1. Petronius in early Canada. On June 28, 1685, Louis-Armand, Baron de Lahontan (1666–1715), author of (English ed. 1703, text electronically available) New Voyages to North America, penned a letter from Montreal, containing this tidbit:
I cannot but be inraged at the impertinent zeal of the Curate of this city. This infernal fellow came one day to my lodgings, and finding the Romance of the Adventures of Petronius upon my table, he fell upon it with an unimaginable fury, and tore out almost all the leaves. This book I valued more than my life, because it was not castrated.
This appears to be the first mention of an unexpurgated Satyricon in Québec. Earlier, in 1611–1612, the Jesuit Pierre Briard’s Latin account of his Canadian explorations contains the expression asperitatem regionis, which has been plausibly identified as a debt to Satyricon 99.3.1, asperisque regionibus, in terms of context as well as linguistic similarity.1
2. “The Race is not to the Swift”—Ecclesiastes 9.11. Being unnoticed in the Bibliographies of Gaselee (1910) and Schmeling-Stuckey, beyond the remit of Stuckey’s “Petronius the ‘Ancient’: His Reputation and Influence in Seventeenth Century England” (1972), and inadvertently omitted from my panoramic “Petronian Jottings” (PSN 23 [1993], 10–12), it is worth drawing attention to Jonathan Swift’s On Dreams: An Imitation of Petronius, written in 1724 (text in Pat Rogers’ edition, New Haven & London [1983], 270–271, plus 738 for notes). Swift’s 38 lines are based on the 16 of Petronius’ poem Somnia quae mentes ludunt volitantibus umbris, etc. After the first 10 lines, which stick fairly close to the original, Swift’s version becomes progressively freer as he transforms the poem into a satirical comment on the politics and scandals of the day, with allusions to (e.g.) peculations by the South Sea directors and the tribulations of prominent churchman Francis Atterbury, plus the introduction of comical scavenger Tom Turdman. For more detailed analysis, cf. Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 1969, 198–203), also Nora Crow Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, NH, 1977, 3–5).
3. The world hardly needed yet another Englishing of Petronius. Still, this one commands attention, being from the pen (or processor) of Frederic Raphael, classically trained novelist, essayist, and all-round man of letters. Except (thanks to television) The Glittering Prizes (London: A. Lane, 1976), I fancy Raphael is not as known in North America as he deserves to be, despite a Chicagoan birth and decades of screenwriting, from Darling (Julie Christie’s launch pad) to Kubrick’s daft Eyes Wide Shut. While orthodox in matters of author, date, and intent, the Introduction is vintage Raphael, coruscating with epigrams and provocations. He makes heavy weather over being kept away from Petronius by his Carthusian masters—in his words, “Outlawed territory” (compare the account of another companion classicist–novelist, Simon Raven, via his biography by Michael Barber, with much on the quirky Tacitean editor A.L. “Uncle” Irvine). Well, maybe at Charterhouse, but some schoolboys elsewhere must have had a taste of the Arbiter, otherwise the school editions of E.T. Sage (1929) and W.B. Sedgwick (1925; 1950) would have had no sales. These inevitably evoke horse-laughs for their quaint playing down of “smut,” for example, Sage’s “surround” for circummingere and Sedgwick’s “consign to the dickens” for laecasin dico, but at least he left this latter in (though expunging Burmann’s catillum concatum, which Martin Smith thought “possibly through fear of seeming guilty of bowdlerizing the text most commentators have welcomed a little uncritically.”) Sedgwick, though, was a first-rate Petronian; for a just appreciation, see Robert Browning’s (CR ns 1, 1951, 193–194) review of the second edition.
Raphael discloses a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the late John Sullivan, at one moment dubbing him “my old friend,” at another praising his translation while insisting he hasn’t read it—Raphael Loebed his way through, presumably via Warmington’s revised version, for still another mockery of Sullivan for the term “scopomixy”—“Trust a classical scholar to find an obscure term for Peeping Tomfoolery,” a bit rich coming from one who indulges in such locutions as “depucelate,” which will have students running for their dictionaries.
Raphael’s translation is in remorseless British demotic, a good deal of which will be beyond most North Americans, with some jarring intrusions, for example, cis-Atlanticisms “buck” and “stash,” and “tin” (= money), a British public school archaism, probably last used by Billy Bunter. The end product is tricky to judge. One simultaneously recognizes Petronius while seeming to read an original Raphael: is this praise or blame? One way of making up your mind is to read or re-read Peter Green’s (yet another Carthusian classicist–novelist—you name it) essay “Medium and Message Reconsidered: The Changing Functions of Classical Tradition,” in his marvelous collection Classical Bearings (1989, 256–270); another is to ponder Thoreau’s (Walden, Chapter 3) dictum: “Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race, for it is remarkable that no transcription of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript,” of which Green writes, “No more damning or total dismissal of all translations has ever been made.”
4. My public library’s electronic catalogue is a curious beast. I recently typed in the name Petronella Wyatt, seeking to find this British journalist’s memoirs. Instead, the site offered me the rubric Petronius, with one choice: The Uncertain Hour, by one Jesse Browner, billed as a New York writer and translator, with novels and multi-journalism on his c.v.
PSN 37 (2007) gave this a one-sentence notice: “This is a fictional account of Petronius and his novel.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The book only makes a half-page appearance in the final pages. We learn that Petronius had been working on it during his last two years of life, untitled (so Browner evades the Satyrica/Satyricon choice), “a satire I suppose you could call it … it’s not dangerous, it’s private.” This in response to his interlocutor’s surprised “A book? You?”—this Arbiter then has no literary reputation. Petronius orders his work to be kept in a sealed amphora, not to be shown or even mentioned to anyone until Nero is dead—why not, if it is “not dangerous?”
Petronius is here talking to and ordering his protégé, the poet Martial no less, prominent throughout the novel as a louche, young poetaster on the make, forever bragging of his sexual prowess and flogging his epigrams, here pleased (“I like it”) to be informed that he is in his mentor’s novel disguised as Ascyltus, translated by him as “untroubled”—if only John Sullivan were here to review this….
This is not the suave, ironic man of letters from Quo Vadis?. Browner’s Petronius is a borborological cocksman more concerned to arbitrate Nero’s hedonisms than his poems. The novel divides between Petronius’ theatrical banquet suicide (though the vein-cutting is done outside the triclinium) and flashbacks to his time as governor and general (much stress on his military abilities and popularity with the squaddies) in Bithynia. Both sections abound in lubricious scenes, somewhat in Henry Miller mode, between our hero and his blonde girl friend Melissa Silia (inspired, Browner says, from the Silia mentioned by Tacitus), acquired from her unsatisfactory and finally killed-in-action soldier husband. Unlike the faithful slave girl Eunice in Quo Vadis?, she will not die with him.
What with the goings-on between himself and Silia, his youthful memories of being deflowered by an older woman thoughtfully provided by his mother, and of fucking Messalina, attempted manual and oral stimulations by a 15-year-old slave girl Surisca—her name connecting with the pseudo-Virgilian Copa (we get a little authorship debate), recited at table as Petronius’ favorite poem—there is little wonder that we find a Priapus statue in the garden of his Roman estate, the latter described in such terms as to put Trimalchio’s mansion, nay, even Nero’s Domus Aurea, to shame.
Some of his luxury items come from his great-grandfather’s time as prefect of Egypt, and from his brother’s time in Britain. Near the end, the latter, in one of the novel’s best scenes, is revealed to be Petronius Turpilianus (step forward, Philip Corbett), now high in Nero’s favor and not about to help his brother, briefly appears to confirm the death sentence and bid farewell in an exchange of frigid formalities worthy of C.P. Snow.
As a Seneca-phobe, my other favorite moment is the elaborately witty denunciation of that pseudo-Stoic’s hypocrisies and Vicar of Bray trimmings by no less than his epistolary recipient Lucilius—not one for Anna Lydia Motto.
The novel’s plan does not allow much scope for extraneous characters and events. Thus, the Fire gets but a single sentence, and no sign of Golden House or Christians in lion cafeterias. A very sub-fusc Nero appears near the end, briefly and to little effect, though his brooding off-stage presence as the signer of death warrants (shades of Stalin) works well enough. Blink twice, and you will miss the on–off epiphanies of Octavia, Lucan, and a surprisingly “rosy-cheeked” Tigellinus. Back at the ranch, we do get the ceremonial smashing of Petronius’ fluorspar big dipper, but his sealed letter to Nero, though nicely tinged with dark predictions of the emperor’s own fall, has not the Tacitus-endorsed catalogue of imperial boudoir frolics.
Browner employs modern demotic remorselessly in the characters’ thoughts and words. Thus, we have Petronius coming out with “It’s a load of crap,” and so forth. Always difficult, of course, to find the right key in an historical novel. We certainly don’t want Bulwer Lyttonisms mediated via Snoopy’s doghouse literary efforts. However, there is an uneasy clash between this technique and the rival prose used in his attempts to recreate the sights and sounds of the Roman world. Setting the bar high, Browner does not compare with Quo Vadis? or I, Claudius, or, at a notch or two lower, John Hersey’s The Conspiracy (1972).
One Christopher Stace is thanked for detecting historical inaccuracies, with the standard authorial shouldering of blame for any that remain. There are some eyebrow-raising moments: Poppaea did not die two years before Petronius; Tigellinus’ big party bash for Nero did not “make the Arbiter of Elegance obsolete at a single blow”; Vatinius was probably hunch-backed rather than club-footed, although Tacitus’ corpore obtorto is ambiguous and a pedic defect nicely suits an ex-cobbler; and Petronius’ last hour is set in December, whereas Kenneth Rose plausibly assigned it to May. One could pick other nits of detail, but this is after all a novel, and as Kingsley Amis (The James Bond Dossier) remarked of Ian Fleming’s capacity for error, “When he goes wrong I either don’t know or don’t notice or don’t care.” Suitable to its plot, the book can be read in a single sitting. How typical it is of Browner, I have no idea, having read nothing else by him. Basically, I thought it a good idea not always good in execution, hence for verdict fall back on Punch’s venerable “Curate’s Egg.”
5. Fraenkel and Petronius. In Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000, (edited by the indefatigable Christopher Stray, 2007), Stephanie West (203–218) recalls reading Petronius in Fraenkel’s 1958–1959 Oxford class, where “we had a vivid sense of scholarship remorselessly advancing.” The great man, West observes, “had a very high regard for the elegant brevity and precision of Petronius’ style,” while, along with her classmates, rightly thinking he “pressed the theory” of his notorious phantom Carolingian interpolator “too hard”—an understatement to my way of thinking (see also the following section 11. “See You Later, Interpolator”).
West also remarks on the group’s suspicion that Fraenkel dispatched a postcard to Konrad Müller in Bern every Tuesday after their sessions—probably as well this was the pre-email era. On one occasion, set to translate Satyricon 102.15, West tried to duck out of rendering this long sentence by suggesting that the concluding relative clause quod frequenter etiam non accersito ferrumine infigitur was an interpolation. She expected ready concurrence, only to find Fraenkel demurring until the next morning when she received a note indicating a change of mind and the intention of forwarding the idea to Müller. West subjoins in a footnote that the square brackets duly appeared in Müller’s first edition, withdrawn (like so many others) in later ones. West, who likewise recanted, is given credit for this notion in John Sullivan’s repertoire of proposed interpolations (1976) and Warmington’s revised Loeb.
By way of a coda, West mentions that Fraenkel could transgress the bounds of rigid textual criticism with which most people identify him, telling how Petronius’ allusion (17.7) to tertian ague “led to a fascinating disquisition on malaria and the ancient drainage system.” A shame that this side of him (confirmed to me by his daughter Renata who lives here in Calgary) did not (save some hints in his Horace) find more public exposure.
6. “But among lesser men we find a certain Petronius and a certain Tigellinus in Rome, who were required to kill themselves, lulling death to sleep, so to speak, by their voluptuous preparations. They made death flow gently along, slipping it in amongst their usual wanton pastimes, between their girls and their drinking-companions, no mention of consolation, no mention of wills, no ambitious show of constancy, no talk of their condition in the life to come, but amidst games and festivities, jokes and common everyday conversation, music and love-poetry”—Montaigne, Essays, 3.9 (“On Vanity”), tr. M.A. Screech, Penguin (1991) 1113. Although he has obviously read Tacitus, Annals 16.18–20 (cf. my articles in PSN 31, 2001, 2–3, and 34, 2004, 3–4) and Histories 1.72, it is clear from his mode of reference that Montaigne had no inkling of any connection between this Petronius and the Satyricon, a work never cited or alluded to throughout the brobdingnagian bulk of his Essais.
Montaigne has, though, made a point worth following up. The two exitus scenes both complement and contrast. Petronius (to borrow a phrase once applied to the egregious David Frost) rose without trace (ignavia ad famam protulerat) into Nero’s favor, more vitiorum imitatione than the real thing, becoming elegantiae arbiter. Tigellinus, on the other hand, moved up fast (velocius), a genuine rascal (foeda pueritia, impudica senecta), reached the top by his wickednesses (vitiis adeptus), the emperor’s (so to speak) arbiter of cruelty (corrupto ad omne facinus Nerone). Petronius dies his leisurely death, hosting a last supper for his smart literary friends, leaving no will, just the insulting letter inventorying Nero’s boudoir antics. Tigellinus leaves the world in a similar though not similarly impressive (deformis moras) slow tempo, enjoying his last dallyings with ladies of doubtful virtue at a fashionable spa before cutting his throat with a razor (apud Sinuessanas aquas supremae necessitatis nuntio inter stupra concubinarum et oscula)—apart from the razor’s unkindest cut of all, I can think of worse ways of going out.
The unanswerable $64,000 question: was Tigellinus’ suicide a conscious emulation or parody of Petronius’? Yes or no, it is piquant (as Tacitus must have noticed, without saying so) that these two old court rivals, different in every other way, should have shared (mutatis mutandis) such melodramatic finales.
7. In Spartacus Road—a delicious blend of classical scholarship, travelogue, and memoir—Peter Stothard hopes (2010, 180–181) that the presumed library buried at Herculaneum might contain “unknown works by Nero’s ‘arbiter of taste,’ Petronius, who set near here his Trimalchio’s Feast, a literary masterpiece of exotic sexuality, cookery and cemetery architecture.” Don’t we all! Of course, one wonders how many books and articles might be refuted by such a discovery. It is not clear what Stothard means by “unknown works,” and there is not much “exotic sexuality” chez Trimalchio.
Musing over rival ancient philosophies, Stothard observes, “Petronius wrote that it was human fear that created the gods: primus in orbe deos fecit timor. Statius of Naples borrowed the same line and gave it to his giant boxer of the Thebaid, Capaneus. Giambattista Vico of Naples, 1700 years later, borrowed it again.” As Kenneth Rose (1971, 5) showed long ago, this is not a secure dating clue. Lactantius and Fulgentius may have been right to credit Petronius with authorship of the poem (Müller 1961, 28) that opens with these words. On the other hand, they may not; some take Lactantius to mean Petronius imitated Statius. Rose concludes that he was simply saying that Petronius wrote after Lucan, which (taking the Bellum Civile as satire on the Pharsalia) we knew anyway, albeit “contemporary with” would be more accurate than “after.”
This tag would have a long history, from its quotation in a Latin quatrain Ad Atheos in the Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1735, 47 (cf. my The Latin & Greek Poems of Samuel Johnson, London, 1995, 171–172, for analysis) to its titular employment in a song by Asgaard Primus—lyrics and details on various websites.
8. Anthony Powell and Petronius again. In his journal entry for September 7, 1988, Powell wrote: “I re-read the Satyricon, also J.P. Sullivan’s book on Petronius. The translation of former by Paul Dinnidge is good and fluent. Sullivan, as a don, is rather worried as how to categorize the work, which does not accord with classical idea of satire.” This point is a perpetual stumbling block with critics in other areas too, who find difficulty in grasping that the world, realistically surveyed with even a minimum of irony (simply naturalistically, so far as that can ever be done), turns out to be a grotesque place, human beings even more so. After all, as Nietzsche points out, the Greeks knew that well. Decently translated, The Satyricon holds up amazingly well, especially Trimalchio, who, one feels, could have been exactly like that as a Roman nouveau riche. Even the picaresque adventures are scarcely exaggerated.
“Dinnidge” is presumably a slip for “Dinnage,” whose translation (Spearman & Calder, London/The British Book Centre Inc., New York) appeared in 1953. It apparently earned a single review, mixed but generally favorable, by Edward L. Bassett, CP 49 (1954, 284–285). Dinnage is herein described as an amateur Latinist (doubtless a reason for the paucity of reviews, academic snobbery being what it is), criticized for his uncertain handling of the editions by Buecheler, Ernout, and Heraeus, but praised for his lively (if sometimes over-free) translations and refusal to bowdlerize.
As signaled in PSN 29 (1999), Costas Panayotakis published in that same year a revised annotated version of Dinnage (Wordsworth, Ware, Hertfordshire), an event unknown to (e.g.) Wikipedia’s list of English versions. I have never seen Dinnage’s translation. Sale copies of the 1953 original can be tracked down online. He appears not to have published anything else on Petronius: leastways, nothing by him is mentioned in Schmeling-Stuckey or Martin Smith’s ANRW bibliography.
A separate entry reads: “The Prince of Wales was attended by a Mr Richard Arbiter. Is the latter a modern version of Petronius Arbiter at Nero’s court, who will write a Satyricon of our day, then be threatened by the jealousy of another royal favourite, and will he then open a vein in his bath, while commending and criticising his servants?”
For further Powellian bonus, his parody of Cyril Connolly (himself an ardent fan of Petronius’ “rapidity of style, visual clarity, biting dialogue, intellectual fastidiousness”) concludes, “Looking around at our contemporaries, we must ponder the ambivalent lament attributed to Petronius, that disinherited Roman clubman: Pueri mater amica optima est—Punch, 1953, repr. Miscellaneous Verdicts (Chicago & London, 1990, 307).
Powell crystallized his Petronian points of view in a review (London, Daily Telegraph, 1968, repr. in Under Review, Heinemann, London, 1961; Univ. Chcago. 1994, 334–336). Too long to reproduce in full, hence just some saliencies. Powell begins, “Certain books possess a magic not altogether explicable in merely critical terms. The Satyricon is one of these.” After three pages of discussing both Petronius and his arbiter Sullivan, he reaches the conclusion “Here, probably for the first time, is the pure imaginative vision of the novelist, directed towards the life around him that may have seemed grotesque enough, but was all the same accepted—and in many ways not all that different from our own day.” Powell inclines toward the Ira Priapi doctrine: disappointing for myself who seems alone in disbelief. However, he makes one interesting observation that deserves reaction. Apropos of the usual view that Encolpius’ impotence is a punishment, Powell suggests that “on the other hand, impotence and homosexuality would in themselves be displeasing to a god of fruitfulness, so that Encolpius may be punished for these as much as by them.” Homosexuality is off the mark (cf. the Priapea poems), impotency perhaps not.
9. A.E. Housman and Petronius. I wrote on this in PSN 36 (2006); now, one aspect of this, the pun on Liber at Sat. 41.7, has been briefly treated by Darrell Sutton (in “An Informed and Unrivalled Critic,” The Housman Society Journal 36 [2010] 123–124), describing and approving Housman’s explanation. Sutton’s accompanying remarks on Petronius describe his novel as “a craftily stitched tapestry of the rural dining habits of the Roman bourgeoisie,” also commending his “drawing of word-pictures for the reader’s imagination and amusement.”
10. The Dating Game. In his “The Satyrica and the Greek Novel: Revisions and Some Open Questions” (2010), Jeffrey Henderson casts doubts on its Neronian date. I don’t think it a case of Mumpsimus to be unconvinced, but he is evenhanded, makes some provocative points, and it does us no harm to rethink our positions.
Early on, Henderson makes the startling suggestion that Petronius “wrote other novels too, namely the Albucia and the Euscion attributed to him by Macrobius and Fulgentius.” Has anyone else ever believed this? Henderson does not elaborate, either with argument or documentation. Both these proper names occur in that most unreliable of provenances, Fulgentius (Macrobius hardly comes into it; cf. my “Fulgentius and his Sources,” Traditio 44 [1988] 37–57). If genuine, there is no reason why they could not come from lost sections of the Satyrica: Albucia is probably (such translators as Heseltine, Sullivan, Warnington agree, albeit the verb subit or subet, which she governs has many shades of meaning) a randy woman, Euscios a shady lawyer. If the lady is a fabrication, the Albucilla described by Tacitus (Ann. 6.47) as multorum amoribus famosa is the likeliest source of inspiration. Since (e.g ) Ernout, Heseltine, Müller, Warmington do not, I subjoin that Euscios’ name is far from certain, as Bücheler’s apparatus makes diffusely clear.
Confining another eye-catching remark to a footnote (490 n. 23)—shades of Gibbon—Henderson observes that a certain Greek writer of uncertain date, Dercyllus, also penned a Satyrica. True enough, but here irrelevant, since our informant Plutarch (?), De Fluviis 10.2, makes it quite clear that this book was about Satyrs in general, and the flaying of Marsyas in particular. Henderson calls many Neronian references in Rose’s inventory “derisory.” As one who has (post-Rose) played this game, I may or may not also have to put my hand up. In fairness to Rose, it should be stressed that he too characterizes these proposed allusions as “alleged” and “supposed”—no Judaeus Apella he.
In continuance of this, Henderson asserts “In fact it is noteworthy that Rose documents all of the Satyrica’s many references to Nero by citing later authors, especially Suetonius, Pliny, Martial, and Juvenal, where a later Petronius could have found them too.” Well, first, at least one item is documented by Seneca; second, the elder Pliny was coeval with Nero and Petronius rather than “later”; third, so what? Where else (we may toss in Dio Cassius) can one look for Neronian documentation?
Henderson is impressed by Martin’s attempts to prove that Petronian epic parodies are closer to Silius than Lucan, also by Habermehl’s claim that linguistic oddities in the Satyrica are akin to late Latin. No mention is made of rival demonstrations by (e.g.) Bagnani, Hofmann, and Sullivan of verbal parallels with Plautus and Seneca. From the neutral corner, it looks as though everybody finds what they are looking for.
Thanks again to Martin’s inventories, Martial is here front and center, with Henderson convinced that Petronius is dependent on him, not vice versa, as was argued in Dousa’s Praecidanea back in 1583. Epigram 3.82 (Zoilus’ dinner party) gets the full treatment, dubbed “a virtual Cena Trimalchionis in miniature.” However, the main theme of this poem (as with Juvenal 5) is the host’s stingy treatment of his guests in terms of food and wine, something of which Trimalchio cannot be accused. Henderson is taken by the appearance in this epigram of a character called Malchio, not observing that (as Bagnani, followed by Rose, pointed out) waxed tablets from Herculaneum listing the freedmen of a C. Petronius also has one. Homonyms can lead anywhere: a Fortunata appears twice in the graffiti at Pompeii’s lupanar. Henderson makes great play with the joint appearance in both authors of Cosmian perfumes, arguing that chronology implies Petronius was copying Martial, only weakly admitting that the Petronian passage (fr. 18) may have been a misattribution: editors (apart from Ernout) such as Heseltine, Müller (who doesn’t print it), and Warmington dismiss it as an error by Perotti (1513). In any case, as Rose and Sullivan suggest, “Cosmian” could simply be a generic or trade name for popular unguents.
On another bit of Martial lore, Henderson believes that Petronius’ description (Sat. 92.7–10) of how a Roman knight is attracted to Ascyltus’ large organ is modeled on Martial’s (9.33) Audieris in quo, Flacce, balneo plausum,/ Maronis illic esse mentulam scito. This, so to speak, is poppycock. No need to suppose any direct borrowing either way. One only has to look back to Catullus’ Mamurra (poem 29) who is all mentula, or forward to the Historia Augusta’s tale of Elagabalus’ scouring the baths for hyper-endowed men.
Henderson dwells on what he calls “another program-level feature of the Satyrica, its homoerotic focus.” Is this true? On the one hand, Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton indulge in gay romps, as does Eumolpus, while Trimalchio has a catamite. On the other, Encolpius goes to desperate lengths to recover his heterosexual potency; Eumolpus has a fling with a young girl; Trimalchio, who as a slave serviced both master and mistress, has a wife; Tryphaena is both married to Lichas and lusting after Giton; and Quartilla’s orgy is bisexual, the adjective that better fits what we have of the novel—who knows what went on in the missing portions?
On the putative links between Petronius and Greek novels, Henderson is rich in detail and evenhanded in approach. I often think, though, that this whole business may be beside the point. There may be similarities in details—indeed, how could there not be?—but, overall, Petronius is quite different, as, in his way, is Apuleius (also receiving Hendersonian attention). It isn’t hard to believe in Roman fictional innovation: as Quintilian famously remarked, Satura quidem tota nostra est.
Pursuing the Satyrica into later times leads Henderson into what seem to me both irrelevancy (Strato’s Musa Puerilis) and ghost-busting (another unknown Petronius to whom the novel was mistakenly ascribed). I increasingly stake my Neronian faith in an item Henderson does not address, namely, Trimalchio’s horti Pompeiani (53.3). This should (Martin Smith concurred), and I think must, mean gardens at Pompeii rather than gardens belonging to a Pompeius, a grammatical possibility that restrained Bagnani, Rose, and others. Two reasons for confidence are the concurrent mention of Trimalchio’s praedio Cumano and the fact that (76.8) he already possessed all the estates of his former master Pompeius. The only way around this must be speculation that there was some revival of Pompeii after AD 79, a notion variously proposed and rejected (details and bibliography in Rose 22 n. 2), but undermined by Statius, Silvae 4.4.79–85 and 5.3.205–8, also Martial 4.44, both of whom make it clear that the town was totally obliterated. No mention of any ancient revival exists, either in such modern books as Michael Grant’s Cities of Vesuvius (1976) or (for what it may be worth) in the Wikipedia notice, while it is worth adding that Vesuvius again erupted in 203 and 472. Surely a clear case of Pompeii and circumstance…
11. See You Later, Interpolator (titular apologies to Bill Haley & The Comets). Essential Bibliography: Apart from the retrenchments, recantations, and ruminations throughout Konrad Müller’s (1961) stream of editions—claudite iam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt—the places to go are John Sullivan’s “Interpolations in Petronius” (1976), and T. Wade Richardson’s 1972 dissertation, the latter fortified by his 2007 work (electronic), comprising L’état de la question and a large number of interpolation-hunting exercises.
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona. This activity began with Petronius’ early editors, whom we may here acknowledge and skip with reference to the bibliographies of Gaselee (1909–1910) and Schmeling-Stuckey (1977). The first post-Trau watershed came with Peter Burmann (1709), to whom, as Gaselee observes, Franz Bücheler “does less than justice, saying ex qua fructum capias perquam exiguum si exceperis Nicolai Heinsii notas antea ineditas. This comment was doubtless meant to clear the way for reception of his own editio major (1862), ever since regarded as (Gaselee’s words) the foundation of all really scientific criticism.
Enter, in our own lifetime, the dynamic duo, the Starsky and Hutch of interpolation-hunting, Eduard Fraenkel and Konrad Müller. Fraenkel was the boffin, the backroom boy issuing a weekly stream of epistolary ukases to his front man. Stephanie West (2007, 212–213) tells the story best: “With his class on Petronius (1958/9) we had a vivid sense of scholarship remorselessly advancing. In Bern, he told us, Konrad Müller was preparing his edition, and we got the impression that every Tuesday evening, after the class, he dispatched a postcard to Bern, to which he would have had a reply by the time we met again. Fraenkel had a very high regard for the elegant brevity and precision of Petronius’ style [Mommsen’s favorite Roman author, too, according to Wilamowitz, BB], but believed that the text had suffered badly from interpolation; a Carolingian schoolmaster had a lot to answer for. This theme gave a distinctive focus to the class, even if some of us confided to one another a suspicion that he pressed the theory too hard.”
This Carolingian ghost conjured up by Fraenkel has, of course, no more substance than those other fashionable phantoms, Enmann’s KG and Syme’s Ignotus. Sullivan concluded that it “must be treated with caution,” sensibly positing several interpolators over the centuries, pointing a particular finger at Jacques Cujas and his circle. West follows up with an amusing anecdote which has Fraenkel initially reject, then change his mind (an unusual event, to say the least) and rush it off to Müller, her own suggestion of an interpolation in Sat. 102.15, a notion which she has subsequently disavowed. The square brackets duly appeared in Müller’s first edition, attributed to “Pickard” (West’s maiden name) via Fraenkel, recurred in the second, but are now long gone.
Overall, Müller may be said to remove and restore depending upon the state of his liver that day, somewhat in the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s “I spent the morning putting in a comma; I spent the afternoon removing it.” In the preface (xxvii–xxviii) to his 1995 Teubner, Müller regretfully records Fraenkel’s displeasure at his abandonment in the second go-round of many of the excisions in his excited first, now sensibly conceding the need for renewed caution: sed universam de interpolationibus Petronianis quaestionem, quae nondum satis videretur explicata, denuo explorandam esse censebam. By the way, did Müller keep all those postcards? If so, they would be well worth publishing.
Back to Fraenkel. It is notable (significant?) that, while lauding his work on interpolations in Greek Tragedy, especially Euripides’ Phoenissae, the hagiographical notice in the Dictionary of British Classicists (1994) makes no mention of his Petronian theory. Also striking is the fact that (according to Schmeling-Stuckey), Fraenkel himself published only one relevant item, “Delevare,” Glotta 27 (1958) 312–315, apropos of Sat. 99.2.
On the larger question of interpolation, Fraenkel’s views were pre-Petronianly set out in his review (Gnomon 2, 1926, 497–532) of Housman’s Lucan, recently analyzed by S.P. Oakley (2009), remarking en passant that Fraenkel’s Petronian dealings were less successful than his Euripidean ones. Though willing to concede some scribal intrusions, Housman generally preferred to heal by bold emendations than hotheaded deletions.
In cognate vein, F.R.D. Goodyear, in the first volume (1972, 19–20) of his Commentary on Tacitus’ Annals, raged against “the pronouncements of that eloquent apostle of reaction, R. Syme, delivered for the benefits of editors of Tacitus everywhere in JRS 38 (1948) 122–131.” It must be added that many questioned the value of an editor of Tacitus to whom (on his own prefatory admission) history was “an alien territory.” James Willis, I subjoin, no slouch in emendatory zeal, in his Latin Textual Criticism (Urbana 1972), while including a definition of “interpolated”—“having alterations made deliberately, not by the simple accidents of copying,” offers no case of it in his welter of trial passages for emendation, and altogether eschews Petronius.
Sullivan poses the issue in terms of conservatism (“a constant force in classical studies”—would that were still true nowadays!) versus radicalism:
One must reject as guides the fear that one is producing too radically different a version of the textus receptus, or one that is too generous with deletions in the text and with suggestions for deletion in the apparatus. This fear that one’s text may be radically different from its predecessors in unacceptable ways is perhaps responsible for the disappointingly conservative edition recently produced by E.H. Warmington for the Loeb Library (1969) … paradoxically, the conservative textual critic will become the highly permissive Latinist, accepting the linguistically unlikely as textually sound.”
Here, we are back to Goodyear’s salvos against Syme. Against his usual even-handedness, Sullivan was, on his own terms, a shade unfair to Warmington, who, whatever the merits of his edition (xx, n. 3), did accept the basic assumption of interpolations by one or more Carolingians, and whose apparatus pullulates with acknowledgements of deletions proposed by Fraenkel, Müller, and others. As Wade Richardson concedes, “Deletions are inevitably the most provocative, because they subtract from the text and raise the concern, as Nisbet put it, that flakes of genuine paint have come away in the cleaning. Also, they rest upon an individual scholar’s claim to have discovered unacceptable stylistic or semantic redundancy or other compositional shortcoming unlikely to have been the responsibility of the author.”
Quite so (Nisbet, himself an enthusiastic deletor, if not delator, made his remark when reviewing Müller, JRS 52 1962, 227–232). And, there is the other obvious $64,000 question: at what point does all this business become mere rewriting, sometimes dangerously close to Bentley’s Paradise Lost?
Recurring to Sullivan’s textual philosophy:
If we accept too many interpolations as genuine Petronius, particularly in the Cena, then we will unconsciously come to regard Petronius’ language and style there as odd and considerably different from Neronian norms and this in turn will lead us to accept scribal corruptions, other than the most obvious, as anomalies to be defended and explained wherever possible, generally by far-fetched analogies in Romance languages.
However, what exactly are these “Neronian norms”? By what prose writers can we measure them, other than Seneca, the most commonly adduced by Sullivan elsewhere, and others, in Petronian connection? And, what if the passages objected to, and such details as “the telltale scilicet”—a prime Sullivan weapon for detecting textual supplements—were in fact integral to Petronius’ narrative style?
One may also venture a subsidiary query. Why do these interpolators, Carolingian or otherwise, not insert glosses on such rare words as embasicoetas? Prudery, in its erotic context? Given their supposed intrusions upon perfectly ordinary words and phrases, should we not have expected equal interference in moments when many readers might well have needed and appreciated a bit of explanation?
Of course, there are some interpolations. The point is, to get rid of Carolingian textual fiddlers, “Neronian norms,” et hoc genus omne. Each case must be argued on its particular merits, with due attention to context and character, not on some improvable blanket principle—in other words, commonsense. As prime example, take poor old scilicet. It hardly has to raise its exegetic head before some editor rushes to strike out the concomitant clause. Yet, one survives: 92.12, iniuriis scilicet inimici mei hilaris, commodis tristis. Rightly so, but why its privileged position? On broader terms, is it not possible that these explanations (cognates such as tanquam and vidilicet are equally vulnerable, while Smith’s note on 73.5 takes Friedlaender to gentle task for his hostility to ergo), even if they seem redundant to us, are part and parcel of Petronius’ characterization of Encolpius as one always out to impress with his knowledge, needed or not.
I hope elsewhere to explore a host of individual passages in detail. Herewith, as preview, a tiny sample:
20.2: ancilla, quae Psyche vocabatur, lodiculam … extendit. Rose deleted the relative clause. Surely Quartilla’s slave girl (others will appear) needs to be identified on her first appearance in (at least) the surviving text. A Rose by any other name…
30.5: exclamavit unus ex pueris qui supra hoc officium positus: “dextro pede.” Fraenkel turfed out the qui clause, on the grounds that it was a borrowing from puerque super hoc positus officium apophoreta recitavit at 56.8. This particular silliness did not long survive: criticized by Smith and Sullivan, jettisoned from Müller’s second edition. Context justifies retention. The guests are said to be afraid they had broken this unfamiliar house custom, hence an explanation of the boy’s particular function is quite in order.
34.4: intraverunt duo Aethiopes capillati cum pusillis utribus, quales solent esse qui harenam in amphitheatro spargunt, vinumque dedere in manus; aquam enim nemo porrexit. Sullivan deleted the quales clause, as he does the closely preceding (33.3), which compares a wooden hen’s wings to those of a real incubating one. One reason was the proximity of these two clauses, but even if damned as clumsy, is there any reason why Petronius should not thus repeat himself, especially in a recital of menu novelties that his readers had probably never seen? They are also the only two examples of this explanatory formula: were they interpolations, one might have expected more.
Sullivan reasonably asks if quales in the second passage refers to the boys or the bags; Smith assumes the former. Sullivan then wonders why normally curly-headed Ethiopians should be dubbed as longhaired; Smith points to Herodotus 7.20 for an explanation of their tresses. Sullivan cautiously allows that “such bags may have been used in the arena”; Smith cheerfully assumes they were. Sullivan brands the comparison “pointless and distracting”; Smith found it natural that Encolpius should be so reminded. Here, then, we see two top-class Petronian scholars going in different directions. One thing in common is their failure to ask if a Carolingian interpolator could/would know about such amphitheatrical minutiae?
40.5: non ille Carpus accessit, qui altilia laceraverat, sed barbatus ingens. Sullivan ousted the relative clause (1970) on the grounds that “Petronius’ audience is not likely to have forgotten who Carpus is after Trimalchio’s carefully-staged pun.” Not an unreasonable point, though (again) stating the obvious may have been part of Encolpius’ character. Also, to my taste, the juxtaposition of two bits of showy meat carving varied by a different verb is both natural and effective. Perhaps more to the emendatory point: where does this excision leave ille?
70.12: notavi super me positum cocum qui de porco anserem fecerat, muria condimentisque fetentem. Fraenkel (surprise, surprise) tossed out the relative clause, an expunction that did not survive into Müller’s second edition. The reader surely needs to be told which of the several kitchen maestros is meant: too many cooks spoil Fraenkel’s wrath.
118.4: sumendae voces a plebe semotae ut fiat “odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” Fraenkel excluded the Horatian quote, restored by Müller; Warmington, though, was tempted to go down this yellow brick road of interpolatory suspicion. This is very much a case where one must follow one’s own instincts. Dropping such direct quotations is not a common narrative feature of Petronius (the Virgil one at 68.4 is in a dramatic class of its own). However, here it seems a reasonable thing for the poet Eumolpus to do, as the lead-in to his immediately following famous compliment Horatii curiosa felicitas (on which, cf. my notes in PSN 34, 2005, and 37, 2007).
As promised/threatened, more to come. Meanwhile, I await the first latter-day Cato to leap in with a ringing Baldwinius est delendus!
1 Lahontan also took to Canada a copy of “my dear Lucian,” attempting to project the satirist’s Cynical ideas upon the native population—doing the same with Petronius would have been even more fun. I am grateful to my colleague Haijo Westra for assistance with these matters. For more information, general and particular, see Westra’s paper (with Milo Nikolic and Alison Mercer) “The Sources of the Earliest Latin Descriptions of Canada and First Nations by the Jesuits,” Fons Luminis 1 (2009, 61–82; electronic publication). Westra is planning a follow-up piece on Lahontan’s use of Lucian.
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N.B: These notes were compiled before the epiphany of Gareth Schmeling’s magnificent Commentary (Oxford, 2011) on the Satyrica. Otherwise, it would have been ubiquitous in my discussion of Interpolations.
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Richardson, T.W. 1993. Reading and Variant in Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and Their Manuscript Sources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, M.S. 1982. Petronii Arbitri Cena Trimalchionis. New York: Oxford University Press (repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Sullivan, J.P. 1968. The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
These may be easily gleaned throughout the essay.