The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter

Title: The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter

Author: Petronius Arbiter

Translator: William Burnaby

Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5611] Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5611

Credits: This eBook was produced by Gordon Keener

This eBook was produced by Gordon Keener.

The Satyricon Petronius Arbiter

Translated by William Burnaby Introduction by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

ON READING PETRONIUS

AN OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN

My dear ————,

On a bright afternoon in summer, when we stand on the high ground above Saint Andrew's, and look seaward for the Inchcape Rock, we can discern at first nothing at all, and then, if the day favours us, an occasional speck of whiteness, lasting no longer than the wave that is reflecting a ray of sunlight upwards against the indistinguishable tower. But if we were to climb the hill again after dinner, you would have something to report. So, in the broad daylights of humanity, such as that Victorian Age in which you narrowly escaped being (and I was) born, when the landscape is as clear as on Frith's Derby Day, the ruined tower of Petronius stands unremarked; it is only when the dark night of what is called civilisation has gathered that his clear beam can penetrate the sky. Such a night was the Imperial Age in Rome, when this book was written; such was the Renaissance Age in Italy, when the manuscript in which the greater part of what has survived is only to be found was copied; such, again, was the Age of Louis XIV in France, of the Restoration, and the equally cynical Revolution in

England, during which this manuscript, by the fortune of war, was discovered at Trau in Dalmatia, copied, edited, printed, in rapid succession, at Padua, Paris, Upsala, Leipzig and Amsterdam, and, lastly, "made English by Mr. Burnaby of the Middle Temple, and another Hand," all between the years 1650 and 1700; such an Age was emphatically not the nineteenth century, in which (so far as I know) the only appearance of Petronius in England was that rendered necessary—painfully necessary, let us hope, to its translator, Mr. Kelly,—by the fact that the editors of the Bohn Library aimed at completeness: but, as emphatically, such is the Age in which you and I are now endeavouring to live.

O fortunate nimium, who were not bred on the Bohn, and feel no inclination, therefore, to come out in the flesh: were you so foolish as to ask me for a proof that this Age is not like the last, what more answer need I give than to point to the edition after edition of Petronius, text, notes, translation, illustrations, and even a collotype reproduction of the precious manuscript, that have been poured out upon us during the last twenty years. But you can read—and have read, I am sure—a whole multitude of stories in the newspapers, which are recovering admirably the old frankness in narration, and have discarded the pose of sermonising rectitude which led the journalists of a hundred years ago to call things (the names of which must have been constantly on their lips) "too infamous to be named"; and from these stories you must have become familiar with the existence in our country to-day of every one of the types whom you will discover afresh in Mr. Burnaby's and the "other Hand's" pages. It is customary to begin with Trimalchio, not that he is the chief, or

even the most interesting figure in the book, but because his is the type most commonly mentioned in society. To name living examples of him would be actionable; besides, you are old enough, surely, to remember the Great War against Germany, and the host of Trimalchiones and Fortunatæ whom it enknighted and endamed. But to go back to our hill above Saint Andrew's, Wester Pitcorthie yonder was the birthplace of James, Lord Hay, of Lanley, Viscount Doncaster and Earl of Carlisle, the favourite of James VI and I, of whom the reverend historian tells us that "his first favour arose from a most strange and costly feast which he gave the king. With every fresh advance his magnificence increased, and the sumptuousness of his repasts seemed in the eyes of the world to prove him a man made for the highest fortunes and fit for any rank. As an example of his prodigality and extravagance, Osborne tells us that he cannot forget one of the attendants of the king, who, at a feast made by this monster in excess, 'eat to his single share a whole pye reckoned to my lord at

£10, being composed of ambergris, magisterial of pearl, musk,' etc. But, perhaps, the most notable instance of his voluptuousness, is the fact that it was not enough for his ambition that his suppers should please the taste alone; the eye also must be gratified, and this was his device. The company was ushered in to a table covered with the most elegant art and the greatest profusion; all that the silver-smith, the shewer, the confectioner, or the cook could produce. While the company was examining and admiring this delicate display, the viands of course grew cold, and unfit for such choice palates. The whole, therefore, called the ante-supper, was suddenly removed, and another supper quite hot, and forming the exact duplicate of the former, was served in its place.

So, in those days as in these, your Trimalchio was ennobled; though, to do King James justice, he had a string of coronets for his Giton also. The latter and his companions are still only emerging from a long period of oblivion in literature and obscurity in life. Like the pagan deities who have shrunk in peasant mythology to be elves and pooks and suchlike mannikins, these creatures, banished from the polite reading of the Victorians, reappeared instantly in that grotesque microcosm of life which the Victorians invented as an outlet for one of their tightest repressions, the School Story. I shall not press the analogy between Lycas and Steerforth, but merely remind you how, years before you ever heard the name (unless it is mentioned there) of Petronius Arbiter, you welcomed Giton's acquaintance in the pages of Eric, or Little by Little, where he is known as Wildney, and painted in the most attractive colours, and were rather bored whenever old Eumolpus walked into the School Library as Mr. Rose. Dear old Eumolpus, with his boring culture and shameless chuckle, no

school is complete without him; indeed, I have heard that the principal scholastic agents keep a section in their lists of "Appointments Required" headed, for private reference, with his sole name. Ascyltos is generally the Captain of the XV or XI, sometimes of both, and represents the unending war of muscle against mind; Encolpius is, of course, the hero of every school story ever written, though (to be fair) the authors of most of them have never guessed it. Agamemnon is the sort of form-master whom it is conventional to rag. He may have told you already that Petronius is worth reading for its admirable literary criticism (contained in pages 1 to 4 and 189 and 191 of this volume) and you may have listened, not knowing yet that literary criticism is rarely admirable, nor suspecting that those are the pages which most people leave unread. But you are fortunate in having being born in a generation which is not afraid to say frankly what it likes, and you will, I imagine, say frankly that you have read Petronius, and intend to read him again because he tells a rattling

good story, and, unlike certain contemporary novelists whom you are counselled to admire, tells it about people whose characters and motives you have no difficulty in understanding.

But all this time I have said nothing to you about Petronius "the man," as literary critics say, and this, as you may have suspected, is because I know as little about him as anyone else. You have not long since laid down your Tacitus: I need do no more than refer you to the Sixteenth Book of the Annals, where, in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th chapters, you will find what is almost the only historical proof of his existence.

A detailed account of him, which must be divinely inspired since there is no human material for it, has been made popular in the last half-century by the author—a foreign gentleman, whose name for the moment escapes me—of a novel entitled Quo Vadis. Fond as he must have been of oysters, there is no evidence that Petronius ever visited England, but it should be borne in mind that the law for which he is generally regarded as showing insufficient respect was not enacted here until more than eighteen hundred years after his death. Moreover, suicide, the one offence with which he is definitely charged, was not in his or his contemporaries' eyes the horrid felony which, I hope, it will always be in yours. That his work—of which this volume forms but a fragmentary part—had made its way into this country, with unusual rapidity, in little more than ten centuries from its publication, is shown by its being frequently quoted by the English churchman John of Salisbury, the pupil of Abelard and friend and biographer of Becket (the Saint, not the boxer), who died (as

Bishop of Chartres) in the year 1180. We may suppose that John took a copy of the Satyricon home with him from Paris, as undergraduates do to-day from Oxford and Cambridge. Two and a half centuries later, in 1423 (I owe this display of erudition to Mr. Gaselee's collotype reproduction of the Trau manuscript), Poggio writes to Niccolò Niccoli that he has received from Cologne a copy recently ordered by him, of the fifteenth book of Petronius, and asks his friend to return the extract from Petronius "which I sent you from Britain." This last, Mr. Gaselee spiritedly assumes, was the part known as Cena Trimalchionis (pages 41 to 118 in this volume) from which John of Salisbury makes three separate quotations, but which is not otherwise on record before the discovery of what may have been Poggio's own manuscript (for it also is dated 1423) at Trau in Dalmatia, in the middle of the seventeenth century.

This manuscript is described as "Fragments from the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Books of the Satire of Petronius Arbiter"; we may assume, therefore, that the whole Satire was immensely long, a life-work, like Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and like that work, perhaps, fatal to its author. Indeed, since Proust's death last year the two have frequently been compared, and on more than the mere alliterative ground that is in their names. Of Petronius we are told "illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu. Ac dicta factaque eius quanto solutiora et quandam sui negligentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur." So far, this describes Proust also, and the similarity extends to their work. In connexion with Proust's, one of our youngest critics, your contemporary rather than mine, raises the question: "how this titanic fragment can be trundled

from age to age," and answers himself with: "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel of the moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved the present cannot decide." The better answer is, surely, that, of Proust as of his fore-runner Petronius, people will keep the things they like best. There are many pages now in Proust that are boring—but even now a selected edition for schools and colleges is (I am told) in the press: there is nothing in the surviving Satyricon that need bring a yawn to the lips of adolescence.

If, as I may suppose, you have planned to translate some at least of the Greek and Latin classics, you can choose no more handy model than Mr. Burnaby. He is later, it is true, than the richest and best examples, but so much the nearer to you in speech. He is not always scholarly—you can safely leave scholarship to others—but he uses an excellent colloquial English with a common sense in interpretation which carries him over the many gaps in the story without any palpable difference in texture. How fragmentary the latter part of the Satyricon is you will see if you turn to the edition published last year in the Loeb Classical Library. The reading of fragments has a fascination for the curious mind: you also, I think, must have devoured those casual sheets of forgotten masterpieces in which book-sellers envelop their parcels, and have dignified the whole with an importance which it can never when in circulation have enjoyed. Balzac, you remember, plays on this weakness, which he must have shared, in La Muse du Département, where the great Lousteau

exasperates a provincial audience, assembled to hear him talk, by reading to them the inconsequent pages of Olympia, ou les Vengeances romaines; it is rich comedy, but the fragment carries us away, and at the beginning of page 209: "robe frôla dans le silence. Tout à coup le cardinal Borborigano parut aux yeux de la duchesse————" we exclaim, don't we, with Bianchon: "Le cardinal Borborigano! Par les clefs du pape, si vous ne m'accordez pas qu'il se trouve une magnifique création seulement dans le nom, si vous ne voyez pas à ces mots: robe frôla dans le silence! toute la poësie du rôle de Schedomi inventé par madame Radcliffe dans le Confessional des Pénitents noirs, vous êtes indigne de lire des romans . . ." And these are fragments that have been deliberately chosen for preservation.

Since it is still safe to assume things, I will go on to suggest to you that the Satyricon was planned, on the Homeric model, in twenty-four books, and will leave you to—in the striking words used recently by The Times of the Japanese earthquake—"grope for analogies" between the text which follows and the fifteenth and sixteenth books of the Odyssey, which you have, doubtless, by heart. But, if I know you at all, you are more likely to be groping for analogies between the characters in Petronius and those you will come across in the first months of your new London life. Quartilla you will hardly escape, or Tryphœna either; Fortunata will pester you with her invitations, and, if you visit the National Gallery (though I hear they intend, now, to close it) or the Turkish Baths, you must beware of Eumolpus: while if the others cross your path by night you will do well to bear in mind the warning given to an earlier poet by a greater Roman even than Petronius:

Questi non hanno speranza di morte, E la lor cieca vita e tanto bassa, Che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte. Fama di loro il mondo esser non lassa, Misericordia e giustizia gli sdegna: Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.

On which high note I shall leave you to enjoy the Satyricon, and shall hope to hear from you, presently, what your opinion of it is.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY EARL OF RUMNEY

Master-General of Their Majesties Ordinance, and of Their Majesties most Honourable Privy-Council, Constable of Dover-Castle, and Lord Warden of the Cinque-Ports.

My Lord,

Good men think the meanest friend no more to be dispis'd, than the politick the meanest enemy; and the generous would be as inquisitive to discover an unknown esteem for 'em, as the cautious an unknown hatred: This I say to plead myself into the number of those you know for your admirers; and that the world may know it, give me leave to present you with a translation of Petronius, and to absolve all my offences against him, by introducing him into so agreeable company. You're happy, my Lord, in the most elegant part of his character, in the gallantry and wit of a polite gentleman, mixt with the observation and conduct of a man of publik employments; And since all share the benefit of you,'tis the duty of all to confess their sence of it, I had almost said, to return, as they cou'd, the favour, and like a true author, made that my gratitude which may prove your trouble: But what flatters me most out of the apprehensions of your dislike, is the gentleman-like pleasantry of the work, where you meet with variety of ridicule on the subject of Nero's court, an agreeable air of humour

in a ramble through schools, bagnio's temples, and markets; wit and gallantry in armours, with moral reflections on almost every accident of humane life. In short, my Lord, I shall be very proud to please a Sidney, an house fertile, of extraordinary genio's, whose every member deserves his own Sir Philip to celebrate him; whose characters are romances to the rest of mankind, but real life in his own family.

I am, my Lord, Your Lordships most devoted Humble Servant, W. BURNABY.

THE PREFACE

The Moors ('tis said) us'd to cast their newborn children into the sea, and only if they swam would think 'em worth their care; but mine, with more neglect, I turn into the world, for sink or swim, I have done all I design'd for't. I have already, with as much satisfaction as Aeneas in a cloud heard Dido praise him, heard the Beaux-Criticks condemn this translation before they saw it, and with as much judgment as if they had: And after they had prophetically discover'd all the flaws in the turns of thought, the cadence of periods, and had almost brought in Epick and Drama, they supt their coffee, took snuff, and charitably concluded to send Briscoe the pye-woman to help off with his books. Well, I have nothing to say, but that these brisk gentlemen that draw without occasion, must put up without satisfaction.

After the injury of 1700 years, or better, and the several editions in Quarto, Octavo, Duodecimo, etc., with their respective notes to little purpose; for these annotators upon matters of no difficulty, are so tedious, that you can't get rid of their enlargements without sleeping, but at any real knot are too modest to interrupt any man's Curiosity in the untying of it. After so many years, I say, it happened upon the taking of Belgrade this author was made entire; made so because the new is suspected to be illegitimate: But it has so many features of the lawful father, that he was at least thought of when 'twas got. Now the story's made out, the character of Lycas alter'd, and Petronius freed from the imputation of not making divine or humane justice pursue an ill-spent life.

As to the translation, the other hand, I believe, has been very careful; but if my part don't satisfie the world, I should be glad to see my self reveng'd in a better version; and though it may prove no difficult province to improve what I have done, I shall yet have the credit of the first attempt.

If any of the fine gentlemen should be angry after they have read it, as some, to save that trouble, have before; and protest I've yet debauch't Petronius, and robb'd him of his language, his only purity, I hope we shall shortly be reconciled, for I have some very pretty new songs ready for the press: If this satisfies them, I'll venture to tell others that I have drest the meaning of the original as modestly as I could, but to have quite hid the obscaenity, I thought, were to invent, not translate.

As for the ladies, if any too-discerning antiquated hypocrite (for only such I fear) shou'd be angry with the beastly author; let the work be my advocate, where the little liberties I take, as modestly betray a broad meaning, as blushing when a man tells the story.