Spent in your converse, stole unmarked away?
Or how, while listening with increased delight,
I snatched from feasts the earlier hours of night?
One time (for to your bosom still I grew),
One time of study and of rest we knew;
One frugal board where, every care resigned,
An hour of blameless mirth relaxed the mind.”—Gifford.
Death overtook our poet in his 28th year (62 A.D.). All we have of his writings is six satires—only 650 hexameter lines. After his death these were published, and elicited unbounded admiration. Other works of his were torn up by his mother, who deemed them unworthy of his genius. Persius bequeathed to Cornutus his library of 700 manuscripts.
The satires of Persius were written in the interest of morality, and what gave them weight was that all knew their author to be a man who practised the virtue he commended, a man of stainless character in an age of universal licentiousness. And yet we do not find him lashing vice as we should expect. Was he loath to do so, lest the very pictures he must draw might corrupt? Or, was Persius forced to hold his peace in the presence of a despot who revelled in the vilest excesses, whose policy it was to reduce his subjects to his own low level? Perhaps for both reasons he preferred to assail wickedness in the abstract. Certainly his “maidenly modesty” shrunk from portraying the hideous sins that flaunted around him, while his philosophical tenets inclined him to keep aloof from the world. (Read Nettleship’s “The Roman Satura.”)
Poetasters and pedants that pandered to the perverted taste of the day, received the brunt of his attack in his First Satire. The Second discusses the proper subjects of prayer. How few, says the poet, would be willing to have their petitions made public:—