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  • Recognizing Persius
  • Kate Meng Brassel
Kenneth J. Reckford . Recognizing Persius. Martin Classical Lectures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 240. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-691-14141-1.

Recognizing Persius is an unapologetically personal book. Reckford has argued for the sophistication and appeal of this chronically obscure poet since his influential "Studies in Persius," Hermes 90 (1962) 476-504. His efforts to scrape calcified aspersions off the satires have been essential to a revitalization of interest in these poems. After fifty-eight years of reading Persius (his interest was sparked in 1951, he writes, ix), Reckford approaches the corpus once again in order to seek the man behind the poems, rejecting the notion that the "implied author" is the furthest reach of the literary critic. The satires' legacy suffered excessively from reliance on the poet's Vita and clichéd representations of the young satirist as a pasty recluse. In the twentieth century, significant gains in our understanding of these complex pieces were made with New Criticism and its successors. Acknowledging the [End Page 376] perils of biographical criticism, Reckford nevertheless wonders whether, with diverse methods now at our disposal, it is possible also to understand "the person behind the text who lived and died; who fought hard, as it seems, for his integrity and moral freedom; and who, amid his many duties and concerns . . . wrote Satires" (16-17).

In chapter 1, organized around "performance," Reckford offers a reading of the first satire as though aloud, juggling Persius' ever-problematic interlocutors and personae. Advancing this interpretation, he situates the dynamics between the satire's voices and the satirist's audience in performance heritages, from the Greeks to Lucilius and, of course, Horace. He imagines the production of Horace's satire from composition to performance and uses Horace's literary self-contextualization to show Persius' isolation by contrast. Reckford reads between Persius' lines for links between the poet and his world, wondering, for example, whether vel duo vel nemo might be Cornutus and Caesius Bassus & Co., or whether semipaganus might have been a taunt made at the young suburban by the young urbans on the playground. Any of these links to Persius' life might or might not be right: that neither answer contributes to a specifically literary interpretation tells us how different this project is: Reckford's readings seek to dislodge restrictive biographical criticism with an expansive criticism that envisions an accessible person and poet in Persius. If we can learn to empathize with this poet, he hopes, we can learn to appreciate his biographical poems.

Expanding the performance theme, Reckford watches Satires 2-5 "play out ethical concerns on the inner stage," since the "stages" of dinners and courts are inhospitable to satire under Nero. In his reading of Aristophanic and philosophical echoes in Satire 2, Reckford makes his own reader "you," reproducing the satirist's own second-person didactic technique. The section on Satire 3 is perhaps the most useful close reading of the book: Reckford examines Persius' ethical stance, deliberately using the blurred term "writer" in his search for Persius' not implied but "implicated" author, "a fragile, flawed, and physically vulnerable human being like ourselves" (67). Reekford resuscitates Housman's resoundingly (but indeed wrongly) rejected 1913 note on the voices of Satire 3 as products of a split personality. The reading is strengthened by identifying the "diagnostic purpose" of such a splitting: another "Persius" would be better able to analyze himself from without.

In chapter 3, Reckford engages in the standard interpretation of Satire 4, a rendition of the First Alcibiades as a screen for Persius' view of Neronian politics. Satire 5 is also treated familiarly, as an extolling of the poet's relationship with his tutor, Cornutus; but after Henderson's 1991 article, it remains surprisingly uncomplicated. The chapter closes with speculation on Persius' level of political engagement; this exercise raises more questions than it answers, but Reckford takes the opportunity to "narrativize" (127) a life for Persius as a dissident. Literary scholars who mistrust claims to virtue and historians who want evidence could take issue with this story of a politically engaged poet, but for Reckford's purposes, the burden of disproof rests...

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