﻿40 THE AGE OF PETRONIUS ARBITER. 



transferring a modern French police-regulation, requiring that travellers newly arrived 

 in a place should register their names in the book of a police-officer, to an Italian town 

 in the early period of the empire. A few years sufficed to put an end to this literary 

 deception. I have dwelt somewhat longer on this subject, because the fraud, although 

 clumsy, and not extending beyond the present begimiing and close of the book, is, 

 within these limits, extensive, inasmuch as Nodot endeavored to supply and complete, 

 with one important exception, all the passages in which the existing text is evidently 

 imperfect ; and created, for a little time at least, considerable interest. The exception 

 referred to is full of significance ; it extends through the entire episode of the supper 

 of Trimalchio, namely, from the close of the twenty-sixth to the middle of the seventy- 

 ninth chapter, over a space of about fifty-three chapters, or more than one third of the 

 present work. Great as the impudence of Nodot was, he probably shrank from making 

 interpolations in a part of the book requii'ing an intimate acquamtance with points of 

 Koman antiquities which, were it not for the preservation of this part of the book, 

 would still be unkno^vn, and the consciousness of his ignorance induced him to abstain 

 from meddling with this i)ortion of the book. This appears to be the most natural 

 explanation of the fact, on the supposition that Nodot was acquainted with the Tra- 

 gurian fragment, the publication of which preceded his own work nearly thirty years. 

 If he was unacquainted with it, his confining himself in his interpolations strictly to 

 the portions of the work previously in existence, and knovra to him, establishes his 

 fraud even more clearly. 



All subsequent discoveries, whether the result of fraud or ignorance, were equally 

 u.nsuccessful. Among them was a fragment which ]\Iarchena pretended to have found 

 in the library of St. Gallon, and which LaUemand published in 1800. No addition 

 has, therefore, been made to the text since the discovery of the Tragurian fragment, 

 and we now have the work in the same condition in which it was after the insertion 

 of that fragment. When I say this, I do not, of coui-se, mclude the changes of the 

 text caused by various critical revisions. There is no reason for despairing of recov- 

 ering parts or the whole of the lost portion of the work ; but since discoveries of this 

 kind are quite as much the result of chance as of skUl and penetration, it is impossible 

 to form any conjecture when and imder what circumstances they will be made. 



