Information about Persius's life comes from an apparently reliable Vita attributed to the first-century scholar M. Valerius Probus. Persius was born in Volaterra (modern Volterrae) in northwest Etruria on 4 December A.D. 34. He died of a stomach ailment on 24 November A.D. 62, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. A Roman knight with blood ties to senatorial families, he came from a rich old Etruscan family and received a first-class education in literature and rhetoric at Rome from two distinguished teachers, Remmius Palaemon and Verginius Flavus. Persius's father died when he was around six; his stepfather died not long afterward. Persius was, says the Vita, "a person of most gentle ways, of virginal modesty, handsome repute, and exemplary devotion to his mother, his sister, and his aunt." Scholars have sometimes belittled Persius as a bookish young man surrounded by adoring female relatives; yet, family and friends involved him, at least vicariously, in public life. He was related to the younger Arria, whose parents were forced to commit suicide under the emperor Claudius after a failed conspiracy; he enjoyed some ten years of close friendship with her husband, Thrasea Paetus, the best-known Stoic dissident under Nero. Persius's friends also included the poet Caesius Bassus and some older men who served as foster fathers and mentors: Servilius Nonianus, a man of affairs; two philosopher-doctors from Greece and Asia; and most important, the learned Annaeus Cornutus, a freedman and scholar who not only wrote Greek treatises on theology and literature but also was a dramatist and, as Persius describes him in Satire 5, a Stoic role model par excellence.
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