About the Work
The Fragmentum Traguriense is a Latin edition of a newly “discovered” portion of Petronius’s Satyricon, published at Nuremberg in 1667 at the expense of Michael and Johann Frideric Endter. The volume presents itself as the restoration of a lost fragment through the good offices of the Venetian envoy to the Roman Pontiff, and it gathers around that text a whole apparatus of scholarly opinion: the conjectures of Jo. Caius Tilebomenus, dissertations and epistolary treatises by Hadrianus Valesius and Jo. Christophorus Wagenseil, the judgments of other learned men, a dissertation by Jo. Scheffer on the true nature of the fragment, and a necessary index. The title page thus advertises not simply a text but a controversy — a recovered antiquity accompanied by the learned men who have weighed it.
What the volume actually contains is a stretch of narrative belonging to the Satyricon: the famous dinner of Trimalchio, in which the narrator and his companions, wandering through a Greek town in southern Italy, attend the extravagant banquet of a wealthy freedman. The fragment opens with the narrator inspecting a shrine in a corner of the house, containing silver household gods and a marble Venus, and a golden box said to hold the master’s beard. He asks Agamemnon about the paintings on the walls and is told they depict the Iliad and the Odyssey. The guests arrive at the dining room, where the steward is receiving accounts, and where the doorposts carry fasces with axes and a bronze ship’s beak inscribed with the name of Cnaeus Pompeius Trimalchio, six-times Augustal priest, and his steward Cinnamus. Under the inscription hangs a double-wicked lamp, and tablets announce the master’s dining engagements and mark the days as good or unlucky. A boy cries out that they must enter with the right foot; a naked slave falls at their feet begging rescue from punishment for losing the steward’s clothes in the bath; the steward forgives him, and the guests recline while Alexandrian boys pour snow-cold water over their hands and sing as they work.
Trimalchio himself is then carried in to the sound of music, wrapped in a scarlet cloak, with a napkin of wide purple stripes, rings on his fingers, a golden armband on his bared right arm, and a silver toothpick. He plays dice with gold and silver denarii for counters, and course after course of theatrical food is brought in: a Corinthian donkey with white and black olives in its saddlebags, dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seed, hot sausages on a silver grill, peahen’s eggs distributed from a wooden hen. The banquet proceeds through a series of grotesque and comic set pieces — a boar stuffed with live thrushes, a pig that turns out to have been gutted already, a dog fight that overturns a lampstand, acrobats, recitations, a will read aloud, a mock funeral, and finally the guests’ escape from the house. Around the table sit a gallery of freedmen — Phileros, Ganymedes, Echion, Habinnas — who talk about grain prices, funerals, inheritances, and the decay of religion, while Trimalchio himself delivers a long autobiographical monologue about how he rose from slavery in Asia to become a master of ships, lost three hundred million sesterces in a single day when Neptune devoured his fleet, rebuilt his fortune, and came to his present eminence.
The volume is therefore two things at once: a text of Petronius and a dossier of the scholarly war over whether that text is genuine. The narrative occupies the central portion; around it are arranged the dedicatory epistle of Christophorus Arnold to the reader, the judgment of Jo. Caius Tilebomenus addressed to the printer, the printer’s preface to the Paduan edition, the dissertations of Hadrianus Valesius and Jo. Christophorus Wagenseil, and a series of textual conjectures and emendations. The edition is thus a document of seventeenth-century classical scholarship as much as a document of Roman literature.
Context
The Fragmentum Traguriense belongs to the long and tangled history of the transmission of Petronius. The Satyricon had reached the early modern world only in fragments, and the standard printed editions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — beginning with the Venice edition of 1495, which Tilebomenus describes as having appeared with its face cruelly lacerated, its mouth and temples ravaged — preserved only portions of the work. The discovery at Tragurium, a small Dalmatian town, of a manuscript said to contain a substantial stretch of the missing narrative was therefore an event of considerable moment for scholars who had long labored to restore Petronius. Tilebomenus lists a whole succession of learned men who had tried to bring aid and medicine to the wounded text, and he presents the new fragment as the means by which the gaps and lacunae of the already vulgarized fragments might be filled, foreign words migrate back to their proper places, and the whole be restored.
The edition appeared at a moment when the question of Petronius’s identity and date was very much alive. Hadrianus Valesius, in his dissertation, recalls that he had judged the recently published text — issued at Padua in the closing year 1663, and again lately at Leiden — not to be Petronius’s. When Wagenseil asked him to commit his views to writing, Valesius found that Wagenseil had reached the same conclusion and had set out his opinion in a dissertation addressed to Christophorus Arnoldus. The two men thus represent a coordinated scholarly attack on the fragment’s authenticity, and the Nuremberg edition of 1667 preserves both their arguments alongside the text they are attacking.
The context of the controversy is also the context of the Satyricon itself. The work was widely understood to have been written against Nero, and the morals and most shameful life of the emperor were thought to be handed down in it under the names of male prostitutes and women. Tacitus, in the sixteenth book of the Annals, reports that Petronius mentioned Nero or Tigellinus or some other powerful man in his will, and described the prince’s flagitious deeds under the names of catamites and women and the novelty of each lust, sending it sealed to Nero. This testimony gave later scholars a framework within which to read the Satyricon: Trimalchio, on this reading, is a mask for Nero, and the dinner is a satire on the imperial court. Wagenseil, comparing Petronius with Suetonius, finds in the Life of Nero a whole series of details that illuminate the Trimalchio passages — the Alexandrian youths with rich hair and excellent dress, the heated pools and cold baths, the litter preceded by decorated runners, the Golden House with its triple porticoes a mile long and its colossal statue of Nero 120 feet tall. He marvels that none of Petronius’s interpreters he has seen had noticed this.
The edition also belongs to the wider culture of seventeenth-century forgery and its detection. The Plautine additions, Cicero’s declamations against Sallust and Sallust’s against him, Seneca’s letters to Paul, and other works of the same workshop easily span two centuries, yet no one therefore covers up their limping style. The scholars assembled in this volume are engaged in the kind of linguistic and antiquarian criticism that was beginning to distinguish genuine from spurious classical texts with some confidence, and their arguments — about vocabulary, syntax, gender, declension, custom, and historical anachronism — are representative of the method of their time.
Structure of the Book
The volume is organized as a collection of related documents rather than as a single continuous treatise. It opens with the title page and preliminaries, which announce the contents and the circumstances of publication. Then comes Christophorus Arnold’s dedicatory epistle to the humane reader, in which he raises the central doubt about the fragment’s authorship and explains how the volume came to be published. Next is the judgment of Jo. Caius Tilebomenus addressed to the printer, praising the printer’s enterprise and arguing for the fragment’s genuineness on the grounds of its narrative coherence and its Petronian charm. Then follows the printer’s preface to the Paduan edition, which makes similar claims and demands belief for the story of the manuscript’s discovery.
The central portion of the volume is the narrative text itself — the dinner of Trimalchio — which runs from the narrator’s arrival at the house through the banquet’s various courses and entertainments to the guests’ eventual escape. This narrative is presented continuously, with the editorial running heads “Petronii Arbitri” and “Fragmentum” on facing pages indicating that it is the main text and not editorial apparatus. Within the narrative, the sequence moves from the shrine and the paintings, through the entry into the dining room and the appetizer, to Trimalchio’s arrival and the long succession of dishes, speeches, and spectacles. The freedmen’s conversation — Phileros on the dead man, Ganymedes on the grain price and the decay of religion, Echion on the state of the colony — occupies a substantial stretch in the middle. The banquet culminates in the reading of Trimalchio’s will, the mock funeral with horn-players, and the guests’ departure.
After the narrative comes a series of editorial and critical materials. There are textual conjectures and emendations, presented page by page and line by line, proposing alternate readings for the printed text. Then come the dissertations of Hadrianus Valesius and Jo. Christophorus Wagenseil, which argue at length that the fragment is a forgery. Valesius’s dissertation is addressed to Wagenseil and examines the authority of the newly unearthed codex, the rank and dignity of its finder, the size of the city where it was found, the reputation of the man in whose possession it was discovered, and the favorable judgment of learned men on its antiquity. Wagenseil’s dissertation examines linguistic evidence — Hebraisms, Italianisms, deformities of style — and then moves from words to things, comparing the Trimalchio passages with Suetonius’s Life of Nero. The volume concludes with a series of Latin letters exchanged among early modern scholars concerning the purported fragment.
The structure thus mirrors the controversy it documents: text first, then the apparatus of doubt. The reader is given the fragment and then given the means to judge it, with the weight of scholarly opinion running strongly against authenticity.
Inside the Book
The Fragment and Its Defenders
The volume presents itself as T. Petronii Arbitri Fragmentum Traguriense, a fragment recovered through the good offices of the Venetian envoy to the Roman Pontiff, accompanied by the conjectures of Jo. Caius Tilebomenus, the dissertations and epistolary treatises of Hadrianus Valesius and Jo. Christophorus Wagenseil, the judgments of other learned men, and a dissertation by Jo. Scheffer on the fragment’s true nature, along with a necessary index. It was published at Nuremberg at the expense of Michael and Joh. Frideric Endter in 1667.
Christophorus Arnold opens with an epistle to the humane reader, invoking Petronius as the most elegant of authors, judged by most Romans to possess a subtle genius and learning — Arbiter under Nero, powerful in the Latin tongue, a man who warned against wordy tumescence and empty sounds. Then Arnold raises the central doubt: is this fragment truly by the Arbiter himself? If the Arbiter does not remove himself from our judgment, and we are discerning spectators of elegance, no one will fail to see it. He asks how great the depravation and foulness of the fragment must seem: there is a huge swelling of words, nearly everything is turgid and inflated, and nothing sounds quite aptly in its place. Yet he is far from neglecting these things or esteeming the work of most illustrious men as of little value; he wishes at least to persuade himself, if not others, of what is comic in it. He cites a line about a woman — that purple is to be hidden, gold is shameful for a woman — spoken in the Mostellaria, and swears it is not clear to him, and thus he will be freed from that judgment. Meanwhile he reveres the learned and dignified men in Gaul whom he has heard discussed with incredible judgment at the feasts of Bivor, not only concerning ancient and new philosophy but concerning this very fragment. When the matter was brought up, Longius and the most exalted Presidents said more investigation was needed. Learned men in Germany, and especially the most erudite, whose opinions are enclosed in these pages, finally, with friends demanding it, he has published, lest they perish. He bids the reader farewell and to refer everything to his own judgment concerning the Arbiter.
Jo. Caius Tilebomenus then addresses the printer as a most friendly man, praising how deftly he soothes the minds of those who still cherish the more refined Roman Muses by preparing a new edition of old authors of any price — the fragments of Petronius found at Tragurium, recently discovered in the rare and enviably fortunate library of the illustrious Cippici there. What would he not call fortunate, he asks, that library which sprinkles such water on letters daily failing and perishing, from which the forces themselves may recover some strength? The printer could adorn nothing more pleasant or grateful to wise men of patrician taste than to bring into the light that little portion of more secret history buried in silence, and to subject to all eyes and hatred the foul crimes of Nero’s court, which Petronius, under the persons of catamites and women, translated onto the stage with urbanity and sharpened. He laments that the most abominable crime of those men who hide the whole body of the most desired Caius Petronius the Satirist — Arbiter, that prince of their own wickedness — and deprive posterity. He urges the printer to continue blessing with his press this part of the comedy, obtained from Italy through illustrious friends with auspicious birds — the honey-sweet part of this comedy, as John of Salisbury in the Policraticus calls this work, to whom Petronius seems as familiar as Terence to Cicero. He does not doubt that it is the genuine offspring of the Arbiter’s genius, since the constant and undisturbed series of narration confirms and proves it, by whose intervention the gaps and lacunae of the already vulgarized fragments of Petronius are filled, foreign words migrate, and proper words return to their place as if by postliminium, and the whole thing is restored. He notes its own force, brilliance, and concinnity of speech, not shared with anything else. But someone may object that many things are narrated that hardly sound Latin, many unusual and obscure words that would give even Oedipus trouble, so that they hardly smell of so pure, bright, and polished a writer. He grants this, but says that person must concede that the charm, grace, and venustas of Petronian speech shine among these and gleam more clearly, as the moon among lesser stars, so that these things should be imputed either to a badly shining or deficient copyist or to a not sufficiently skilled amanuensis. He says he does not say this impudently, since he knows well that this kind of misfortune happened to this very Petronius when it was first committed to the press and published at Venice in 1495, the Satiricon of that one with face cruelly lacerated, mouth and temples ravaged. He then lists many learned men who labored to bring aid and medicine to Petronius, beginning with Hermannus.
The House of Trimalchio
In a corner the narrator saw a shrine containing silver household gods and a marble statue of Venus, along with a not-small golden box in which, it was said, the master’s beard was kept. He began to ask Agamemnon what pictures they had in the middle. Agamemnon replied that it showed the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that the gladiatorial games of Laenas could not be viewed in detail. They had now arrived at the dining room, in the first part of which the steward was receiving accounts. What the narrator especially marveled at was that on the doorposts of the triclinium were fasces with axes fixed, whose lowest part ended in a bronze ship’s beak, on which was written: “Cnaeus Pompeius Trimalchio, six-times Augustal priest. Cinnamus, steward.” Under this same inscription hung a double-wicked lamp from the ceiling, and two tablets fixed on each doorpost. One, if the narrator remembered rightly, bore the inscription: “On the third day and the day before the Kalends of January, our master Cnaeus dines out.” The other had painted images of the Moon, the seven stars, and days marked with a knob distinguishing which were good and which unlucky. Filled with these delights, as they were trying to enter the triclinium, one of the boys placed over this duty cried out: “With the right foot!” They hesitated a little, lest anyone cross the threshold contrary to the command. Then, as they moved their right feet together, a slave stripped of his clothing fell at their feet and began to beg them to rescue him from punishment, saying his offense was not great, for which he was in danger: the steward’s clothes had been stolen from him in the bath, worth scarcely ten sesterces. So they brought back their right feet, and begged the steward, who was counting gold coins on demand, to remit the slave’s punishment. That proud man raised his face and said it was not the loss that moved him so much as the negligence of a most worthless slave: his dining clothes were lost, which a client had given him on his birthday, undoubtedly Tyrian, though already washed once. Whatever it was, he said, he gave it to them as a gift. Bound by so great a kindness, when they entered the triclinium, the same slave for whom they had interceded met them, and to their astonishment showered them with most abundant kisses, thanking them for their kindness. In short, he said, they would soon know for what benefit they had given. Wine belonging to the master is the servant’s grace. At last they reclined, with Alexandrian boys pouring snow-cold water on their hands, and others following to attend their feet, removing hangnails with great delicacy. And not even in so troublesome a duty were they silent, but sang as they went. The narrator wished to test whether the whole household sang, so he asked for a drink; the readiest boy received him with no less a shrill song, and whoever was asked to give anything — you would think it a chorus of pantomime actors, not a dining room of a household head. Then a very elegant appetizer was brought. For now all had reclined except Trimalchio alone, whose first place was being reserved in a new fashion. In the appetizer tray was a Corinthian donkey with saddlebags, having white olives on one side and black on the other. Two platters covered the donkey, on whose rims the name of Trimalchio was inscribed along with the weight of the silver. Little bridges of soldered metal supported dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seed. There were also hot sausages placed on a silver grill, and under the grill Syrian plums with pomegranate seeds.
While they were in these delights, Trimalchio himself was brought in to the sound of music, placed among the most fortified cushions, and provoked laughter in the unwise. For he had wrapped his head in a scarlet cloak, and around his burdened neck had thrown a napkin with wide purple stripes, fringes hanging on either side. He also had on the little finger of his left hand a large gilded ring, and on the outermost joint of the next finger a smaller one, entirely gold as it seemed to the narrator, but plainly soldered with iron stars. And lest he display only these riches, he bared his right arm adorned with a golden armband connected by an ivory circle with a shining plate. Then, when he picked his teeth with a silver pin, he said: “Friends, it had not yet been agreeable to me to come to the dining room, but lest I be absent longer, I denied myself pleasure. Do you permit the game to be finished?” A boy followed with a terebinth wood board and crystal dice, and the narrator noted a most delicate thing: instead of white and black counters, he had gold and silver denarii. Meanwhile, while he consumed all the talk of the dice-players in jest, with them still tasting, a tray was brought with a basket in which was a wooden hen with wings spread in a circle, like those that brood eggs. Two slaves immediately approached, and with music resounding began to search the straw, and brought out peahen’s eggs, which they divided among the guests. Trimalchio turned his face to this scene: “Friends,” he said, “I ordered peahen’s eggs to be set under a hen, and
Talk of the Dead and the Price of Grain
The passage opens mid-speech with a remark that a physician is nothing other than a consolation of the mind. The speaker notes that someone had been carried out well, on a vital couch, with good coverlets, and was mourned properly; he manumitted several slaves, though his wife wept for him only grudgingly. The speaker asks what would have happened had the man not received her well, then calls woman a kite-like species, asserting that one should do good to no one, since it is the same as casting into a dung-pit.
The Dog Scylax and the Boy on Trimalchio’s Back
A dog of enormous size is brought in on a chain, and at a kick from the doorkeeper it lies down before the table. Trimalchio tosses it white bread and declares that no one in his house loves him more than the dog. A boy, indignant that Trimalchio praised Scylax so effusively, sets a small bitch on the floor and urges her into the fight. Scylax, with sudden canine instinct, fills the dining room with savage barking and nearly tears apart a pearl of Croesus. The uproar does not stop at the brawl: a lampstand is overturned above the table, the crystal vessels are shattered, and several guests are splashed with boiling oil. Trimalchio, so as not to seem moved by the loss, kisses the boy and orders him to climb on his back. The boy rides him at once, striking his shoulders with a full hand and shouting amid laughter, “Bucca, bucca, quot sunt hic.” Trimalchio, checked, orders a large camel mixed and drinks divided among all the slaves who sat at his feet, with the added exception that whoever refuses shall have his head broken. He remarks that what was severe by day is now merry.
Monstrous Dishes and the Arrival of Habinnas
This kindness is followed by monstrous dishes, the recollection of which offends the narrator. Each dish of capons is served in place of thrushes, and goose eggs are served in caps. Trimalchio most ambitiously begs them to eat these, saying the chickens had been boned out. Meanwhile the doors of the dining room are struck by a servant, and a man enters clothed in white with a great crowd of attendants. The narrator, terrified by his majesty, thinks a praetor is coming and tries to rise and set his bare feet on the ground. Agamemnon laughs at this panic and tells him to restrain himself, saying the man is Habinnas, a Sevir, and a stonecutter who seems to make monuments best of all.
Reassured, the narrator settles back and watches Habinnas entering with great admiration. Habinnas, already drunk, had placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders, and loaded with several garlands and with ointment flowing over his forehead and eyes, he takes the praetor’s place and immediately calls for wine and hot water. Delighted by this merriment, Trimalchio himself calls for a larger cup and asks how he was received. Habinnas says they had everything except Trimalchio, for his eyes were there, and by Hercules it went well. He describes a nine-day funeral feast for a slave named Scissa, whom he had manumitted when he died, and estimates the dead man had a great fortune of twenty thousand, for they reckon fifty thousand. He says it was pleasant, though they were forced to pour half their drinks over the dead man’s bones.
Habinnas Recounts the Funeral Dinner
Trimalchio asks what he had for dinner. Habinnas says he will tell if he can, for he is not of such good memory as to forget his own name frequently. He lists: in the first course a crowned pig, and around it a sausage, gizzards well made, and beet, and bread of autopyrus from his own flour, which he prefers to white bread because it gives strength and he uses it for a laxative purpose. The next course was cold scriblita and black, hot honey, an excellent Spanish infusion. Of the scriblita he ate no little; of the honey he touched as far as the chickpea and lupine, with the bald man’s judgment, and apples one each. He himself took two and has them tied in his napkin, for if he does not bring some gift to his little slave Vernula, he will get a scolding. His mistress reminds him well. In the main course they had a piece of bear, of which Scintilla, imprudently tasting, nearly vomited her intestines. He, on the contrary, ate more than a pound, for the boar itself tasted good, and he says if a bear eats a man, how much more should a man eat a bear. In sum they had soft cheese and must, and one each of figs, and hearts of fish, and cuttlefish in dishes, and capped eggs, and turnip and mustard, and a dish of concagatum, “pax palamedes,” and in a tray were served oxicomina. He says they were all lifted up by a fist improperly, for they gave no ham. He asks Gai why Fortunata does not recline. Trimalchio says, how do you know her, unless she has arranged the silver, unless she has divided the leftovers among the slaves; she will not throw water into the mouths of the slaves. Habinnas replies that unless she reclines, he will leave. He had begun to rise, when, at a signal, Fortunata was called four times more by the whole household. She comes, girded with a greenish-yellow belt, so that a cherry-colored tunic appeared beneath, and twisted anklets and golden slippers. Then, wiping her hands with a handkerchief she had on her neck, she applies herself to the couch on which Scintilla, Habinnas’s wife, reclined, and kisses her as she applauds, saying “it is good to see you.” Then it came about that Fortunata took the armlets from her very stout arms and showed them to the admiring Scintilla. Finally she also unfastened her anklets and a golden hairnet which she said was made of solid gold.
The Quarrel and Trimalchio’s Tears
The passage opens mid-scene: someone began to curse Trimalchio, calling him a “purge and disgrace” who could not contain his own lust, and finally added the word “dog.” Trimalchio, confused and offended by the insult, threw a cup into Fortunata’s face. She cried out as though she had lost an eye and pressed her trembling hands to her face. Scintilla was alarmed and drew the trembling woman to her bosom. A dutiful slave boy brought a small vessel of cold water to her cheek; Fortunata leaned over it and began to groan and weep. Trimalchio retorted, asking whether “Ambubaia” had not sent him away from that “jaw of a pipe” — claiming he had made the man “among men,” but that he now puffed himself up like a frog and consulted his own bosom; he called him a “Codex, not a Woman.” He complained that this man, born in a pergula, had not dreamed of a house. He swore by his genius that he would make “Cassandra the shoemaker” tame. He boasted that he, a man of “two-penny” worth, could have received a hundred million sesterces. He asked whether the listener knew he was lying, and recounted that “Agatho the perfumer” had seduced him recently, saying “Suadeo, do not let your race perish.” He said that while he was acting the good man and did not wish to seem soft, he had “dashed himself against his own leg.” He said he would take care that the man would seek him with fingernails, and to show his present feeling, he told Habinnas not to place that man’s statue on his monument, lest he have quarrels even when dead. He said he did not want him to kiss him when dead, so he would know he could do harm. After this thunderbolt, Habinnas began to ask him to stop being angry, saying that none of them does not sin, that they are men, not gods. Scintilla, smiling, said the same, and calling on his Genius and addressing him as Gaius, began to ask that he be softened. Trimalchio could no longer hold back tears, and said, “I beg, Habinnas, if your little cup is cracked — if I have done anything wrong, spit in my face.” He said he had kissed a boy, a frugal little slave, not for his beauty but because he was frugal. He said the boy recited ten parts, read a book from sight, made a thretium for himself from his daily rations, acquired an artirfelium from his own, and “two trullas.” He asked whether the boy was not worthy to be carried in his eyes, but Fortunata forbade it. He asked whether she seemed to him a “fulcipedia” (crutch-foot). He advised her to digest her own good, saying she would not make him grimace, “little girlfriend,” otherwise she would experience his brain. He said she knew him: what he had once decided was fixed with a nail in a cobbler’s last. He said they should remember the living. He asked his friends to be well, saying he too had been as they are, but by his virtue he had come to this. He said it is the “coricillum” that makes men; all else is trash. He said he buys well and sells well; another will tell them other things; he “leaps apart” by felicity. He asked Stertera why she was still weeping, saying he would take care that she weep for her own fate. He said, as he had begun to say, that his “singleness” had led him to this Fortune. He said he came from Asia as great as that candelabrum is to the top. He used to burn himself daily at that one, and to have a bearded face more quickly, he anointed his lips with a lamp. He said he was in the delights of his master for fourteen years, and it is not shameful what a master commands. He said he satisfied his master and himself. He said they knew what he was saying; he was silent because he was not one of the boastful. He said that as the gods willed, he became master in the house, and began to be his master’s “little brain.” He said, “What more? He made me co-heir with Caesar, and I received a patrimony of a broad clavus.” He said nothing is “sane” to anyone. He desired to trade; not to delay them with many words, he built five ships, loaded wine, and then it was against the wind. He sent to Rome — you would think he had ordered it. All the ships were wrecked. It happened, not a story. In one day Neptune devoured three hundred million. Did they think he had failed? No, by Hercules, that loss was as if nothing had been done. He made others larger and better and more fortunate, so that no one would not call him a brave man. He said a great ship has great courage. He loaded again wine, lard, beans, “seplasium,” slaves. At this point Fortunata did a pious thing: she sold all her gold, all her clothing, and placed a hundred gold pieces in his hand. This was the ferment of his money. He quickly became what the gods will. In one course he rounded up a fortune.
Editorial Conjectures and the Valesius Dissertation
The remaining notes turn from the narrative to the scholarly apparatus.
The Forger’s Ignorance of Roman Custom
The editorial dissertation by Hadrianus Valesius opens with a frontal assault on the impostor who forged the added material, arguing that the forger betrays a profound ignorance of Roman custom. A sudarium of linen, he explains, was used to wipe sweat from the face—whence its very name—and Roman matrons never wore one around the neck. He mocks the notion that Fortunata, wife of the rich and elegant Trimalchio, could be so filthy as to wipe her hands at dinner on the linen with which she had covered her neck, like a napkin. The impostor, he charges, assumed that matrons of his own day wore a linen sudarium around the neck—commonly called a muscarium because it covers the neck and defends it from flies—and so supposed ancient Roman matrons did too. Such ignorance of Roman custom belongs not to Petronius but to an impostor wholly ignorant of antiquity.
Trimalchio’s Will and the Funeral Mime
Next, Trimalchio orders his will read at the banquet, granting freedom to all his slaves and explaining what monument he wants and what inscription. Not content with this, he orders a funeral garment (which he calls vitalia), nard ointment, and other things brought into the dining room and shows them to the guests; finally he orders horn-players to perform as if at his funeral and invites the guests to the bath. The writer exclaims at the absurdity. Here the pseudo-Petronius betrays ignorance of Roman custom by employing horn-players instead of trumpeters for funerals: the dead were carried out to the trumpet, or also to the pipe, as Ovid in Fasti book VI, Persius in Satire IV, and Aulus Gellius book XX chapter 11 attest; the true Petronius alone teaches this, saying “what if the same … knees and hands … it is permitted to send to the trumpeters.” Peter Pithoeus wrongly prefers to read tubicines there.
The Incoherent Ending and the Chalk-Marked Porticoes
The impostor should also have taken care that the end of Trimalchio’s dinner cohere with what follows, so that false and fabricated matter might join with true and not be detected as fraud. The end in the Patavine edition is this: when the horn-players sounded, the watchmen of the neighboring district, thinking Trimalchio’s house was on fire, ran up with water and axes and broke down the door. Encolpius (also called Polyamus by another name), Ascyltus, and Giton, glad of the opportunity, depart. “We,” seizing the most opportune occasion, deceived Agamemnon and fled swiftly as if from a fire. But in the true Petronius, as recently edited, Encolpius, under whose persona the whole story is narrated, makes no mention of horn-players or watchmen; he says that after dinner, when he and Ascyltus and Giton wished to leave Trimalchio’s house and had wandered drunkenly through the very broad and long porticoes in the middle of the night without light for almost a whole hour, ignorant even of places obscure by day, they finally extricated themselves as if by the thread of Ariadne, because all the pillars had been marked the day before with chalk, which showed the wanderers their way by its most certain and notable whiteness.
The Barbatoria and the Free Dinner
The writer then notes that in the year 1663 he published a Panegyric on Berengarius Augustus, recovered years earlier from the monastic library of Padua by Johannes Rhodius and Nicolaus Heinsius. In his notes he explained what it meant in Gregory of Tours to “celebrate barbatorias” and what barbatoria signified. His observation pleased the impostor, an Italian from the Venetian province or Dalmatia, who (if any faith is due) had approved his pseudo-Petronian trifles to Johannes Rhodius. So it seemed worthy to insert into his dinner: “Trimalchio says: Friends, today a slave celebrates his barbatoria, a frugal and modest man. So let us make a holiday, and you … into the light and dinner.” But this custom is much older than Petronius’ age; the name barbatoria is more recent. Thus the same impostor, who had learned from Henry Valesius, the writer’s brother, that certain things about a free dinner had been observed, wished also to mention a free dinner and to begin his supposititious dinner from that. The third day had now come, that is, the expectation of the free dinner.
The Verdict on the Paduan and Parisian Additions
The writer therefore judges that all these new things published first at Padua, then at Paris, under the name of Petronius Arbiter, are false, fabricated, supposititious, barbarous, trifling, devoid of judgment and learning, and plainly ridiculous and to be rejected in every part, and that they depart far from the genius, elegance, and polish of Arbiter both in words and in subject matter. He then turns to disagree with Wagensbilius, who wondered that the great Lipsius doubted and deliberated whether our Petronius was the one mentioned by Tacitus in the affairs of Nero. The writer boldly follows the opinion (or rather conjecture) of Peter Pithoeus, Claudius Binetus, Janus Dousa, and most subsequent commentators on Petronius, who make him a contemporary of Nero Augustus and think Nero is designated by Petronius under the name of Trimalchio. But Trimalchio was brought to Rome among slaves for sale, where he learned accounting, then was made a steward, as the true and formerly published Petronius himself teaches. Would they turn him into the emperor?
The Case for a Later Date and a Gallic Origin
A second strand of the editorial material maintains that Petronius’s style betrays a Gallic, Transalpine origin rather than a Roman one, and that it suits the times of the Antonines rather than those of Domitian’s Nero. Valesius denies that Petronius is comparable to Seneca, Quintilian, the two Plinys, Tacitus, or Suetonius, since Petronius belongs to a later period; he admits Petronius is sometimes loose and not everywhere pure, polished, and limpid. He concludes Petronius lived nearer the principate of the Antonines than that of Gallienus Augustus, since Petronius’s elegance could not fall into the old age of the Roman Empire and the decay of the Latin tongue caused by barbarian incursions. He cites Macrobius, who in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis not only joins Arbiter with Apuleius but ranks him as equal or even older, calling him “prior.” He notes that Apuleius flourished before Septimius Severus, under Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and that Janus Dousa wrote that some believed Petronius later than Lucian—which agrees with Valesius’s own dating, since Lucian also flourished in the Antonine period.
Barbarisms and Gallicisms in the Text
Valesius then argues that Petronius’s speech is not everywhere pure but sometimes inelegant and uncultivated. Setting aside Petronius’s verses (whose structure is often faulty and whose meaning is obscure and intricate), he lists prose passages he deems unworthy of the Neronian age. He objects to phrases such as tam valde for tam or adeo; tam magnum facinus where tantum facinus was proper; tam grande munus, tam grande pondus, tam magnam familiam, tam magnum clamorem, tam magnam fortunam, minus grandem vexatam injuria, and quam magnum flagitium—all of which should have used tantum or quantum. He observes that moderns still imitate Petronius, saying si grand and combien grand. He notes Petronius’s bene mane surrexi for summo mane or prima luce, paralleled by French bien matin; et jam plena nox erat, paralleled by en plein jour and en pleine nuit; and repositum in pristinum decorem puerum gaudebam, paralleled by French remis en premier éclat. From these he infers Petronius was a Gaul by birth, since the French still follow his speech in many things. He further argues Petronius was far removed from Nero’s times by citing indignam rusticas, where exhiberi not exhibendum was required; ostium nostrum satis audaci strepitu impulsum exsonuit, where exsonare is a word unused in that age though Petronius often uses it; omnia mimico risu exsonuerant and exsonat cantibus totum navigium; in hoc diversorio quemquam mortalium admitti, where in hoc diversorium was required; Trimalchio ad symphoniam allatus est, positusque in cervicalibus minutissimis, where in cervicalibus minutissimis or in cervicali minutissimo was required; ne absensivus essem for ne abessem; quales esse solent quae incubant ova, since incubare ova or ovis is said of hens but ova incumbere is not; ficedulam inveni pipere ato vitello piperatam, comparing it to gypso gypfatum parietem; si bona fide paenitentiam emendas, since paenitentia culpam emendare is permissible but paenitentiam emendare is not; amicta discolorio veste, since discolor is used but discolorius is not, no more than decolorius, concolorius, etc.
The Turin and Paris Letters of Wagenfeil
The closing stretch of the volume turns from the fragment itself to the learned correspondence that grew up around it, and it opens with the letters of Johann Christoph Wagenfeil. Writing from Turin on the ninth of December, 1664, he apologizes for the rarity of his letters on the grounds that he has nothing worth arguing about: he lives in a place whose only industry is the contriving of ingenious spectacles for the stage, where scarcely a word is spoken that is not either “pope” or “Tamo,” whether from the pulpit or in declamation. He passes on the news he has had from Cl. Ecchellensis, that the Venetian legate resident at Rome had obtained a codex of Petronius mutilated in no part, which he intends to publish as soon as he returns to his household gods; Ecchellensis adds that it was discovered in an obscure and ancient place and transcribed with care. Wagenfeil offers his services, expects to spend several months at Paris, and may afterwards push on into Spain itself.
A second letter, dated the tenth of February, 1665, from Paris, excuses another long silence and explains that what he now sends is less a letter than a book. He asks that these trifles be read aloud as a public document of his obedience and prefixed to the supposititious fragment of Petronius, whose edition he is confident the recipient will undertake. He composed it amid haste and a thousand distractions, being ready to depart for Spain within three days. He notes that the illustrious Hadrianus Valesius will send his own judgment on the fragment in a letter addressed to him, which must be printed along with the rest; his friends have orders to forward it in his absence, and he begs that it be printed faithfully and without error.
A third letter, written from Madrid on the twentieth of May, 1665, describes an immense journey along the whole coast of Spain to the inner sea, through many Mediterranean places and along the African shore. He hopes the Petronius fragment with his attached letter has arrived, and asks for the recipient’s verdict. He mentions further letters of Valesius that were copied and circulated but which he has not yet read, owing to an unexpected calamity and a courier’s imminent departure. He urges reverence toward Valesius and asks the printer to use more elegant type and to avoid mistakes. In Spain, he reports, great barbarism reigns and all good letters are exiled; yet he has had the good fortune to extract from dust and filth several manuscripts—Cicero’s De Officiis and certain other small works, Pomponius Mela, some works of Priscian, and a certain Historia inscribed Abbreviata Hierosolymitana, written by one Adagistus, from the nativity of the Messiah, A.D. 1291. He asks the recipient to examine what has been published in the last two days.
Praschius and the Monster in the Court
Johann Ludwig Praschius writes to Christophorus Arnoldus to say that while the recipient’s faith and goodwill in the Petronian matter delighted him, the fragment itself turned his stomach. He had been ready to illustrate his conjectures or to refute them, and had already taken up his pen, but changed his plan once he began to weigh the opening and the head of the book more attentively. The whole thing, he says, is barbarous even where it does not pretend otherwise, and judged by the standard of Petronius’s genius and eloquence one would say the twenty-third malicion wrote it. He declares it manifestly spurious and, as the inscription itself has it, “nothos.” What moves him is less the writing than the fact that such men abuse the greatest names to build a stage and veil an injury, and do so not in private judgments but in order to obtain privileges. He wonders whether a court that gave birth to this monster, if it looked more carefully into the fabricator, would not vindicate its own reputation and others’ with deserved punishment. No notes or fuller censure should be expected from him, especially since the most erudite Wagenfeil has already proposed proofs of fraud and refuted the ineptitudes of the prologues. As for the claim that the narration of the glass vessels’ artifice, the pigs and other animals and foods of Trimalchio, as received from John of Salisbury, are Petronian, one may easily learn from Gellius, Book III of the Noctes, chapter three, what the true norm of judgment is in such matters. Who, he asks, would rather conclude from this that the man did not deceive than that he deceived cautiously? The prudent Kersherus agrees with him throughout and sends dutiful greetings. Letters have arrived from the venerable Ursinus, whom he rejoices to find favoring their opinion, and he prays God to preserve the recipient, Ursinus, the renowned Dilherrus, and all who love good letters.
Ursinus on a Corrupt and Stained Text
J. H. Ursinus writes to the clarissimus Dominus Praeschius on the third of November, 1665, thanking him for the Petronian fragment and its communication. He has read it only cursorily, hindered by his occupations. He judges it very corrupt, whether from the scribe’s ignorance or from the author’s effort to prefer something obscure and to set a cross for grammarians, whom this witty man wished to exercise as at a stake. He deems it unworthy of Petronius’s mouth, from which Muses and Sirens once flowed, yet not unworthy of his festive genius, if only it were not so stained; the whole thing is satyric, and the author makes—
Praschius’s Freedom and the Ratisbon Doubts
The edition’s correspondence continues with a letter from J. L. Praschius dated the second of October, in which he admits he has recently taken a certain freedom, without injury to anyone, though he later regretted a Maronian poem. He was silently indignant that a little crow of Aesopian style should aspire to Petronius’s refinement and succeed, with learned men somewhat assenting—men whom he otherwise greatly venerates and embraces.
A letter to a “Vir Plurimum Revere,” written from Ratisbon on the first of November, reports that Praschius sent him a Petronian fragment with a specimen of Scheffer’s most learned notes eight days earlier. Scheffer discusses both sides of the question of authenticity elegantly, but the opinion that it is spurious does not please Praschius, who considers it wholly spurious, as the writer observed in a recent private discussion. The writer himself inclines toward the view that the fragment is truly Petronian but enriched by the base addition of a shameful interpolating hand, and he remains undecided. He quotes the words of “our Ruperts” from the Observations on Besild, page 684 of the reader’s edition: there remain in this age some who, like many good men, think the Transalpine peoples lack the faculty of judging. Farewell.
A second letter from Ratisbon, dated the sixth of November, finds the writer still unsatisfied. He cannot subscribe to Ferrarii’s opinions; that writing transcends cloistral erudition. If he differs from the recipient, he asks pardon for his freedom, for he sacrifices to truth, not to friendship, though difference of opinion is not alienation of will. He asks: if this is a political play mocking modern morals, whose morals does it touch? What vice does it particularly insult? Whom does it choose to expose and single out? Why does it put on the mask of Petronius? Why not openly attack the vices of this age, in which it is difficult not to write satire? Why does it wish to be read but not understood? Why so many obsolete words, drawn—as Taubmann jests—from Saturn’s posterior? He then offers his own dream: the work is the product of a mediocrely learned man, not deeply versed in Petronius, who perhaps at the beginning of the rebirth of letters, having leisure, chose Petronius to imitate and in many places imitated him not unhappily, but in most places, as an imitator is never equal to his author, betrayed himself. He sprinkles flowers plucked from other good authors’ gardens and, as Wagenfeil well observed, grafted material from Apuleius’s ass. Whether the solecisms and verbal monstrosities come from the author himself, striving too much for antiquity, or from a copyist’s error, he cannot easily say—though he leans toward the copyist, since many corruptions in interpretations and distinctions cannot be pure.
Scheffer’s Dissertation on Authenticity
Johannis Schefferus’s dissertation closes the volume. Many doubted, before publication, whether Petronius was the true author of this fragment published at Padua, as is clear from the preface the printer prefixed; even now some continue to doubt. Just as gaps in Plautus were filled by recent writers and whole acts added, as a consolation was falsely ascribed to Cicero and a fragment to Velleius, so many fear the same has happened to Petronius. This fear is not without grave cause. First, it seems very difficult that this fragment could have lain hidden so long, especially among learned men like Nicolaus Cippicus and his ancestor Hector Cippicus, remembered by the Paduan printer. Petronius’s name was not so unknown, nor his satyric works so trivial, that a mediocrely lettered man could scorn them; nor was there such sluggishness among Italians and neighboring lands that they would neglect anything Latin pertaining to letters. Second, it is suspicious that not the manuscript itself but only an apograph is sent to Rome and communicated to the Venetian legate. So the friendship of Statileius with Cippicus, and the dignity of the legate and the Venetian legate so eagerly seeking the fragment, availed nothing. When nothing could better convince doubters than the book itself, written more than two hundred years ago, why did they not show the parchment, the writing, the letters, and similar things to remove all doubt? Moreover, the very thing from which the fragment was copied is kept so religiously that no one is permitted to inspect or judge it. But these things might find some excuse if the writing did not betray itself. For how many things are not Petronian, as the editors themselves admit? Abstinax for abstinens; fatum masculine for neuter; caelus for caelum; nervia for nervos; vasu for vas; lorus for lorum; molestare for molestum esse; gaudimonium for gaudium.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the volume’s critical apparatus is that the Fragmentum Traguriense is not the work of Petronius but a forgery. Hadrianus Valesius states this position at the outset: he had judged the recently published text, issued at Padua in 1663 and again at Leiden, not to be Petronius’s. He examines the authority of the newly unearthed codex and finds it wanting. The finder is presented by Paulus Frambottius, a Paduan printer, as Marinus Statileus the Dalmatian, an unknown young man who, after studying law at Padua, returned home. The place of discovery is the library of Nicolaus Cippicus, an obscure man, in the insignificant Dalmatian town of Tragurium. Of all who allegedly judged the codex at Venice, Padua, and Rome, only Johannes Rhodius, a Dane, is praised — learned and long practiced in examining old codices — but he died at Padua before the edition of the Cena, so his view cannot be learned from him. Valesius asks why consult anyone, since the Paduan edition itself betrays the forgery on its every page.
The argument from language is developed at length. Petronius uses ordinary words, but here occur monstrosities: faplutus, hpatria, matus, Vfil mat fui, abftinens for abstinent, calidiurbntuy for hot-tempered, nefapius for foolish, madeia and permadeia (Syriac), homodtgnttofus, gaudfmontum for joy, trifimonium for sadness, bucthalifam for torpor, Ore its and aboculus for blind, exppinijfent for think, apocnlo for leave the feast, palamedes, jlrabonus, monftruofitm, concilium for corculum. Proper names appear — Mammia, Cicuro, Saturnus as a goddess, Gavilla, Ploerimus, Habinm — whose language Valesius confesses he does not know, whereas in the genuine Petronius all proper names but Bargatis are Greek or Latin. Recent, non-Latin words absent in Petronius’s age are found: expudorata, bruncus porcm, fnutniolm, amafiuncula, fulctpedta, flamtnatd, btrbex and berbix, moleftare, adftt are, oricularu, roflrum burbatnm. Archaic words already obsolete appear: uxfrumfct, Jovis for Jupiter, bovupxo, prafifctni. Valesius asks who could believe Petronius varied so — now frui, now frumfci; now adjuvare, now adjutari; now Jupiter, now Jovis.
The argument from custom is equally pointed. The writer attacks the impostor for revealing ignorance of Roman custom. A sudarium of linen was used to wipe sweat from the face, whence its name; Roman matrons never wore a sudarium around the neck. The notion that Fortunata, wife of the rich and elegant Trimalchio, could be so filthy as to wipe her hands at dinner on the linen with which she had covered her neck, like a napkin, is absurd. The impostor thought that matrons of his own day wore a linen sudarium around the neck — commonly called a muscarium because it covers the neck and defends it from flies — and so supposed ancient Roman matrons did too. Such ignorance of Roman custom belongs not to Petronius but to an impostor wholly ignorant of antiquity. Similarly, Trimalchio orders horn-players to perform as if at his funeral, but the dead were carried out to the trumpet, or also to the pipe, as Ovid in the Fasti, Persius in the fourth Satire, and Aulus Gellius attest; the true Petronius alone teaches this. The impostor should also have taken care that the end of Trimalchio’s dinner cohere with what follows, so that false and fabricated matter might join with true and not be detected as fraud. In the Patavine edition, the horn-players sound, the watchmen of the neighboring district think Trimalchio’s house is on fire, and Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton depart. But in the true Petronius, Encolpius makes no mention of horn-players or watchmen; he says that after dinner, when he and his companions wished to leave and had wandered drunkenly through the very broad and long porticoes in the middle of the night without light for almost a whole hour, they finally extricated themselves as if by the thread of Ariadne, because all the pillars had been marked the day before with chalk.
Wagenseil adds the argument from scripture and Italian. He asks whether the true Arbiter would have read sacred scripture or known the modern Italian language. He cites phrases such as “Ipse Trimalcio fundos habet, qui milvi volant, nummorum nummos,” which savor of Hebraism and the sacred Scripture’s manner of speaking. He finds stronger evidence at page 25, “Nomina omnium reddere, tamquam unus de nobis,” twisted from the divine words “Ecce Adam sicut unus ex nobis.” Most manifestly of all, at page 46, “Deductum e lacunaribus subita erectione ingens de cupa videlicet grandi excussum demittitur, cujus per totum orbem corona aurea cum alabastri unguenti pendebant,” he asks whether this phrase “alabastrum unguenti” could come from anywhere other than Luke chapter 7, being Hellenistic and peculiar to the Evangelist, with no example among profane authors. At page 27, “Scio te litteris saturum esse,” is doubtless taken from Festus the Governor’s words to Paul the Apostle: “Insanis Paule: multae litterae te ad insaniam convertunt.” This argument alone, even if nothing else occurred, would abundantly suffice to confound the Pseudo-Petronius. He then argues the author knew Italian, citing page 112, “Un servitore Agamemnon interruppe,” page 32, “Io non me nehercules mi ha queste satturagusti fatto,” and shortly after, “Mi ha cento aureos in mano pasciuto.” At page 28, “Multu jam die bus venter mihi non respondit: nec Medici se inveniunt.” No suitable authority can be found to defend these barbarisms, for they smack of the pure Italian idiom. At page 15, “plovebat” is written for “pluebat,” in which one immediately recognizes Italian pronunciation, pronouncing u as o.
The counter-arguments, advanced by Tilebomenus and the printer, are also recorded. Tilebomenus does not doubt that the fragment is the genuine offspring of the Arbiter’s genius, since the constant and undisturbed series of narration confirms and proves it, by whose intervention the gaps and lacunae of the already vulgarized fragments are filled, foreign words migrate, and proper words return to their place as if by postliminium, and the whole thing is restored. He notes its own force, brilliance, and concinnity of speech, not shared with anything else. He grants that many things are narrated that hardly sound Latin, many unusual and obscure words that would give even Oedipus trouble, so that they hardly smell of so pure, bright, and polished a writer. But he says that person must concede that the charm, grace, and venustas of Petronian speech shine among these and gleam more clearly, as the moon among lesser stars, so that these things should be imputed either to a badly shining or deficient copyist or to a not sufficiently skilled amanuensis. He notes that this kind of misfortune happened to Petronius when it was first committed to the press and published at Venice in 1495. The printer similarly claims that most lacunae and gaps in the commonly published codices are filled from this fragment and that its style does not differ from Petronius’s character.
The critical apparatus rejects these arguments. The forger’s claim of narrative coherence is called utterly trivial: every age has produced inept sycophants who, abusing leisure and talent, interpolate others’ writings while preserving the order of events. If that reasoning held, one could attribute supplements of Livy or Curtius to those authors themselves. The claim of stylistic similarity is admitted to carry more weight and could be proved — but no one will prove it, since the contrary appears probable, and a clear distinction can be shown between the true and the counterfeit Arbiter’s speech. The story of Muretus’s codex is dismissed: it is not established that Muretus ever had such a codex, and Petrus Daniel, the only one who mentions it, tells the story so as to show it was drawn from vague rumors. Even if Muretus had an excellent Petronius codex, since the Tragurian exemplar is claimed to be over two hundred years old, it cannot have been copied from Muretus’s book. The printer is accused of selling only his own sooty art and of fabricating everything shamefully. Why, among many excellent Venetian and Paduan men, does he name only Rhodius — because Rhodius, dead and dwelling in the land of the blessed, cannot act against the insult to his name and learning. Octavius Ferrarius, a man of deep knowledge of elegant letters, had no knowledge of the Petronian fragment; otherwise he would not have concealed it from the author, whom he admitted among his closer friends. The printer, deserted by Venetian and Paduan literati, goes to Rome and claims to have submitted the fragment to the judgment of doctors in the city, and that it was judged good because of its two-hundred-year age. This is a conjecture no sane person at Rome could have made. If no fraud was committed recently, does it follow none ever was? Forgers began with letters themselves and will not stop until all is reduced to primeval chaos.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur throughout the volume and give it its intellectual shape. The first is the idea of the codex — the physical manuscript — and the authority that attaches to it. The whole controversy turns on the question of whether the Tragurian codex is genuine, and the scholars examine its finder, its place of discovery, its age, and the judgments of those who allegedly saw it. Valesius asks why, if learned men at Venice and Padua deferred greatly to the codex, we hear or see nothing of what we most need; why such men’s judgments are suppressed; why the printer would not attach them to the fragment to gain authority. The codex is thus not simply a source but a claim to authority, and the scholars treat it as such.
The second concept is style — the stili ratio — and the idea that a genuine author has a recognizable manner that can be distinguished from an imitation. Tilebomenus argues that the charm, grace, and venustas of Petronian speech shine among the fragment’s difficulties as the moon among lesser stars. The critical apparatus argues the opposite: that the true Arbiter’s speech, rising with natural beauty and sufficiently self-consistent, cannot coalesce into one body with the other blotchy, gaping text painted with vibrant little sentences — like pavements poorly tiled with mosaic. The concept of style is thus both the forger’s strongest defense and the critic’s sharpest weapon.
The third concept is custom — the mos Romanus — and the idea that a genuine ancient text will reflect the customs of its time, while a forgery will betray the customs of the forger’s own day. The sudarium around the neck, the horn-players at funerals, the barbatoria — all are examined as evidence of anachronism. The impostor, it is argued, thought that matrons of his own day wore a linen sudarium around the neck and so supposed ancient Roman matrons did too. The concept of custom thus provides a way of testing authenticity by comparing the text’s assumptions about daily life with what is known of antiquity.
The fourth concept is language itself — vocabulary, syntax, gender, declension, case — as a historical phenomenon. The critics note recent, non-Latin words absent in Petronius’s age, archaic words already obsolete, barbarous mutations of gender and declension, and the intrusion of Italian pronunciation. The concept is that language changes over time, and that a text’s language can be dated. Valesius observes that moderns still imitate Petronius, saying si grand and combien grand, and infers from such parallels that Petronius was a Gaul by birth, since the French still follow his speech in many things. The concept of language as a historical marker is thus central to the whole enterprise.
The fifth concept is imitation — the idea that a forger imitates not only the words but the manner of an author, and that the imitation can be detected by its excesses. The fragment is said to have a huge swelling of words, nearly everything turgid and inflated, nothing sounding quite aptly in its place. Arnold asks how great the depravation and foulness of this fragment must seem. The concept of imitation as a detectable failure — the forger’s overreach — runs through the critical apparatus.
Themes
The most pervasive theme of the narrative is the world of the freedman — the former slave who has risen to wealth and who now displays that wealth in every possible way. Trimalchio is the central figure of this world, and his banquet is a theater of self-display. He has wrapped his head in a scarlet cloak, thrown a napkin with wide purple stripes around his neck, wears rings on his fingers and a golden armband on his bared arm, picks his teeth with a silver pin, and plays dice with gold and silver denarii for counters. The food he serves is equally theatrical: a Corinthian donkey with olives in its saddlebags, dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seed, hot sausages on a silver grill, peahen’s eggs distributed from a wooden hen, a boar stuffed with live thrushes, a pig that turns out to have been gutted already. The theme is the comedy of ostentation — the freedman’s desperate need to be seen as cultivated, generous, and refined, and the way his very efforts betray him.
A second theme is the decay of religion and the indifference of the gods. Ganymedes complains that no one thinks Heaven Heaven, no one keeps fast, no one values Jupiter a hair; all with covered eyes count their goods. Formerly the matrons went barefoot up the Clivus, with loose hair, pure minds, and begged Jupiter for water; then it rained in buckets, then or never, and all laughed as if the gods were mice. So the gods have washed feet; because they were not religious, the fields lie barren. The theme is the connection between piety and prosperity, and the sense that the old religion has been abandoned for the counting of goods.
A third theme is the precariousness of human affairs.
