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Persius is at his best when he forgets for a moment the icy peak to which as a philosopher he has climbed, and suns himself in the valley of natural human affections a reason why the fifth and sixth Satires, which are more personal than the rest, have always been considered greatly superior to them.
Yet what I have done is enough to distinguish you from any other, which is the proposition that I took upon me to demonstrate. And now, my lord, to apply what I have said to my present business: the satires of Juvenal and Persius, appearing in this new English dress, cannot so properly be inscribed to any man as to your lordship, who are the first of the age in that way of writing.
The elaborate editions of the Latin poets, from Lucretius to Persius, produced by Probus, and the commentaries on Terence, Cicero, Sallust, and Virgil by Asconius and Asper, were the work of a generation to whom these authors had become in effect the classics. But literature, as the event proved not for the first or the last time, cannot live long on the study of the classics alone.
But Cornutus used his whole influence with the mother of Persius to prevail upon her to destroy these compositions. As soon as his book of Satires was published, all the world began to admire it, and were eager to buy it up.
Will you please but to observe that Persius, the least in dignity of all the three, has, notwithstanding, been the first who has discovered to us this important secret in the designing of a perfect satire that it ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to one particular theme, or, at least, to one principally?
But to proceed: Dacier justly taxes Casaubon for saying that the satires of Lucilius were wholly different in species from those of Ennius and Pacuvius, Casaubon was led into that mistake by Diomedes the grammarian, who in effect says this: "Satire amongst the Romans but not amongst the Greeks, was a biting invective poem, made after the model of the ancient comedy, for the reprehension of vices; such as were the poems of Lucilius, of Horace, and of Persius.
As a matter of fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec, peccat!" cries Persius in terror. The earlier naïve animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the wealth of ancient myths.
Indeed we do not. Let all the abatements mentioned above, and more, be granted; yet, even then, when we remember that the world from which Jerome or Anthony fled was even worse than that denounced by Juvenal and Persius that the nuptials which, as legends say, were often offered the virgin martyrs as alternatives for death, were such as employed the foul pens of Petronius and Martial that the tyrants whom they spurned were such as live in the pages of Suetonius, and the Augustae Historiae Scriptores that the gods whom they were commanded to worship, the rites in which they were to join, were those over which Ovid and Apuleius had gloated, which Lucian had held up to the contempt of heathendom itself that the tortures which they preferred to apostacy and to foul crimes were, by the confessions of the heathens themselves, too horrible for pen to tell it does raise a flush of indignation to hear some sleek bigot-sceptic, bred up in the safety and luxury of modern England, among Habeas Corpus Acts and endowed churches, trying from his warm fireside to sneer away the awful responsibilities and the heroic fortitude of valiant men and tender girls, to whose piety and courage he owes the very enlightenment, the very civilisation, of which he boasts.
Impetuous they hurry to the cause, each of them a fine sight. But the Grecian Persius, as soon as he had been well sprinkled with Italian vinegar, bellows out: O Brutus, by the great gods I conjure you, who are accustomed to take off kings, why do you not dispatch this King? Believe me, this is a piece of work which of right belongs to you.
Unhappily he is oftener diffuse than brief, and sometimes he becomes tedious to the last degree. His poetical art is totally deficient in variety. He knows of but one method of gaining effect, the use of strong language and plenty of it. If Persius was inflated with the vain desire to surpass Horace, Lucan seems to have been equally ambitious of excelling Virgil.
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