﻿64 THE AGE OF PETRONIUS ARBITEK. 



Strange as the great diversity of opinion -uith regard to the age of Petronius may 

 appear, a stranger fact is yet to be stated. It is, not only that different scholars, as has 

 been seen, widely differ on this point ; there are instances of scholars, and able ones 

 too, who, having discarded their former and adopted a new opinion, differ with them- 

 selves. I have already mentioned the case of Marinus Statilius, who in the beginnmg 

 adopted the popular opinion that Petronius was the Petronius of Tacitus, but was 

 afterward induced to place him as late as the times of Constantino. Another similar 

 change of opinion has occurred in our own times. G. Bernhardy, Professor of Classi- 

 cal Literature at Halle, and one of the ablest classical scholars of Germany, expressed, 

 iir the first edition (1830) of his Grundriss der Rdmischen Litteratur (p. 331), the 

 following opinion : " The mysterious Petronius (Satyricon) W'as formerly believed to be 

 the luxurious T. Petronius Arbiter under Nero, and was, even down to our own times, 

 on account of his supposed eloquence and humor, praised by many, and diligently 

 explained. A healthier criticism has proved the incorrectness of this vicAV, and at the 

 same time assigned to this production a more appropriate and more significant place. 

 As far as the hitherto incomplete investigation of the text enables us to judge, the 

 whole appears to be an aggregate of dissimilar fragments, collected without any prin- 

 ciple, — not the product of an individual who submits to the laws and plan of the artist 

 and the rules of the written language, but the unrestrained play of local rhetoric and 

 low popular humor, the offspring of Naples and Lower Italy, and set off by the flexi- 

 bility, voluptuousness, and fantastic absence of character of the plebeian classes of 

 that region, whose wantonness, appearance, and depraved morals are mirrored forth in 

 a loose series of extravagant episodes and descriptions of manners, revelling in sensu- 

 ality, with alternations of poetic and prosaic, vulgar and refined language. In this, 

 then, and not in the gratification afforded by the description of a bountiful life, con- 

 sists the value of the Avork of Petronius, inasmuch as it affords a clearer insight into 

 the double-tongued idiom and the rhetorical manner of the Italiots, and is the only 

 attempt of antiquity to furnish a people's book, the result of popular art irrespective 

 of literary objects and tendencies. Sure indications of a particular period in the time 

 of the emperors are wanting." 



The substance of this criticism is, that while many have formed an extravagant 

 opinion of the elegance and cleverness of this work, its principal merit consists in 

 furnishing us with a representation of the peculiar character, feelings, morals, manners, 

 and especially the language, of the inhabitants of Middle and Lower Italy. 



In a foot-note, after giving some specimens of those extravagant opinions, as they 

 appear to him, Bernhardy expresses the sensible wish, that a consistent criticism may. 



