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George Long:
Philosophy Of Antoninus Stoic Philosophy Part I. and the poets Persius and Juvenal, whose energetic language and manly thoughts may be as instructive to us now as they might have been to their contemporaries. Persius died under Nero's bloody reign, but Juvenal had the good fortune to survive the tyrant Domitian and to see the better times of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. His best precepts are derived from the Stoic school, and they are enforced in his finest verses by the unrivalled vigour of the Latin language. [Footnote 1: I have omitted Seneca, Nero's preceptor. He was in a sense a Stoic and he has said many good things in a very fine way. There is a judgment of Gellius (XII. 2) on Seneca, or rather a statement of what some people thought of his philosophy, and it is not favourable. His writings and his life must be taken together, and I have nothing more to say of him here. The reader will find a notice of Seneca and his philosophy in "Seekers after God," by the Rev. F. W. Farrar. Macmillan and Co.] [Footnote 2: Ribbeck has laboured to prove that those Satires which contain philosophical precepts are not the work of the real, but of a false Juvenal, a Declamator. Still the verses exist, and were written by somebody who was acquainted with the Stoic doctrines.] | |
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