The Satyricon — Complete, Petronius Arbiter [read book txt] 📗

Subjects,” and, as a means of publishing his erotic lucubrations, he constructed this fragment, which brings in those topics on which he had enlarged. He translated the fragment into French, attached his notes, and issued the book. There is another story to the effect that he had been reprimanded by Moreau for having written a loose song and that he exculpated himself by assuring the general that it was but a new fragment of Petronius which he had translated. Two days later he had the fragment ready to prove his contention.

This is the account given by his Spanish biographer. In his preface, dedicated to the Army of the Rhine, he states that he found the fragment in a manuscript of the work of St. Gennadius on the Duties of Priests, probably of the XI Century. A close examination revealed the fact that it was a palimpsest which, after treatment, permitted the restoration of this fragment. It is supposed to supply the gap in Chapter 26 after the word “verberabant.”

Its obscenity outrivals that of the preceding text, and the grammar, style, and curiosa felicitas Petroniana make it an almost perfect imitation. There is no internal evidence of forgery. If the text is closely scrutinized it will be seen that it is composed of words and expressions taken from various parts of the Satyricon, “and that in every line it has exactly the Petronian turn of phrase.”

“Not only is the original edition unprocurable,” to quote again from Mr. Gaselee’s invaluable bibliography, “but the reprint at Soleure (Brussels), 1865, consisted of only 120 copies, and is hard to find. The most accessible place for English readers is in Bohn’s translation, in which, however, only the Latin text is given; and the notes were a most important part of the original work.”

These notes, humorously and perhaps sarcastically ascribed to Lallemand, Sanctae Theologiae Doctor, “are six in number (all on various forms of vice); and show great knowledge, classical and sociological, of unsavory subjects. Now that the book is too rare to do us any harm, we may admit that the pastiche was not only highly amusing, but showed a perverse cleverness amounting almost to genius.”

Marchena died at Madrid in great poverty in 1821. A contemporary has described him as being rather short and heavy set in figure, of great frontal development, and vain beyond belief. He considered himself invincible where women were concerned. He had a peculiar predilection in the choice of animal pets and was an object of fear and curiosity to the towns people. His forgery might have been completely successful had he not acknowledged it himself within two or three years after the publication of his brochure. The fragment will remain a permanent tribute to the excellence of his scholarship, but it is his Ode to Christ Crucified which has made him more generally known, and it is one of the ironies of fate that caused this deformed giant of sarcasm to compose a poem of such tender and touching piety.

Very little is known about Don Joe Antonio Gonzalez de Salas, whose connecting passages, with the exception of one which is irrelevant, are here included.

The learned editors of the Spanish encyclopedia naively preface their brief sketch with the following assertion: “no tenemos noticias de su vida.” De Salas was born in 1588 and died in 1654. His edition of Petronius was first issued in 1629 and re-issued in 1643 with a copper plate of the Editor. The Paris edition, from which he says he supplied certain deficiencies in the text, is unknown to bibliographers and is supposed to be fictitious.

To distinguish the spurious passages, as a point of interest, in the present edition, the forgeries of Nodot are printed within round brackets, the forgery of Marchena within square brackets, and the additions of De Salas in italics {In this PG etext in curly brackets}.

The work is also accompanied by a translation of the six notes, the composition of which led Marchena to forge the fragment which first appeared in the year 1800. These have never before been translated.

Thanks are due Ralph Straus, Esq., and Professor Stephen Gaselee.

THE SATYRICON OF PETRONIUS ARBITER

BRACKET CODE

(Forgeries of Nodot)

[Forgeries of Marchena]

{Additions of De Salas}

       DW

VOLUME I.

ADVENTURES OF ENCOLPIUS AND HIS COMPANIONS

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

(It has been so long since I promised you the story of my adventures, that I have decided to make good my word today; and, seeing that we have thus fortunately met, not to discuss scientific matters alone, but also to enliven our jolly conversation with witty stories. Fabricius Veiento has already spoken very cleverly on the errors committed in the name of religion, and shown how priests, animated by an hypocritical mania for prophecy, boldly expound mysteries which are too often such to themselves. But) are our rhetoricians tormented by another species of Furies when they cry, “I received these wounds while fighting for the public liberty; I lost this eye in your defense: give me a guide who will lead me to my children, my limbs are hamstrung and will not hold me up!” Even these heroics could be endured if they made easier the road to eloquence; but as it is, their sole gain from this ferment of matter and empty discord of words is, that when they step into the Forum, they think they have been carried into another world. And it is my conviction that the schools are responsible for the gross foolishness of our young men, because, in them, they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of every-day life, but only pirates standing in chains upon the shore, tyrants scribbling edicts in which sons are ordered to behead their own fathers; responses from oracles, delivered in time of pestilence, ordering the immolation of three or more virgins; every word a honied drop, every period sprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

Those who are brought up on such a diet can no more attain to wisdom than a kitchen scullion can attain to a keen sense of smell or avoid stinking of the grease. With your indulgence, I will speak out: you--teachers--are chiefly responsible for the decay of oratory. With your well modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that the body of your speech has lost its vigor and died. Young men did not learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were searching for words in which to express themselves. In the days when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse there was no private tutor to stifle