﻿THE AGE OF PETRONIUS ARBITER. 25 



Among these, the distinguished Niebuhr occupies a conspicuous place. It was in the 

 year 1821 that he published his paper on the age of Curtius and Petronius, in the 

 Transactions of the Berlin Academy. I shall have to advert again to this paper, when 

 I speak of the different opinions entertained concerning the age of Petronius. At pres- 

 ent I shall confine myself to Niebuhr's opinion of the moral and intellectual character 

 of our author. 



" The disgusting indecencies of which the remains of Petronius are full (although 

 the inoffensive, nay, the pure, predominates even in amount) give him so bad a name, 

 that he who confesses an intimate acquaintance with the poem, and expresses gratifica- 

 tion with it, exposes himself to a severe judgment, and affords a good opportunity for 

 the display of sanctimonious hypocrisy. This will be the more the case, if I reject the 

 notion that the objectionable portions in particular, being extracted by filthy hands (the 

 poor monks), were preserved, and remark that the immoral is inseparable from the 

 scope and plan of the work. 



" It is very probable that the great majority of those who have, since the days of the 

 past, regaled themselves with this work, have done so from a corrupt heart, as so many 

 used to read with pleasure the abominations of the French novels which were written 

 before the Revolution ; and many well-meaning persons may scarcely know that in 

 these last three centuries many honorable men, wlio ^^•cro disgusted with the filtli of the 

 Anthology, admired Petronius as one of the greatest minds in the literary world. He 

 who is afraid of calumny does in such cases conceal his opinion ; but it is better to pro- 

 fess one's opinion, without fear, so plainly that perversion alone can impart to it a false 

 appearance. An open declaration in favor of truth is always a good action, as timid 

 concealment is a bad one. 



" All great dramatic poets arc endowed with the power of creating beings who seem 

 to act and speak Avith perfect independence, so that the poet is nothing more than the 

 relator of what takes place. When Goethe had conceived Faust and Margarete, 

 Mephistopheles and Wagner, they moved and had their being without any exercise of 

 his will. But in the peculiar power which Petronius exercises, in its application to 

 every scene, to every individual character, in everything, noble or mean, which he 

 undertakes, I know but one who is fully equal to the Homan, and tliat is Diderot. 

 Trimalchio and Agamemnon might have spoken for Petronius, and the nephew Ramcau 

 and the parson Papin for Diderot, in every condition and on every occasion inexhausti- 

 bly, out of their own nature ; just so the purest and noblest souls, whose kind was, after 

 all, not entirely extinct in their day. 



" Diderot and a contemporary, related to him in spirit. Count Gaspar Gozzi, are 



