Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/28

 among which is the baseless idea which possessed his early commentators, that the main object of the First Satire was to ridicule the poetical productions of the Emperor Nero.

That Persius was born at Volaterrae in Etruria rests on the authority of the Biography, as also of the Eusebian chronicle; yet learned commentaries have been written to wrest the words of Sat. vi. 6-7 from their natural meaning in the endeavour to prove that the poet was born at the town of Luna on the Gulf of Spezzia, on the Genoese coast, near the famous marble quarries of Carrara. Having migrated to that delicious spot for the winter, Persius writes;

mihi nunc Ligus ora Intepet, hibernatque meum mare.

But the words meum mare cannot be made to bear the meaning of a native shore; and, even if they did, the phrase might well be used of the sea that beats on the shores of Etruria, in which province the poet was born.

The period of the early years of Persius marks in a peculiar manner the change which had taken place in the general system of education as formerly pursued at Rome with a view to the needs of actual life. Tin's change was the direct result of the dowDfall of the old constitution, and the substitution of an all-pervading despotism for the free play of public life which had characterised and ennobled xxiv