The mantle of the satirist preacher which had fallen from Horace found no worthy claimant for nearly half a century. The successor, and, so far as in him lay, the sincere imitator of Horace, was Aulus Persius Flaccus. His circumstances were as unlike those of his great predecessor as can well be imagined. Horace was the son of a freedman, with no financial or social backing save that which he won by his own genius; Persius was, like Lucilius, of noble equestrian rank, rich, and related by birth to some of the first men of his time. Horace, while he had every opportunity for learning all that books and the schools could teach him, was, as we have already seen, preëminently a student of real life, having been taught by his father to study men as they actually were. Persius, on the other hand, saw little of the world except through the medium of books and teachers. When the future satirist was but six years of age, his father died, and he was brought up chiefly in the society of his mother and sister, carefully shielded from contact with the rough and wicked world. At the age of twelve he was taken from his native Volaterræ in Etruria to Rome, where his formal education was continued in the same careful seclusion until he assumed the toga of manhood. His writings do not, therefore, smack of the street and the world of men as do those of Horace, but they savor of the cloister and the library. Horace preached against the sins of men as he saw them; Persius, as he imagined them and read of them, taking his texts often from the more virile satires of Horace himself. Horace was devoted to no school of philosophy, but accepted what seemed to him best and sanest from all schools, and jeered alike at the follies of all. But Persius was by birth, education, and choice a Stoic. He became an ardent preacher and expounder of the Stoic philosophy, just as Lucretius had thrown his whole heart into expounding the doctrine of Epicurus a hundred years before. Stoicism, as Tyrrell says, was the "philosophy in which under the Roman Empire the human conscience sought and found an asylum. It had ceased now to be a philosophy, and had become a religion, appealing to the rich and great as Christianity appealed to the poor and humble." Persius, accordingly, following his early bent, as soon as he arrived at man's estate, placed himself under the care and instruction of Cornutus, a Stoic philosopher. His own account of this event forms one of the most pleasing passages in his works, and is found in the fifth satire, which is a confession of his own ardent devotion both to his friend the Stoic, and to Stoicism as well.