This article focuses on the early modern reception of a single verse from Persius’s Satires, ‘ut ramale vetus vegrandi subere coctum’ (1.97). It begins by explaining a four-hundred-year-old, bilingual, terribly rude joke that was inspired by this verse and was told on the London stage. It then develops the explanation of this English-Latin pun into a sustained study of the scholarly reception of that line in early modern commentaries of Persius. Today, classicists consider this line to be part of an impertinent but ultimately inconsequential remark by Persius’s interlocutor. As I shall show, however, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, 1.97 was of great critical interest: it was edited as a stand-alone punch-line and interpreted as nothing less than Persius’s vindication of Virgil’s epic style. For an early modern reader, 1.97 thus promised to reveal what the highly respected Persius thought about the even more admirable Virgil. But what exactly does it mean to say that Virgil’s style is ‘like an ancient dried-up branch with swollen bark’? Early modern commentators’ efforts to explain how this strange simile might function as a defence of the Aeneid provide us with fresh sources for the study of Renaissance attitudes to Virgil’s epic style. Some of the explanations of 1.97 support and further elucidate what we already know about Renaissance perspectives on Virgilian style; another opens up surprising perspectives on Virgil as a difficult, even crabbed, stylist. I take the latter as an invitation to put ancient, early modern and modern commentators on Virgil’s language into dialogue. In a coda, this investigation returns to its place of origin, the early modern London stage and brings its insights to bear on a striking expression in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster
