Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/26

 that author wrote a book De Poetis, of which the ancient biographies of Terence and Horace are supposed to have formed a part. In the oldest MSS., however, the Biography of Persius is described as having been taken from a commentary of Probus Valerius, so that we may with some probability attribute this Biography either to the famous grammarian of that name, who lived in the reign of Nero, or to one or other of the grammarians who bore the same name. Such as it is, this authority is the best that we possess; and as it is evidently of ancient origin, and deals with simple facts with regard to which there could be no motive for falsification, we may with some confidence accept its statements as authentic.

We are told that the poet was born at Volaterrae on the 4th of December, A.D. 34, and that he died of an affection of the stomach on the 24th of November, A.D. 62. He was a Roman Eques, of good position, and became heir to a considerable fortune. His father died when he was only six years old; and though his mother married again, becoming a widow for the second time, she attended carefully to his education, first at Volaterrae, and then removing him in his twelfth year to Rome. There he went through the usual course of instruction for youths in his position, attending the lectures, first of the distinguished grammarian Remmius Palaemon, and afterwards those of the rhetorician Virginius Flavus. At the age of sixteen xxii