The man who wrote this has 'loved righteousness and hated iniquity'. In the work of Persius' rivals it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it is the hatred of iniquity that is most prominent; the love of righteousness holds but a secondary place.
Persius is uncompromising; he is the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters or consolatory treatises. He speaks straight from the heart. His faults are more often the faults of the school of philosophy than of the schools of rhetoric. The young Lucan is said to have exclaimed, after hearing a recitation given by Persius:[243] 'That is real poetry, my verses are mere _jeux d'esprit_.'
If we take Persius at his noblest, Lucan's criticism is just. In these passages not only is the thought singularly pure and noble, and the expression felicitous, but the actual metre represents almost the high-water mark of the post-Vergilian hexameter. Here, as in other writers of the age, the influence of Ovid is traceable in the increase of dactyls and the avoidance of elision. But the verse has a swing and dignity, together with a variety, that can hardly be found in any other poetry of the Silver Age. It is the existence of passages such as these, and the high unswerving moral enthusiasm characterizing all his work, that have made Persius live through the centuries. It is fashionable for the critic to say, 'We lay down Persius with a sigh of relief.' That is true, but we feel the better for reading him. He is one of the few writers of Rome whose personality awakens a feeling of warm affection. He was a rigid Stoic, yet not proud or cold. In an age of almost universal corruption he kept himself unspotted from the world. He had a rare capacity for whole-hearted friendship. If his teacher Cornutus had never made another convert, and his preaching had been vain, it would have been ample reward to have won such a tribute of affection and gratitude as the lines in which Persius pours forth his soul to him (v. 21):