Delphi Complete Works of Petronius

by Petronius

  Between rich and poor in Cumae the one link is commerce in vice. Trimalchio finds Fortunata the chorus-girl standing for sale in the open market, and calls her up to be the partner of his sterile and unmeaning prodigality. She has learnt all the painful lessons of the slums; she will not grace Trimalchio’s table until dinner is over, and she has seen the plate safely collected from his guests, and the broken meats apportioned to his slaves; she knows the sting of jealousy, and the solace of intoxication or tears; normally she rules him, as Petruchio ruled Katharine, with loud assertion and tempest of words. The only other woman present at the dinner, Scintilla, the wife of Trimalchio’s friend Habinnas, a monumental mason, is more drunken and unseemly, and leaves behind her a less sharp taste of character.

  Trimalchio’s dinner breaks up with a false alarm of fire, and the infamous heroes of the story give Agamemnon the slip. Trimalchio vanishes, and with his loss the story becomes fragmentary once more, and declines in interest almost as much as in decency. Its attraction lies in the verse and criticism put into the mouth of Eumolpus, a debased poet whom Encolpius meets in a picture gallery. With him the adventures of the trio continue. There is a lodging-house brawl, a voyage where they find themselves in the hands of old enemies, the ship’s captain Lichas, whose wife Hedyle they appear to have led astray, and Tryphaena, a peripatetic courtesan who takes the Mediterranean coast for her province, and has some unexplained claim on Giton’s affections. They settle these disputes only to be involved in a shipwreck and cast ashore at Croton, where they grow fat on their pretension to be men of fortune, and disappear from sight, Encolpius after a disgraceful series of vain encounters with a woman named Circe, and Eumolpus after a scene where he bequeaths his body to be eaten by his heirs.

  Coherence almost fails long before the end: the episode in which Encolpius kills a goose, the sacred bird of Priapus, gives a hint, but no more, that the wrath of Priapus was the thread on which the whole Satyricon was strung. But the life of the later portions of the novel lies in the critical and poetical fragments scattered through it. These show Petronius at his best as a lord of language, a great critic, an intelligent enthusiast for the traditions of classical poetry and oratory. The love of style which was stronger in him even than his interest in manners doubly enriches his work. It brings ready to his pen the proverbs with their misleading hints of modernity, (See especially c. 41 to 46, 57 to 59. xiv) the debased syntax and abuse of gender, which fell from common lips daily, but is reproduced here alone in its fullness; and side by side with these mirrored vulgarisms the gravity of the attack on professional rhetoric with which the novel begins, and the weight of the teacher’s defence, that the parent will have education set to a tune of his own calling; Eumolpus’s brilliant exposition of the supremacy of the poet’s task over that of the rhetorician or historian; the curious, violent, epic fragment by which he upholds his doctrine.

  Petronius employed a pause in literary invention and production in assimilating and expressing a view upon the makers of poems, prose, pictures, philosophies, and statues, who preceded him, and thereby deepened his interpretation of contemporary life. His cynicism, his continual backward look at the splendours and severities of earlier art and other morals, are the inevitable outcome of this self-education.

  By far the most genuine and pathetic expressions of his weariness are the poems which one is glad to be able to attribute to him. The best of them speak of quiet country and seaside, of love deeper than desire and founded on the durable grace of mind as well as the loveliness of the flesh, of simplicity and escape from Court He knew the antidote to the fevered life which burnt him up. His book is befouled with obscenity, and, like obscenity itself, is ceasing by degrees to be part of a gentleman’s education. But he will always be read as a critic; he tells admirable stories of werewolves and faithless widows; (In c.61 through Niceros, in c. 63 through Trimalchio, and in c.III through Eumolpus (the famous and cosmopolitan tale of the Widow of Ephesus), xvi) he is one of the very few novelists who can distil common talk to their purpose without destroying its flavour. The translator dulls his brilliance, and must leave whole pages in the decent obscurity of Latin: he is fortunate if he adds a few to those who know something of Petronius beyond his name and the worst of his reputation.

  The thanks of the editors and the translator are due to Messrs. Weidmann of Berlin, who have generously placed at their disposal a copyright text of the Satyricon, the epoch-making work of the late Professor Buecheler.

  Mr. H. E. Butler, Professor of Latin in the University of London, is responsible for the selection of critical notes from Buecheler’s editio maior, the Introduction to and text of the poems, and the Bibliography: the translator is indebted to him and to the editors for invaluable assistance in attempting to meet the difficulties which a rendering of Petronius continues to present.

  MICHAEL HESELTINE.

  THE TEXT OF PETRONIUS

  The sources for the text of Petronius fall into three groups.

  (1) — The codex Leidensis (Q61) written by Scaliger and the editions of the de Tournes (Tornaesius) 1575 and Pithou (Pithoeus) 1577. These are our authorities for the fuller collection of excerpts. This source is known as L.

  (2) — A number of MSS. of which codex Bernensis (357) of the 10th century is typical. This group is our authority for the abridged collection of excerpts and is known collectively as O.

  (3) — The codex Traguriensis (Paris 7989) of the 15th century, which, save for a very few brief excerpts in L and O, is our sole authority for the cena Trimalchionis. This MS. was discovered in 1650 at Trau in Dalmatia. It is known as H.

  The text was not put on a scientific basis till the appearance of Buecheler’s Editio maior in 1862.

  In the Apparatus Criticus the source of the most important corrections is stated, and followed by the reading given by Buecheler in his editio minor as the probable reading of the archetype or as the oldest reading available. The sources from which the different portions of the text are derived are indicated by the letters in the margin of the text.

  SIGLA

  L = codex Scaligeranus, and editions of Tornaesius and Pithoeus.

  O = MSS. containing abridged excerpts of which cod. Bernensis may be regarded as typical.

  H = codex Traguriensis, our sole source for the Cena Trimalchionis.

  NOTE. A great number of minor corrections and alternative readings are, owing to the demands of space, omitted from the critical notes.

  TACITUS’ ACCOUNT OF PETRONIUS

  From ‘The Annals’, Translated by John Jackson

  18 1 Petronius calls for a brief retrospect. He was a man whose day was passed in sleep, his nights in the social duties and amenities of life: others industry may raise to greatness — Petronius had idled into fame. Nor was he regarded, like the common crowd of spendthrifts, as a debauchee and wastrel, but as the finished artist of extravagance. His words and actions had a freedom and a stamp of self-abandonment which rendered them doubly acceptable by an air of native simplicity. Yet as proconsul of Bithynia, and later as consul, he showed himself a man of energy and competent to affairs. Then, lapsing into the habit, or copying the features, of vice, he was adopted into the narrow circle of Nero’s intimates as his Arbiter of Elegance; the jaded emperor finding charm and delicacy in nothing save what Petronius had commended. His success awoke the jealousy of Tigellinus against an apparent rival, more expert in the science of pleasure than himself. He addressed himself, therefore, to the sovereign’s cruelty, to which all other passions gave pride of place; arraigning Petronius for friendship with Scaevinus, while suborning one of his slaves to turn informer, withholding all opportunity of defence, and placing the greater part of his household under arrest.

  19 1 In those days, as it chanced, the Caesar had migrated to Campania; and Petronius, after proceeding as far as Cumae, was being there detained in custody. He declined to tolerate further the delays of fear or hope; yet still did not hurry to take his life, but caused his already severed
arteries to be bound up to meet his whim, then opened them once more, and began to converse with his friends, in no grave strain and with no view to the fame of a stout-hearted ending. He listened to them as they rehearsed, not discourses upon the immortality of the soul or the doctrines of philosophy, but light songs and frivolous verses. Some of his slaves tasted of his bounty, a few of the lash. He took his place at dinner, and drowsed a little, so that death, if compulsory, should at least resemble nature. Not even in his will did he follow the routine of suicide by flattering Nero or Tigellinus or another of the mighty, but — prefixing the names of the various catamites and women — detailed the imperial debauches and the novel features of each act of lust, and sent the document under seal to Nero. His signet-ring he broke, lest it should render dangerous service later.

  20 1 While Nero doubted how the character of his nights was gaining publicity, there suggested itself the name of Silia — the wife of a senator, and therefore a woman of some note, requisitioned by himself for every form of lubricity, and on terms of the closest intimacy with Petronius. She was now driven into exile for failing to observe silence upon what she had seen and undergone. Here the motive was a hatred of his own. But Minucius Thermus, an ex-praetor, he sacrificed to the animosities of Tigellinus. For a freedman of Thermus had brought certain damaging charges against the favourite, which he himself expiated by the pains of torture, his patron by an unmerited death.

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