Part 3

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.