The Satires of A. Persius Flaccus
Saturarum liber, ex sex carminibus heroico metro compositis, opus est Auli Persii Flacci, equitis Etrusci iuvenis qui Stoicae philosophiae studio sub Annaeo Cornuto magistro deditus erat. Carmine prooemiali poeta ipse de se profitetur nec fonte caballino se potasse nec in Parnaso somniasse; deinde per singulas saturas vitia hominum perstringit: vanas vota deorum, inane carmen recitantium, divitias prodigorum, libidines, mortemque securam stultorum. Sermone obscuro et contorto, imaginibus densis atque acribus, lectorem ad sapientiam et ad sui ipsius cognitionem hortatur.
Praecipua materia est doctrina Stoica de vera libertate, quae non in statu civili sed in animo a cupiditatibus liberato sita est. Persius, brevi vita praereptus, paucissimos versus reliquit, sed his summam gravitatem morum et castitatem propositi infudit. Hoc opus ideo magni momenti est, quod inter Romanae satirae poetas Persium ostendit severissimum atque honestissimum, qui non risu sed conscientiae stimulo lectorem ad virtutem revocare conatur.
How it begins
If any of these characters do not display properly—in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter—or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. All Greek text has mouse-hover transliterations: ὥς . A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have been marked in the text with mouse-hover popups . THE SATIRES OF A. PERSIUS FLACCUS EDITED BY BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE, Ph.D. ( Göttingen ), LL.D., PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1875. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Harper & Brothers, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PREFACE. The text of this edition of Persius is in the main that of Jahn’s last recension (1868). The few changes are discussed in the Notes and recorded in the Critical Appendix. In the preparation of the Notes I have made large use of Jahn’s standard edition, without neglecting the commentaries of Casaubon, König, and Heinrich, or the later editions by Macleane, Pretor, and Conington, or such recent monographs on Persius as I have been able to procure.
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