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PERSIUS was born at Volaterrae, of an equestrian family, about the beginning of the Christian aera. His father dying when he was six years old, he was left to the care of his mother, for whom and for his sisters he expresses the warmest affection.
Decline of Roman Literature. 2. Fable; Phaedrus. 3. Satire and Epigram; Persius, Juvenal, Martial. 4. Dramatic Literature; the Tragedies of Seneca. 5. Epic Poetry; Lucan; Silius Italicus; Valerius Flaccus; P. Statius. 6. History; Paterculus; Tacitus; Suetonius; Q. Curtius; Valerius Maximus. 7. Rhetoric and Eloquence; Quintilian; Pliny the Younger. 8.
John Gardiner, of Trinity Church, who was reputed a good scholar, having been bred in the mother country under Dr. Parr. "I prepared at home what he prescribed, and the rest of my time occupied myself according to my tastes. I read with him parts of Livy, the Annals of Tacitus, the whole of Juvenal and Persius, the Satires of Horace, and portions of other Latin classics which I do not remember.
The greatest defect in Persius, as a satirist, is that the Stoic philosophy in which he was educated rendered him indifferent to the affairs of the world. His contemplative habits led him to criticise, as his favorite subjects, false taste in poetry and empty pretensions to philosophy. Horace mingled in the society of the profligate and considering them as fools, laughed their folly to scorn.
Though there was no distinction in the places between the first patrician and the lowest plebeian, yet the nobility used their own silver and gold plate, for washing, eating, and drinking in the bath, together with towels of the finest linen. They likewise made use of the instrument called strigil, which was a kind of flesh-brush; a custom to which Persius alludes in this line,
One of Lucan's intimate friends was a young man of high family, Aulus Persius Flaccus of Volaterrae in Etruria, a near relation of the celebrated Arria, wife of Paetus. Through his kinswoman he was early introduced to the circle of earnest thinkers and moralists among whom the higher life was kept up at Rome amid the corruption of the Neronian age.
The few lines that have come down to us resemble that ridiculed by Persius for its turgid mannerisms. A good instance of the excellences which a Roman critic looked for in tragedy is afforded by the praise Cicero bestows on the Niptra, a play imitated from Sophocles. The passage is so interesting that it may well be added here. Cicero's words are
He was a member of the circle of Maecenas, though, strangely enough, never mentioned by Horace, and exercised his varied talents in epic poetry, in which he met with no great success, for Martial says "Saepius in libro memoratur Persius uno Quam levis in toto Marsus Amazonide." From this we gather that Amazonis was the name of his poem.
The satires of Persius are written in a free, expostulatory, and argumentative manner; possessing the same justness of sentiment as those of Horace, but exerted in the way of derision, and not with the admirable raillery of that facetious author.
After the death of Lucilius satire languished, until half a century later, when it assumed a new garb in the descriptive scenes of Horace, and put forth its original vigor in the burning thoughts of Persius and Juvenal. HISTORY AND ORATORY. Prose was far more in accordance with the genius of the Romans than poetry.
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