﻿THE AGE OF PETRONIUS ARBITER. 35 



tenth. If this supposition be correct, the book in its present shape is not more than 

 one fifth of the entu'e -work, and may be no more than one tenth. The work as we 

 now have it makes a volume of about 150 pages ; the whole would make a volume, or 

 volumes, of not less than 750 pages, and possibly as many as 1500.* 



With regard to the age of the codex, Statilius mentions that the scholars in Rome 

 who inspected it considered it three hundred years old, exceeding by one hundred years 

 the age which the editor of the Paduan edition had assigned to it. From the fact that 

 John of Salisbury, of the thirteenth century, mentions the "porcus Trojanus" and the 

 vessel of malleable glass, StatUius infers that the portion containing the banquet of 

 Trimalchio, at least, was completely extant a short time before the copymg of this 

 fragment, about one hundred years after John of Salisbury. 



It is somewhat singular that Statilius should, after so careful and thorough an 

 examination of the subject, come to the conclusion to change his mind with regard to 

 the age of Petronius. The manner in which he announces this change of view favors 

 somewhat the hypothesis that he was, to some extent, influenced by the spii'it of con- 

 tradiction, by the deske to difier from "Wagenseil in every respect. He says : " Vide 

 autem, quantum in hoc a te dissentiam ; quae tibi [Wagenseil] validissima argumenta 

 ■sidentur, abjudicaudi a Petronio hujus fragmenti, iu iis ego argumentis vel maxima 

 hujus causae praesidia posita esse censeo. Qua de re antequam dicere incipio, aliam 

 quandam, quae mibi tecimi est, controversiam paucis aperiam ; nee sane erit, quod mo- 

 leste id feras, quandoquidem hac eadem in re a me ipso dissentio, adductus scOicet "^i 

 veritatis, cujus mibi studiimi omnibus meis studiis et rationibus antiquius est. Xam 

 cum hactenus vulgatam de Petronii aetate opinionem, quae iUum Xeroni aequalem 

 statuit, probare solitus essem, nupcr accm-ata eruditi hominis disputatione coactus siun, 

 ut multo recentiorem hunc scriptorem existimem, et paullo ante Constantini August! 

 tempora, certe longe infi-a Severum coUocem." The conclusion at which he arrived was, 

 as we see, that Petronius did not belong to the age of Nero, as he had hitherto thought, 

 but a little before the Emperor Constantine ; at any rate, long after Severus. Consider- 

 ing that Nero reigned from 55 to 68, and Constantine firom 306 to 337, it is a change of 

 nearly three hundred years ; and this change is stUl greater, if we take into the account 

 the condition and fate of Roman civilization, and of the Latin language in particular, 

 during that extended period. Of the reasons assigned by Statilius for this change of 

 opinion, the first is, that while later -niiters — Priscianus, Diomcdes, Victorinus, and 



* Jan Dousa (Praecidanea, Lib. I. cap. 2) considers the remains of Petronius scarcely the tenth part of the 

 whole. It should be borne in mind, that Dousa wrote before the discovery of the Tragurian fragment. 



