Early in the 5th century other aristocratic Romans interested themselves in the textual criticism of Persius and Martial.
Persius was a young man of little originality, who expressed in his poems only what he learned from his teachers.
Great Greek writers were wanting; and the Latin writers extant, except the satirist Persius, are of an ordinary type.
Persius has fallen into none of them; and therefore is free from those imputations.
And Persius favours me, by saying, that Ennius was the fifth from the Pythagorean peacock.
