Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/25

 under Hadrian, who became emperor in A.D. 119. Hadrian himself was a patron of actors and artistes of every kind, and he was quite a person who might have taken offence at a supposed insult offered to one of his favourites. The words of Sidonius Apollinaris, in the sixth century, who says of Juvenal irati fuit histrionis exul, show how steadily the tradition of the banishment had maintained itself. There is a certain convergence of dates in Juvenal's life towards the year 119; and though the above explanation can only be looked upon as a conjecture, it presents a story which may not impossibly be true, while the traditional version of the story is demonstrably false. 



We know from the Eusebian chronicle that the poet A. Persius Flaccus was born in the year A.D. 34, somewhat more than two years before the death of the Emperor Tiberius, and that he died in the year 62. He thus lived through the reigns of Caius and Claudius and the first eight years of Nero. For other information as to his life and circumstances our sole source of information is an ancient Biography prefixed to many of the manuscripts of Persius. This Biography many scholars attributed to Suetonius, the biographer of the first twelve Caesars, on the ground that the lexicographer Suidas says that xxi