advances, until, in literature at least, it attains the persistence of a dominant. Juvenal is so passionately moral that he frequently renders himself liable to Horace's censure of those who worship virtue too much; but, in his best moods, as in the famous lines which close the Tenth Satire, he depicts the virtuous man in a style which is not the less earnest and sincere because it is also dignified and calm. Persius, whose disposition was marked by maidenly modesty and gentleness, and who is also described as frugi et pudicus, shows, even when hampered by a disjointed style which only allows him to utter his thought in fragments, that devotion to the highest moral aims which we should expect from a writer brought up under the influences which he enjoyed;[1] and though he, too, exhibits some of the savage ferocity of Juvenal in his strictures of vice, he yet pays, in his Fifth Satire, that tribute to virtue in the person of Cornutus which "proves the goodness of the writer and the gracefulness with which he could write."[2] Lucan, too, whose youth, like that of Persius, had the inestimable advantage of receiving a share of the wisdom which Cornutus had gained by nights devoted to philosophic studies, exhibits a spirit of the loftiest morality under the rhetorical phrasing of his great Republican Epic.[3] Looking back, with something of regret, to the days of a dominant
- ↑ See the Life of Persius, included, with the Lives of Terence, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, and Pliny the Elder, in the writings of Suetonius.
- ↑ Macleane's Persius.—Introduction.
- ↑ Persius: Sat., v. 62-64.—At te nocturnis juvat impallescere chartis, Cultor enim juvenum purgatas inseris aures Fruge Cleanthea.
