Persius is hard to read. He wants it that way. “If you do not wish to be understood, you should be left unread” (si non vis intellegi, debes neglegi) asserts a famous sentence of Ambrogius (some attributed it to Gerolamus) that would become the rallying cry of certain of Persius' modern detractors. Difficulty, though an inescapable fact of reading Persius, ought not to be made a cause of censure in his case, but a necessary point of interest for his interpretation. In fact, any interpretation that would propose to uncomplicate an author so obviously enamored of contradictions and short-circuitings of meaning might well be regarded as suspect.

One of the chief reasons for Persius’ complexity is that two of the principal components of his satire, the imitation of Horace and Stoic philosophy, are naturally in conflict with one another, and thus he toggles between opposite poles of outspokenness and silence, public engagement and disengagement, and so on. Paradox and conflict operate at many levels in Persius’ satires, found in what his poems assume, what they assert, and in the political context that they put us in mind of. Horace, Stoicism, and the question of freedom (satiric and political) are for Persius diverse aspects of the same search.