Persius

Aulus Persius Flaccus was born in AD 34 in Volaterrae (modern Volterra) in Etruria, to a wealthy equestrian family. He studied under the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, who became his mentor and close friend, and moved in the literary circles of Neronian Rome — he knew the poet Lucan and was admired by Seneca. He died in AD 62, at the age of twenty-eight.

He left six satires totalling only 650 hexameter lines — one of the smallest surviving corpora of any major Roman poet. But what lines they are. Persius writes in a dense, knotted, allusive style that makes Juvenal look transparent. His subject is Stoic ethics applied to Roman life: the corruption of literary taste, the folly of prayer, the meaning of true freedom, the nature of avarice. His first satire — an attack on contemporary poetry — opens with a single disgusted word: O curas hominum!

He was widely read in antiquity and the Middle Ages despite (or because of) his difficulty. His commentator, the grammarian Cornutus scholiast, became a standard school text. Six satires were enough.