AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

Persius' debt to Horace.

by Hetha Amelia Eitzen




Institution: University of Missouri – Columbia
Department:
Year: 1906
Record ID: 1489293
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10355/15460


Abstract

In the comparison of the Satires of Persius with those of Horace it will be found that there are many similar passages. Some of these passages are alike in thought, while others contain the same group of words, but the meaning of the whole is different. The passages from Persius which show a slight resemblance in form even where the thought is different, as well as those in which the thought is the same, are regarded by some writers as imitations of Horace. Werther in his dissertation "De Persio Horatii Imitatore" first collects examples in which he finds similar wording and thought; next he gives those passages in which the same words are joined in the same way by both poets, then he adds those in which Persius joined not the same words as Horace, but similar words, and finally he takes up the passages in which the same words are used in corresponding parts of a verse; at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. He also states that Persius gave Horatian names to the men whose faults he blamed. In the following discussion I have made frequent use of Werther's "De Persio Horatii Imitatore", of, Connington's "Persius with translation and commentary", and of "Auli Persii Flacci Satirarum liber cum scholiis antiquis" by Otto Jahn. I have considered only those passages of Persius as imitations of Horace in which the words and thoughts or the thoughts were alike.