﻿THE AGE OF PETRONIUS ARBITER. G5 



from the few manuscripts, ascertain the genuine fragments, even if it be impossible to 

 discover the original division into books, or the historical causes of the present disso- 

 lution. To this critical examination should be added a sober interpretation of anti- 

 quarian matters and local idioms. These will be the means of discovering the authors 

 and their times.* He thinks that most of the hypotheses on the age of Petronius 

 rest too much on single points ; as, for example, that of N. Ignarra, set forth in his 

 work, " De Palaestra Neapolitana," and concurred in by Ruhnken, who places Petronius 

 in the times of Commodus (180-193 A. D.); and the more probable one of Niebuhr, 

 according to which Petronius lived in the middle of the third century. He then adds, 

 " that the unreasonable respect for the ready language which characterizes the pert- 

 ness of these would-be Avitty describers of manners has been so long maintained be- 

 cause a separation of all the fragments, especially the poetic, according to their lin- 

 guistic and aesthetic A^alue, was not made." We see here again the hypothesis of several 

 authors, the correctness of Avhich, Bernhardy thinks, would be proved by a more careful 

 examination of the language of the book. 



The opinion on the same subject given by Bernhardy in the second edition of his 

 Grundriss der Romischen Litteratur, which appeared twenty years after the first, in 

 1850, is a striking proof how much more trustworthy results careful examination, 

 aided by the labors of others, furnishes, than a hasty, partial, however ingenious, appre- 

 hension and treatment of a subject. I shall give the substance of the later view of 

 Bernhardy, and it will be seen that scarcely a vestige of the former remains. 



" Petronii Satyricon, an unfinished book in 14:1 chapters, is probably the most 

 paradoxical phenomenon of Eoman literature. We have a novel different in matter 

 and tone from the known works of fiction. The description of manners, in a dramatic 

 form, with nudities, as well as the alternation of prose and longer or shorter pieces of 

 improvised poetry, some being composed with cleverness and elegance, remind us of 

 satire ; but it is impossible to form an accurate conception of the plan and original 

 connection of the whole, the work being composed of different fragments discovered 

 by degrees, and havmg, as flir as tradition reaches, never existed as a whole. The 

 last-discovered fragment, the " Coena Trimalchionis," forms a nucleus of the hetero- 

 geneous mass ; the narrative in its various parts is chiefly occupied with these im- 

 portant characters, Encolpius, Eumolpus, Trimalchio, who speak according to their 



* From this expression and the above, " aggregate of dissimilar fragments," it appears that Bernhardy 

 considers these fragments the work of several writers. An attentive reader of the work will scarcely be 

 able to reconcile this theory with the circumstance, that every part of the work is marked by the same 

 characteristics of tone, spirit, and language. 



