Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/37

 

The great difference between Persius and Juvenal is this, that Persius was a poet of the closet, a student, a recluse, full of youthful enthusiasm, living in a retired atmosphere under the shelter of loving female relatives, and with no knowledge of the outside life of the world beyond what could be gathered from the lectures of his Stoic instructors. His world is not the living world of Rome, but the world of books; his incidents, his characters, are chiefly taken from Horace, whose virile expressions he delights to serve up in some novel and recondite form, or from the stock examples of the Schools.

Juvenal, on the other hand, is a realist of the realists; he grapples with the real things of life, and derives all his inspiration from the doings of the men and women of his own day. He belonged to the generation which had suffered from the enormities of Caligula, Claudius and Nero; he had probably himself witnessed the concluding and worst phases of the reign of Nero, and had lived through the whole of the gloomy tyranny of Domitian. He thus knew what Rome was in the period of her worst corruption. Impregnated with the moral teaching of the Stoics, he was no mere repeater of the commonplaces of the Schools. An ardent admirer of the simple and hardy virtues of ancient Rome, he holds up a mirror to every part of the xxxiii