Augustin quotes or imitates him often,
and Jerome is saturated with the phraseology of our poet. Commended to
Christian teachers by the elevation of his moral tone, by the pithiness
of his maxims and reflections, and the energy of his figures, he was set
up on a high chair, a big school-boy, to teach other school-boys, and
scarcely a voice was raised in rebellion for centuries. But since the
time of the Scaligers, who were not to be kept back by any consideration
for the feelings of the Fathers, there has been much unfriendly
criticism of Persius; and the world owes him a debt of gratitude for
provoking an animosity that has opened the way to a freer discussion of
the literary merits of the authors of antiquity. To be subject all one's
life through fear of literary death to the bondage of antique dullness,
as well as to the thraldom of contemporary stupidity, would have been a
sad result of the revival of letters.
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.
No critic has put the problem with more brutal frankness than M. Nisard,
who, at the close of his flippant but suggestive chapter on Persius,
asks the question, _Y a-t-il profit à lire Perse_? Though he makes a
faint show of balancing the Ayes and Noes, it is very plain how he
himself would vote. The impatient Frenchman is evidently not of a mind
'to read prefaces, biographies, memoirs, and commentaries on these
prefaces, these biographies, these memoirs, and notes on these
commentaries, in order to form an idea that will haply be very false and
assuredly very debatable, of a work about which no one will ever talk to
you, and of a poet about whom you will never find any one to talk to.'
But the question, which may be an open one to a critic, is not an open
one to an editor; and editors of Persius are especially prone to value
their author by the labor which he has cost them, by the material which
they have gathered about the text. The thoughts are, after all, so
common that parallels are to be found on every hand; the compass is so
small that it is an easy matter to carry in the memory every word, every
phrase; and so-called illustrations suggest themselves even to an
ordinary scholar in bewildering numbers, while the looseness of the
connection gives ample scope to speculation. Hence the sarcasm of Joseph
Scaliger: _Non pulchra habet sed in eum pulcherrima possumus scribere_;
and the well-known criticism of the same scholar: _Au Perse de Casaubon
la saulce vaut mieux que le poisson_. But this artificial love on the
part of the editors has not contributed to the popularity of the author,
and the youthful poet has been overlaid by his erudite commentators.
Besides this disadvantage, Persius, when he is read at all, comes
immediately after Juvenal, and, as if to enhance the contrast, is
generally bound up with him; and the homeliness of his tropes, the
crabbedness of his dialogue, the roughness of his transitions repel the
young student, who finds the riddance of the historical and
archaeological work which Juvenal involves a poor compensation for the
lack of the large manner and the dazzling rhetoric of the great
declaimer. On the other hand, maturer scholars have been found to
reverse the popular verdict, and to say, with Mr. Simcox, that 'the shy,
youthful fervor of the dutiful boy, combined with the literary honesty
which kept Persius from writing any thing which was not a part of his
permanent consciousness, makes him improve upon every reading, which is
more than can be said of Juvenal, who writes as if he thought and felt
little in the intervals of writing.' But while it is easy to get tired
of Juvenal, it is not so easy to become enamored of Persius; and it must
be admitted that the pleasure is questionable. Yet, in spite of
M. Nisard, there is no real question about the utility of the study of
the poet, who illustrates by what he does not say even more than by what
he says the character of an age which is of supreme importance to the
historian. Even if we put the study on lower ground, we must admit that
Persius's title to a prominent position in the annals of Roman
literature is indefeasible. However desirable it may be to get rid of
him, an author who has left his impress on Rabelais and Ben Jonson, as
well as on Montaigne and Boileau-- an author whose poems have furnished
so many quotations to modern letters, can not be dismissed from the
necessities of a 'polite education' with a convenient sneer. Persius
deserves our attention, if it were only as a problem of literary taste.
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.
The Satire is the only extant form of Latin poetry that can lay claim to
a truly national origin; and the error into which the early historians
of classical literature were led by the resemblance between the name of
the Roman satire and the name of the Greek satyr-drama has long been
corrected. But the truth which this error involves, the connection
between the comic drama and the satire, remains. The satire goes back to
the popular source of comedy, and holds in solution all the elements
which the Greeks combined into various forms of dramatic merriment. As
the rhythmical movements, which culminate in such perfections as the
dactylic hexameter and the iambic trimeter, are common to our whole
race, and the rude Saturnian verse is one with the heroic, so the rustic
songs of harvest and vintage are common to Greece and Italy; and it is
no marvel that, as the satire was working itself out to classic
proportions, it should have felt its kindred to Greek comedy, and should
have drawn its materials and its methods from that literature on which
Roman literature in its other departments was more directly dependent.
And so the satire, though a genuine growth of Italian soil, was none the
less subject to Greek influences. It was trained into Greek forms, it
was permeated by Greek thought; and here as elsewhere the retranslation
into Greek, of which the older commentators were so fond, is often the
key to the meaning; here as elsewhere our appreciation of the author, as
a whole, is conditioned by our knowledge of Greek literature.
Horace, the master of Roman satire, has more than once drawn the
parallel between satire and comedy; and Persius, who follows the
literary, though not the philosophical creed of his predecessor, aims
even more distinctly than Horace does at reproducing the mimicry of
comedy on the narrow stage of the satire. At the close of the First
Satire he goes so far as to demand of his readers the intense study of
the Old Attic Comedy as the preparation for the enjoyment of his poems--
an extraordinary demand, if we do not make due allowance for the
rhetorical expression of high aims and earnest endeavors. A comparison
of the triumvirate of the _comoedia prisca_ of Attica reveals little
trace of direct influence, abundant evidence of extreme diversity in
expression and conception. I say 'expression,' not 'language.' It is
true that the language of Persius has a virile tone, but the masculine
energy of his words is often out of keeping with the scholastic tameness
of his thoughts. The breezy Pnyx of the Athenian and the stuffy
_lecticula lucubratoria_ of the Roman are not further apart than
Aristophanes and Persius.
The New Attic Comedy, the comedy of situation and manners, furnished
themes that lay nearer to the genius of Persius, although the grace of a
Menander was much further from his grasp than from Terence, the
half-Menander of Caesar's epigram. One passage is all but translated
from Menander's Eunuch; and if Persius did not borrow traits for his
picture of the miser and the spendthrift from the master of the New
Comedy, it was not for lack of models. Indeed, so unreal is Persius,
with all the realism of his language, that one of the most striking
features of his poems-- the opposition to the military-- loses somewhat
of its significance when we remember that the Macedonian period, to
which the New Comedy belongs, is crowded with typical soldiers of
fortune, with their coarse love of sensual pleasure-- their coarse
contempt of every thing that can not be eaten, drunk, or handled. Every
line of Persius's centurion can be reproduced from the Greek; and
although it would be going too far to say that there was no counterpart
to his sketch in his own experience, although, on the contrary, Persius
seems to have verified by actual observation whatever he learned from
books, the historical value of his portrait is very much reduced by the
existence of the Greek type. As a specimen of a kind of
clerico-political opposition to an empire which its enemies might call
an empire of brute force and military mechanism, the hostility of
Persius to a class whose predominance was making itself felt more and
more is not without its point and interest, and it is unfortunate that
we have to leave its reality in suspense.
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.
Surely these are originals enough, the Attic Comedy, the Mime, Sophron
and Plato, Menander and Philemon. But we find other models nearer home,
and, passing by the reflections of Greek comedy in Plautus and Terence,
its refractions in Afranius and Pomponius, we come to the satiric
exemplars of Persius-- Lucilius and Horace. _Mox ut a scholis et
magistris divertit, lecto libro Lucilli decimo, vehementer saturas
conponere instituit._ This statement of the old _Vita Persii_ is much
more consonant with the character of Persius than his own affected
mirthfulness. His 'saucy spleen' had as little to do with his verse
writing as righteous indignation with the rhetorical outpouring of
Juvenal. His laughter was as much a part of the conventionalities of the
satire as the _Camena_ was of his confidences to Cornutus. School-boys
all imitate circus-riders; here and there one mimics the clown; and
Persius, who had not outgrown the tendencies of boyhood, straightway
began to make copies of verses in the manner of Lucilius. At the same
time he was too much under the influence of Horace to follow Lucilius in
his negligences, and too little master of the form to strike the mean
between slovenly dictation and painful composition. As an imitator of
Lucilius he boldly lashes men of straw where Lucilius flogged Lupus and
Mucius, and breaks his milk-teeth on Alkibiades and Dama where Lucilius
broke his jaw-teeth on living and moving enemies. As an imitator of
Horace he appropriates the garb of Horatian diction; but the easy
movement of roguish Flaccus is lost, and the stiff stride of the young
Stoic betrays him at every turn.
As in the case of the Old Attic Comedy, Persius's intellectual affinity
with Lucilius was purely imaginary; and for the purposes of this study
it is unnecessary to reproduce the lines of Horace's portrait of the
'great nursling of Aurunca,' or to attempt to form a mosaic out of the
chipped chips of Lucian Müller's recent collection. The wide range of
theme, the manly carelessness of style, the bold criticism, the bright
humor, the biting wit-- in short, almost every characteristic of
Lucilius that we can distinguish, shows how little kindred there must
have been between the two men. The dozen scattered verses of the Tenth
Book of Lucilius, which is said to have suggested the theme of the First
Satire of Persius, and the fragments of the Fourth Book, which is
imitated by Persius in his Third Satire, though more significant, give
us no clew to the manner or the extent of his indebtedness. Here and
there a verse, a hemistich, a jingle may have been taken from Lucilius,
and he may have enriched his vocabulary here and there from Lucilius's
store of drastic words; but his obligations to Lucilius, real and
imaginary, are all as nothing in comparison with the large drafts which
he drew on the treasury of Horace.
The obligations of Persius to Horace have been the theme of all the
editors. The scholiasts themselves have quoted parallels, and Casaubon
has written a special treatise on the subject, and commentators, with
almost childish rivalry, have vied with each other in noting verbal
coincidences and similar trains of thought. The fact of the imitation is
too evident to need proof, and it would have been much more profitable
to examine the causes and significance of this dependence, and to study
the modifications of the language and the thought as they passed through
the alembic of Persius's brain, than to multiply examples of words and
phrases that are common, not only to Horace and Persius, but to the
language of every-day life. Indeed, some go so far as to make Persius
quibble on Horace; and 'How green you are,' of the modern street, and
'What means that trump?' of the modern card-table, are as much
Shakespearian as some of Persius's 'borrowings' are Horatian.
Horace had long been a classic when Persius dodged his school-tasks and
was a dab at marbles. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable about Roman
literature than the rapidity with which the images of its Augustan
heroes took on the _patina_ of age. The half-century that lay between
Horace and Persius drew itself out to a distant perspective, and Virgil
and Horace had all the authority of _veteres_. They not only dictated
the forms of poetry, but permeated and dominated prose. True, the
hostility to Virgil and Horace had not ceased; the _antiquarii_ were not
dead; but the ground had been shifted. The admirers of republican poetry
in the time of Horace were republicans-- in the time of Persius they
were imperialists, and the maintenance of the authors of the Augustan
age as the true classics was a part of the programme of the opposition.
The court literature of the Neronian period found its models in the
earlier epic essays of Catullus rather than in the poems of Virgil.
Virgil had modified the Greek norms to suit the Latin tongue; but these
men went back of malice aforethought to the Greek standard, and emulated
the proportions of the Greek versification of the Alexandrian period.
They were impatient of the classic vocabulary, and found the classic
rhythms tame, and so they betook themselves to the earlier language and
set it to more exact harmonies. It was no heresy with this set to
consider Virgil at once light and rough. The mouth-filling words of the
older and bolder period, marshaled in serried ranks, no gap, no break,
as they kept time to a rhythmical cadence that was marked by all the
music of consonance and assonance-- this was the ideal of the school
which Persius assailed, just as an admirer of Pope or Goldsmith might
assail the dominant poetry of our day, with its sensuous melody and its
revived archaisms. Surely the worshippers of recent poets might pause
before accepting the narrow literary creed of Persius. But, not to
imitate the example of Nisard, and indulge in dangerous parallelisms, it
is sufficient for our purpose to note that Persius's close study of the
language of Horace was not only a part of a liberal education, but a
necessity of the school to which he belonged. If he was to write satire
at all, he must needs take Horace for his model. If he had written an
epic, he would have taken Virgil.
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.
Having thus briefly disposed of those turns which are common to the
Latin tongue, and those which ran freely into the pen of the writer, we
have now to deal with a considerable number of passages in which the
memory of Persius must have lingered over the words of Horace, in which
his painstaking genius has hammered the thoughts of Horace into a more
compact or a more angular utterance. To the majority of readers his
condensations and his amplifications will alike appear to be so many
distortions of the original. So, notably, where he characterizes Horace
himself, and substitutes for the simple _naso adunco_ the puzzling
_excusso naso_, where 'the dreams of a sick man' become the 'dreams of a
sick dotard,' where 'telling straight from crooked' is twisted into
'discerning the straight line where it makes its way up between crooked
lines,' and where he wrings from the natural phrase 'drink in with the
ear' the odd combination 'bibulous ears.' In the longer passages the
wresting is still more pronounced; and those who refuse to take into
consideration the moral attitude of Persius may well wonder at the
perversity with which he distorts the lines and overcharges the colors
of the original. But it is tolerably evident that, with all Persius's
admiration of Horace as an artist, he felt himself immeasurably superior
to him morally, and looked upon these adaptations and alterations as so
much gained for the effect of his discourse. The slyness of Horace might
have answered well enough for his day and for the kind of vices that he
reproved, but the depth over which Persius stood gave him a more than
Stoic stature. Horace might have been content with a flute; nothing less
resonant than a trumpet would have suited the moral elevation of
Persius. Horace is a consummate artist, and not less an artist in the
conduct of his life than in the composition of his poems. Persius is the
prototype of the sensational preacher, and preachers of all centuries,
from Augustin and Jerome to Macleane and Merivale, have had a weakness
for him.
Aside from the moral tone, which is enough to give a different ring to
the most similar expressions in the two poets, there is an artistic
difference of great significance in the handling of the dramatic
element, which they both recognized as fundamental in the satire. The
dramatic satires of Horace will not bear dislocation without
destruction. In Persius the characters are always shifting, always
fading away into an impersonal _Tu_. This may be partly due to the
interval which he allowed to elapse between the periods of composition;
but it is possible that he recognized the limitation of his own powers,
that his satires were intended to be a knotted thong, and not a smooth
horsewhip. This piecemeal composition, be it the result of poverty or of
economy, makes Persius the very author for 'Elegant Extracts.' Hence it
is not hard to defend him, as it is not hard to defend Seneca, and on
similar grounds. Single verses ring in the ear for months and years.
What line, for instance, more quoted than
_Tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex_?
What line sinks deeper than the sombre verse,
_Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta_?
Single scenes, whether of dialogue or of description, possess every
requirement of dramatic vividness. On every page of the commentary we
call him bookish, and yet his pictures stand out from the canvas with a
boldness which makes us concede that his books did not keep him from
seeing, if they did not teach him to see, what was going on around him.
What is not a little remarkable in so young a man is the honesty of his
painting. A home-keeping youth, Persius gives us living pictures of what
he saw at home, whether at Rome, at Volaterrae, or at Luna; in the
school-room, in the lecture-room, in the court of justice, on the wharf,
at the country cross-roads. He has watched the carpenter stretching his
line, the potter whirling his wheel, the physician adjusting his scales.
He has heard the horse-laugh of the burly centurion, and shivered; has
heard, with a young Stoic sneer, a cooing and mincing declaimer. He
knows all about ink and paper and parchment and reeds; he has not
outlived his knowledge of marbles, and one might fancy that the lustral
spittle of his aunty was still fresh on his brow. The fact that there is
no breeziness about his poems, nothing that tells us of the liberal air
beyond, is another sign of his truthfulness. His life is like his own
'ever retreating bay' of the Sixth Satire, with the cliffs of Stoic
philosophy between him and the wintry sea without. Arretium he knows--
it was not so far from Volaterrae-- and Bovillae, in the neighborhood of
which he had a farm, and Luna, and the world of Rome; but the rest of
his geography is in the inane. Horace, on the other hand, ambles all
over Italy, and treats us every now and then to a foreign tour with the
air of a man who had run across the sea in his time; and even if he who
takes us in his sweeping flight from Cadiz to Ganges be not the real
Juvenal, the undisputed Juvenal has a far wider geographical outlook
than Persius. This very limitation is one of the best signs of the
artistic worth of Persius, and justifies the regret that he had not made
himself the Crabbe of Roman poetry.
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.
We now proceed to yet another formal element, which is no less
significant to the close student of antique literature. The Roman
handling of the hexameter was artificial in the extreme. Reasoning
backward from the Latin hexameter, scholars have been prone to transfer
the conscious symbolism of the Roman poets to the Greek originals; and
if they had stopped, say, at Apollonius Rhodius, they might have been
justified, for in the later Greek poets something of the sort is not to
be denied. But the healthier period of Greek poetic art was lifted far
above such toying adaptations of sound to sense as commentators still
discover in Homer when they enlarge on the symbolism of this or that
spondaic verse, the beauty of this or that combination of diaeresis and
caesura. A recent comparison of Homer with his successors has shown
that, of all the spondaic verses in Homer, scarcely one in a hundred can
be traced to any 'picturesque' motive, and the rapid movement of so many
five-dactyl hexameters is simply the normal pace of the verse. When we
come to Latin metres, however, we must take a different standard, and
recognize a conscious modification of the Greek rule. The Ovidian
pentameter of the best period-- to cite a familiar instance-- is subject
to minute laws, which are transgressed at every turn in Greek elegiac
poetry, and the different ideals of Persius and Horace are distinctly
traceable in their treatment of the hexameter. Horace, as is well known,
broke the lofty movement of the hexameter to suit the easy gait of the
satire. Persius is more rhetorical than Horace, and, although he admits
elision with as great freedom as his master, his verse has a more
mechanical structure than the verse of Horace, and many of the
conversational peculiarities of the Horatian hexameter are much less
conspicuous in Persius. Horace weakens the caesura, employs a great
number of spondaic words, and neglects the variety at which the epic
aims; and perhaps the trained ear of a determined scholar might hear in
the jog-trot of his satiric rhythms the hoofs of his bob-tailed mule and
the lazy flapping of his portmanteau. Persius, on the other hand,
hammers out his thoughts in a far more orthodox cadence. Comparing the
first six hundred and fifty verses of the first book of the satires of
Horace with the six hundred and fifty verses of Persius, we find that
more than eight per cent. have five spondees against less than five per
cent. in Persius. The so-called third trochee or feminine caesura of the
third foot is found in one of ten of Horace's hexameters, and only in
one of twenty-six in Persius-- a low proportion even for a Latin poet.
Still more striking is the rare use which Persius makes of the masculine
caesura of the sixth foot, with its consequent monosyllabic close. Aside
from all idle symbolism, this arrangement, which is comparatively common
in Horace, gives the verse a certain familiar roughness, especially
where the final word forces a union with the following line. These
diversities can not be accidents, and serve to show that, although
Persius might weave himself a garment from the dyed threads of Horatian
diction, he was not bold enough to wear the _discincta tunica_ of
Horace's Muse. But we must not forget to be just, and it is only fair to
add that such a garb would have been as inappropriate to his severe and
lofty, though narrow spirit, as the Coan vestments of Ovid's 'kept
goddess'-- if we may borrow the _déesse entretenue_ of Heinrich Heine.
A comparison of Persius with Juvenal-- a favorite theme with editors--
does not enter into the plan of this study. It suffices for our present
purpose to note that the practiced rhetorician of the time of Trajan
could not have shared Quintilian's admiration of his youthful
predecessor. The parallel passages which have been cited belong to the
common stock of satirical strokes or to the thesaurus of proverbial
phrases. Who can believe that Juvenal took _usque adeo_ from Persius, or
borrowed from him the familiar _rara avis_? There are three or four
touches in the Tenth Satire which recall some of the more striking
expressions of Persius; but Ribbeck's objections to the genuineness of
this sophistic declamation, if not convincing, are at least sufficiently
well founded to make us pause in citing them. In moral earnestness,
Persius is as far superior to Juvenal as he is inferior to him in the
rhetorical treatment of his themes; and so long as men will take into
consideration this moral element, which modern critics are prone to
eliminate from works of art, so long as they will say _pectus est quod
satiricum facit_ as well as _quod theologum_, Persius will command a
personal esteem which does not attach to the satires of Juvenal. The
ingenious theory of Boissier, that the great satirist of the Caesars was
a snubbed snob, brings out in still more striking contrast the figure of
Persius as the reserved provincial aristocrat, and may be worthy of a
more ample development than it has yet received. But Juvenal is a
dangerous theme. As M. Martha has admirably observed, Juvenal is an
author whose declamatory tone has infected his eulogists; and those who
are not carried away by an 'admiration which disfigures while it
exalts,' may readily be tempted into the opposite extreme. Let us turn,
then, to other matters which illustrate more directly the character of
our author's compositions. And first a word or two of Stoicism.
With the strong practical tendencies of the Romans, the only systems of
Greek philosophy that ever found large acceptance at Rome were the
Epicurean and the Stoic; and in the Stoic school the only doctrines that
commanded much attention were the ethic. The subtle dialectic of the
Stoics, of which we have some unjoyous specimens in Cicero's
philosophical compilations, was not congenial to the Roman mind; but the
Stoic creed was the creed of the nobler spirits of the imperial time.
Excluded from public life, or, at all events, from the satisfactory
exercise of public functions, the elect few took refuge in Stoic
philosophy.[1]
[Footnote 1: 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.
All humanity is one people; all the world one state; its ruler the
Deity; its constitution the eternal law of the universe. The more
unconditionally a man submits to the guidance of this law, the more
exclusively he seeks his happiness in virtue, the more independent he
will be of all without him, the more contented in himself, and yet the
readier to enter into communion with others, and to do his duty to the
whole of which he is a part.
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.
In speaking of this subject it is difficult to keep from using the word
religion, for the emotional element, which is so characteristic of
religion, is not wanting in a system which is the popular synonym for
suppression of emotion. This is the thesis which M. Martha has brought
out into clear relief, and illumined by many apposite examples-- a
thesis which will not be strange to those who have studied with any care
the social aspects of the later life of antiquity. Under the empire
morality was more than morality-- it was a religion; and all the
formulae of certain phases of Christian ascetics may be applied to the
ethical side of Stoic philosophy. It is difficult to approach the
subject without seeming irreverence; but the faith of the Christian must
be far from robust who can shrink from a parallel that goes no farther
than the machinery-- that does not involve the motive power. It is not
the aim of this study to determine whether this parallelism is to be
recognized as a _praeparatio Evangelica_, or as the like result of
similar forces at work in different systems of thought and belief. It is
enough to present the parallelism, to excuse the phraseology.
Our ancestors, at all events, were not afraid to recognize 'natural
Christians' in such men as Socrates, in such youths as Persius. Why,
even Seneca figured for a long time as St. Seneca; and Jeremy Taylor was
following old example when he cited the Stoic as well as the Christian
code. It is only one step from the recognition of this spiritual kindred
to the recognition of the practical methods of spiritual work as
anticipated in the life of antiquity-- practical methods which for our
purposes are even better described by an unbeliever like Lucian than by
a believer like Marcus Antoninus. In that age of transition we find
father confessors, private chaplains, mendicant friars, missions,
revivals, conversions, ecstasies-- all showing the deep needs of the
human heart, which refused to be satisfied with the outworn gods of the
Pantheon, and, in ignorance of the divine Person, who alone can answer a
personal love, sought solace in the mechanism of morality. In
characterizing Cornutus, I have already borrowed a phrase from
M. Martha, and called him, as M. Martha calls Seneca, a spiritual
director; and I have already ventured to call Persius a sensational
preacher. His stock of philosophy or theology is not as large as some
commentators suppose; and all the elaborate attempts to show by the
satires that Persius was a thoroughly trained and consistent Stoic have
failed. The most elementary knowledge of Stoic ethics is sufficient for
the comprehension of Persius. Whatever else he knew he kept back for
practical considerations. He sticks to the marrow of morality, and
reiterates the cardinal doctrines of Stoicism with the vehemence of a
Poundtext. This vehemence, this enthusiasm, may be explained by his
youth, his Etruscan blood, his profession as a moral reformer. A critic
with M. Taine's resources might account for it by the climate of
Volaterrae; but, however it may be accounted for, certain it is that he
himself is much impressed with the profundity of the doctrines which he
professes; that he warms and glows as he imparts to his auditors the
great secret that they are not free because they are slaves to vice;
that a man who does not understand his relations to his Maker can not
move a finger without sinning; that in the flesh there is no good thing;
and that the anguish of a tortured conscience is the worst of hells. But
the difficulties of Persius are not due to recondite Stoic thought, and
can not be cleared up by reference to Stoic philosophy. The trouble lies
in the slangy expressions, the lack of organic development, the restless
zeal to force his message home to the heart of every hearer, and the
consequent shifting of the personages of his dialogue to suit the cases
as they rose before his mind.
Persius, then, was a preacher of Stoicism-- Stoicism, at once the
philosophy and the religion of a time when serious and noble natures had
no city of refuge except in their inmost selves, when the only possible
activity seemed to be submission to the inevitable. The hydrostatic
pressure of the imperial time forced all the better elements into this
mould; and in so far Persius bears the stamp of his period, and the very
absence of political and personal allusions shows how imperfect life
must have been. But one school of commentators, headed by Casaubon, and
represented to-day in Germany by Lehmann, in England by Pretor, see in
Persius much more than a disciple of the Stoa; and the satires of our
author-- especially the First and Fourth-- are supposed to be full of
more or less oblique references to Nero's person, his habits, his
literary pretensions, his aristocratic birth. At one time it seemed as
if this thesis, which was suggested by the scholiast, had been
abandoned, but the field for historical ingenuity is too tempting; and
one of the vaguest of all the satires, the Fifth, has been discovered by
Lehmann to be full of the most stinging allusions to Nero. It is not
enough to grant to this school that Nero, as the type of his age, may
have been present to the mind of the author. They scornfully reject this
concession, and resort to all manner of legerdemain in order to explain
away the impossibilities of such an attack and the improbabilities of
its execution. With such scope as these scholars allow themselves we may
find parallels every where, and covert assaults may be detected in the
most innocent literary performances. But it would not answer the purpose
of this Introduction to enter into an elaborate discussion of this
question, which seems to be destined to an uncomfortable resurrection as
often as it is laid. Every plausible coincidence has been mentioned in
the Notes, and it will be sufficient for ingenuous youth to know the
opinions of distinguished scholars on the subject.
If this essay had not been prolonged beyond the limit proposed, it might
be well to give some account of the grammatical and rhetorical
peculiarities of the style of Persius; but the grammar of Persius will
present few difficulties to those who are at all familiar with the
poetic syntax of the Latin language; and enough has been said to prepare
the student, in a measure, for coping with the labored terseness of our
author.
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_.
* * * * *