SOURCE: "The Date and Authorship of the 'Satyricon'," in The Phoenix, Vol. II, 1954, pp. 3-26.

[In the following essay, Bagnani explains the difficulties and contradictions that must be overcome in determining the authorship and date of composition of the Satyricon; rejects arguments of other scholars that involve circular reasoning; and concludes that it was written by the Petronius described in Tacitus's Annals around the year 60.]

Notes upon books outdo the books themselves.
J. BRAMSTON

The present state of the "Petronius Question" can only be described as unsatisfactory. Though "the accepted date and authorship are likely to remain in favour," we are constantly being reminded that these assumptions "are only presumptive, not proved."¹ It is characteristic of the unsatisfactory state of the question that the very same passage has been used to prove that the Satiricon was written after Commodus, and to prove that it was written under Nero. In Chapter 57, Hermeros, reaching the bellicose state of intoxication rather sooner than the others, looks round to find someone with whom to quarrel and, lighting on Ascyltos, lets out a torrent of Billingsgate. Amongst other endearments he says: eques Romanus es, et ego regis filius. E. V. Marmorale² assumes that Ascyltos is wearing the equestrian gold ring (cf. 58. 10), and that Hermeros consequently believes him to be really a knight. Since this is obviously impossible, Marmorale argues that Ascyltos must have received the ius anuli aurei by imperial decree as a concession of ingenuitas, a practice that becomes general only after Commodus. On the other hand, A. Momigliano³, reviving a suggestion of N. Heinsius,⁴ sees in et ego regis filius an oblique reference to Pallas who, regibus Arcadiae ortus, veterrimam nobilitatem usui publico postponeret, seque inter ministros principis haberi sineret.⁵ He considers this an argument "which alone is sufficient to date Petronius in the Neronian time" and adds: "the allusion could not be understood—and would no longer be interesting—after Nero."

The difficulties and contradictions implicit in Marmorale's theory have been effectively examined by numerous scholars, including Maiuri⁶ and R. Browning,⁷ but even the last-mentioned assumes that Hermeros believes Ascyltos to be a knight. Now it is quite obvious, as Sedgwick rightly pointed out,⁸ that the whole passage cannot be taken seriously. Hermeros is not deceived by the anuli buxei, and, as "a self-made man and proud of it," an inverted snob, he is the last person on earth to advance spurious claims to gentility. He advances a preposterous and obviously false claim to royal blood to beat Ascyltos' even more preposterous and obviously false claim to equestrian rank. "If you're a Roman knight, well then, I'm a King's son!" It is just a part of that ritual of abuse used in only slightly different forms semper, ubique et ab omnibus. There is a story that a certain gentleman, strolling with the late Lord Curzon, stopped to talk to an old family retainer, the widow of a sergeant-major in the Indian Army. Life in India having been mentioned, Curzon chipped in with: "That must have been when I was Viceroy." Whereupon the old lady countered with "Ye was, was ye? Well, me 'usband, 'e was Commander-in-Chief, 'e was!"

An allusion to Pallas is possible only if the Satiricon was written in the time of Nero; otherwise it might just as well be an allusion to Maecenas or, indeed, to anyone else. Throughout the whole course of the Empire there must have arrived in Rome every year a host of "aliens" who could claim—frequently with perfect truth—that their "birth, beyond all questions, springs From great and noble, though forgotten, kings."⁹ The different interpretations of this one short passage illustrate the exceptional importance of the problem of the date and authorship for the full understanding of the work itself. It is obviously full of allusions, but their interpretation depends entirely on the precise dating of the work; they cannot be used to date it. If we can prove that the Satiricon was written for the amusement of Nero's court, then the ego regis filius may have been intended as an allusion to Pallas, or, more probably, may have been taken by some contemporary readers as an allusion to Pallas, but it is perfectly comprehensible without any such allusion. The sentence with which Trimalchio ends his epitaph (71. 12), nec umquam philosophum audivit, is a perfectly good boutade and need not be anything more. But if the Satiricon was written for the entertainment of Nero at a time when Seneca was falling from favour, we can easily suppose that the author hoped that the Emperor, on reading the passage, might exclaim, "Lucky fellow! I wish I could say as much!"

Nothing is more subjective than the interpretation of an author's allusions. When Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son were published in 1774 the description of the "respectable Hottentot"¹⁰ was almost universally understood as a reference to Johnson, and it undoubtedly fits Johnson better than any allusions in the Satiricon fit their alleged prototypes. But everyone is now agreed that the allusion is to Lyttelton, and Birkbeck Hill points out that, had the letter been published when it was written and not twenty-three years later, an allusion to Johnson would never have been suspected.¹¹ The explanation of the allusions in the Satiricon depends entirely on the date; to use them as an element of dating is to argue in a circle. The most that can be said is that no historical or literary allusion has been found that is hopelessly inconsistent with an early date, and the same can be said of the proper names; but this can hardly be used as a conclusive proof that the work was written during the first century, and still less that it was written in the time of Nero.¹²

The precise dating of the work itself is also the only way by which we can identify the author. There is no direct evidence whatsoever to connect the author with the Petronius of Tacitus. The facts are clear and not in dispute. The late authors and MSS that mention our author call him indifferently Petronius, Arbiter, or Petronius Arbiter, and obviously consider Arbiter to be his regular cognomen. From the account of Tacitus¹³ it is equally obvious that Arbiter Elegantiarum was an appellation or nickname given by Society or by Tacitus himself to Nero's favourite, and was not a formal cognomen. Tacitus implies that Petronius had no cognomen. Two explanations of these facts are equally possible, indeed equally plausible: that later authors turned the nickname into a cognomen, or that the descendants of Petronius adopted the nickname as the regular cognomen of their branch of the gens Petronia. In the present state of our knowledge what must be avoided is the usual circular argument: that since it was written by the Petronius of Tacitus the Satiricon was written in the time of Nero, and that since it was written in the time of Nero it must have been written by the Petronius of Tacitus.

If it can be proved by conclusive internal evidence, without any reference to the name of the author, that the work must have been written between A.D. 55 and 65 there can be no reasonable doubt that it was written by the Petronius of Tacitus. And thus we return once more to the essential question: the precise dating of the work itself by internal evidence alone.

An absolute terminus ante quem and post quem are easily fixed. Maiuri has rightly pointed out that malui civis Romanus esse quam tributarius (57. 4) would be meaningless after the Constitutio Antoniniana of A.D. 212,¹⁴ which is therefore an absolute terminus. The first author to quote the "Arbiter" is Terentianus Maurus,¹⁵ whose date, however, is only slightly less uncertain than that of Petronius himself, though most scholars are now agreed in placing his activity towards the end of the second century."¹⁶ His statement that people in his own day were in the habit of singing the songs of Petronius has been used as an argument that Terentianus and Petronius were contemporaries.¹⁷ It can, of course, be interpreted this way, but let us remember that Addison heard Venetian gondoliers sing the songs of Tasso, and that we ourselves solemus cantare—or whistle—both the latest musical and the songs of Shakespeare and Jonson.¹⁸

An equally definite terminus a quo is given by the simple consideration that, though the cognomen Arbiter could be borne by any descendant of the Petronius of Tacitus, it could not possibly be borne by anyone earlier. And therefore the work itself, though it may be later than the time of Nero, cannot possibly be earlier. This terminus is confirmed and rendered more precise by the close relationship between Petronius and the younger Seneca and Lucan,¹⁹ a relationship that is quite undeniable, but that may be explained in various ways. Petronius may be consciously and deliberately imitating, criticizing, and parodying Seneca; on the other hand he may be a contemporary, moving in the same or a similar circle, influenced by the same ideas and ideals, and drawing his material from the same common stock. For example: the parallel between Trimalchio and the Calvisius Sabinus, described by Seneca in Ep. ad Luc. 27, is extremely close and can hardly be fortuitous,²⁰ but it is equally explicable on the supposition that Petronius developed and expanded Seneca's charactersketch, or on the supposition that he too was acquainted with Calvisius and drew from life, without any knowledge of Seneca's letter. We cannot therefore maintain that the Satiricon must necessarily have been written after the publication of the Letters to Lucilius.

The same considerations apply to the undoubtedly close relationship with Lucan.²¹ It is quite possible to argue that Petronius' de Bello Civili is a satire on or a parody of Lucan's poem. On the other hand it is equally arguable that Eumolpus is genuinely expounding the theories of Petronius on how an epic poem should be written. In this case it is unnecessary to suppose that Petronius knew the whole of Lucan's poem, or even the first book. It would be enough for him to know that Lucan was planning an epic poem on the Civil War—and the Senecan coterie will have put out a good deal of advance publicity—and to have sufficient knowledge of "the wonderful boy's" style to form a pretty shrewd idea of what the public was likely to get. A certain connexion has been pointed out between the first lines of the two poems.²² This does not necessarily prove that the Satiricon was written after A.D. 60 when Lucan published his first book.²³ Parts of Lucan's poem may have been read in Seneca's salon before publication; it is not inconceivable that Lucan may have admired the sidus conceit and borrowed it from Petronius and not vice versa; and finally both poets may have independently made use of a fashionable conceit. The only positive statement we can make is that the Satiricon must have been written after Lucan was known to be engaged on an epic poem on the Civil War, i.e., not earlier than ca. A.D. 58.

To resume: Petronius is contemporary with, or later than, Seneca and Lucan, and contemporary with, or earlier than, Terentianus Maurus, and the Satiricon cannot have been written before A.D. 58 or after A.D. 212. Is it possible to reduce these limits still further?

We have already seen that up till now all attempts to fix a definite date by explaining the allusions have been subjective and based only too frequently on circular reasoning. The same can be said of the endless discussions of Petronius' alleged literary theories, especially of the interpretation of the opening dialogue between Encolpius and Agamemnon (1-5).²⁴ A. D. Nock has rightly pointed out the danger of taking the passage as a serious contribution to the question.²⁵ Petronius' main object may well be to poke fun at the stock controversies between the different schools of rhetoric and to parody the stock arguments that were now centuries old. In this case the famous nuper²⁶ of 2. 7—nuper ventosa istaec et enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia commigravit—may represent the translation of an early Hellenistic or even fourth-century original when the statement was literally true.

The investigation of the Latinity of Petronius,²⁷ a happy hunting ground for philologists, lexicographers, and candidates for the Ph.D., leads to a dead end as far as dating the work is concerned. We know too little to be able to date "vulgar" Latin. It is only through an accident that the closest parallels with the language of Petronius are furnished by the Ludus de morte Claudii and the Pompeian graffiti, that is to say by documents dating between A.D. 55 and 79. And even if our material were far more extensive than it is, it is an open question whether we could date it with any degree of approximation. A spoken language or dialect usually changes much more slowly than the literary dialect, which is immediately affected by literary fashions or by the example of an influential author. The difference between the literary Italian of Boccaccio—or, for that matter, even of Manzoni—and the modern literary Italian of, say, Malaparte or Moravia, is enormous: but when Boccaccio reproduces the spoken Tuscan of his own time in the mouths of comic characters such as Calandrino and Buffalmacco it is not very different, wit included, from the language spoken today by Tuscan peasants. The most cursory glance at Hofmann's Umgangssprache shows that Petronius shares many peculiarities with Plautus, many others with the author of the Peregrinatio Aetheriae, and many with both. Even if all Marmorale's philological arguments in favour of a late dating were sound, they would prove only that the Satiricon might have been written at the end of the second century, not that it was.

What renders the question so peculiarly difficult is that we cannot be quite certain that Petronius is ever wholly serious. The first line of the schedium Lucilianae humilitatis (5. 1) is given by practically all the MSS as

artis severae si quis amat effectus

and practically all modern editors, except Sage, emend the amat to ambit. Marmorale maintains the reading of the MSS and sees in the false quantity a proof that Petronius was writing at a time when the feeling for quantity was lost.²⁸ Now, the merit of Petronius as a poet may be a matter of opinion, but that he is a competent versifier is not; and to find a time when even a schoolboy poetaster did not know, or might forget, the quantity of the first syllable of amare, the most overworked verb in the whole of a poet's vocabulary, we should have to go to the darkest of the Dark Ages. If the text is sound the false quantity is intentional, and what both Marmorale and the editors forget is that the schedium is a parody of Lucilius. It is also incredibly bad: nowhere else is Petronius guilty of such really appalling doggerel. The conclusion is obvious: Petronius has a low opinion of Lucilius as a poet.

Horace's remark that the verses of Lucilius were duri (S. 1. 4. 8), and that they ran incomposito pede (S. 1. 10. 1), is merely a polite way of saying that they frequently did not scan.²⁹ And we know from the eight verses prefixed to this tenth Satire—which, if not Horatian, are probably ancient—that old editors of Lucilius, like modern editors of Petronius, were given to emendation. Petronius, wishing to parody Lucilius, deliberately introduces a false quantity, and, to make the point perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence, makes the blunder in the very first line with the most familiar of all verbs.

If the horti Pompeiani of 53.5 are to be understood as "the farms at Pompeii," the Satiricon could be dated with certainty before the eruption of A.D. 79, for Maiuri's argument³⁰ that the area round Vesuvius cannot have been cultivated for over a century after the eruption is quite unanswerable. Unfortunately one cannot exclude the interpretation "the farms of Pompeius," on the analogy of Horti Sallustiani, etc. To ask who then can this Pompeius be, is quite beside the point; agreed that it cannot be Trimalchio's patron, but Pompeius is a common nomen throughout the Empire, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that any particular Pompeius is meant.

The hypothesis of a late second-century date can be excluded with certainty, not by considering this or that detail, but by observing the entire and perfectly consistent picture given in the Satiricon of contemporary life and manners, and of social and economic conditions. The perusal of any Handbook of Private Antiquities—Marquardt, Bliimner, Friedlander, Carcopino—is enough to convince an unbiased reader that the Satiricon reflects the manners and customs of the first century. Marmorale has sought to meet this objection by quoting parallels from the Historia Augusta.³¹ Now it is quite obvious that, whatever view we take of the value of the Historia Augusta as a record of historical events, it is entirely valueless as evidence for the mores of the second or early third century—though it may possibly have considerable value as evidence for those of the late fourth or early fifth.

To prove that the Satiricon reflects the social and economic conditions of the first century of the Empire would involve writing still another book on Roman life.³² But, besides the arguments advanced by so many others, I should like to stress a few that seem to me quite decisive. In the Graeca urbs the municipal magistracies are flourishing and the leading men of the town are straining every nerve, and spending a great deal of money, in order to get elected.³³ By A.D. 180 they would have been working even harder to avoid by every means in their power election to municipal office. Nor is there any trace in the Satiricon of those great corporations and collegia that from the middle of the second century on are so important a part of the economic life of the Empire, and this in a city which, whether it be Puteoli or not,³⁴ is certainly intended to represent an important commercial city of Campania.

The complete absence of any religious feeling in Petronius has often been pointed out, and is indeed-one of his most obvious characteristics. He pokes more or less good-humoured fun at astrology and divination,³⁵ omens and prodigies,³⁶ ghosts and were-wolves. He obviously considers mysticism and mystery religions an outlet for wealthy nymphomaniacs. Philosophy does not come off much better; certainly Trimalchio's Epicureanism is hardly a recommendation for the school. Nor is Petronius merely disapproving of religious innovations or aberrations; the old Roman religion is laughed at with equal impartiality.³⁷ The picture of the good old days when "our great ladies went up the hill to the Temple of Jupiter in their best clothes, their feet bare, their hair loose, their thoughts pure, to pray for rain. And of course down it came at once in buckets—if that didn't do it, what would?—and everyone went home like drowned rats,"³⁸ is one of the best things in the whole book, but its creator can hardly be considered an enthusiastic supporter of the Augustan religious programme. Personally I find it most unfortunate that this passage invariably comes to my mind when looking at the Ara Pacis.

Such indifference to religion is hardly conceivable at any period after the accession of Hadrian, when even scepticism, as in Lucian, becomes militant and doctrinaire. The author who most resembles Petronius is certainly Apuleius, but the close formal resemblance between the two works³⁹—-both picaresque novels with a considerable amount of obscenity—must not blind us to their essential, their fundamental difference. Apuleius' novel is a profoundly moral work, a kind of Divine Comedy, the regeneration of sinful man through Isis and her mysteries. Petronius' "heroes" are quite definitely unregenerate and their creator quite obviously wants to keep them that way. If one of the main threads of the novel is the loss and recovery by Encolpius of his virility,⁴⁰ it is a metamorphosis very different from Lucius's. When Apuleius digresses we get the masterpiece of Cupid and Psyche: when Petronius digresses we get the Pergamene Boy and the Matron of Ephesus, also masterpieces, but of a very different kind. Fulgentius himself would find it hard to interpret the Satiricon allegorically, and, if Petronius is a "Moralist,"⁴¹ he is a moralist of a very peculiar type, certainly not the Johnsonian.

Even though we can unhesitatingly affirm that the Satiricon reflects the mores of the first century, it does not follow that it reflects those of the time of Nero, still less that the problems of the date and authorship are solved, as most commentators directly or indirectly imply. Manners and customs change with every decade. Johnson once rightly "observed, that all works which describe manners, require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less";⁴² and if manners had changed so greatly in sixty years as to render much of The Spectator unintelligible in 1773, we can assume that there must have been an at least equal change of manners between the time of Claudius and that of Nerva. Unfortunately we know too little about the details of Roman life to do more than date by centuries, and though the Satiricon reflects the manners of the first century, we cannot say whether it reflects the early, the middle, or the final decades. Admittedly the general impression would seem to favour a Julio-Claudian rather than a Flavian date, but this is a merely subjective impression. The luxury of Trimalchio would appear to be pre-Flavian, but Tacitus' claim that the Flavian was an age of almost "Victorian" respectability after the excesses of the Julio-Claudians,⁴³ is hardly borne out by Juvenal and Martial, who, more than any other authors, are a commentator's seconds in his duel with the text of the Satiricon. It is true that Encolpius seems to take it for granted that, in a case of disputed possession, the interdictal procedure will be followed,⁴⁴ and Frontinus has been cited as proving that, by the Flavian period, this cumbersome procedure was avoided as much as possible.⁴⁵ But our text of Frontinus is in a most unsatisfactory state—it may well have been interpolated—and in any case Frontinus is referring to immovables and not to utrubi, the only one of the possessory interdicts applicable to the case of the cloak.

It would be easy to advance a theory that the Satiricon was written in the first decade of the second century by some descendant of the original Arbiter in order to satirize Domitianic society.⁴⁶ Such a theory would explain the close relationship between Petronius on the one hand and Juvenal, Martial, Quintilian, Statius, and Tacitus on the other, without postulating any conscious borrowing one from another. In such a case Tacitus would have presumably based his detailed account of the death of the Arbiter—with an oblique explanation of the origin of the cognomen—on a couple of letters written to him by, say, a grandnephew, one of his literary friends. The amphitheatre at Puteoli is the new Flavian one, and Ganymedes' lament on the decay of the city (44) genuinely reflects the decay of Campania under the Flavians, and is not the typical grouse of a typical laudator temporis acti.

To resume: we can now say that the Satiricon cannot have been written before A.D. 58 at the earliest, nor after about A.D. 118 at the latest. Can these limits be reduced still further? Can proof be found that will conclusively assign the work to one of these six decades? The road leading to this goal is strewn with the warning bones of my predecessors, but audaces fortuna iuvat: let's try again!

Echion, the rag-and-bone man, in enumerating the attractions of the coming games, mentions specifically (45. 7-8) dispensatorem Glyconis, qui deprehensus est cum dominam suam delectaretur, videbis populi rixam inter zelotypos et amasiunculos. Glyco autem, sestertiarius homo, dispensatorem ad bestias dedit. It is clear from this that Glyco used his absolute power of life and death over his slaves to be revenged on his steward, and that he was legally entitled to do so, even though a considerable section of public opinion was against him. This absolute power of a master over his slaves was restricted by a Lex Petronia cited by Modestinus (D 48. 8. 11. 1-2): servo sine iudice ad bestias dato, non solum qui vendidit poena, verum et qui comparavit tenebitur, post legem Petroniam et senatus consulta ad eam legem pertinentia dominis potestas ablata est ad bestias depugnandas suo arbitrio servos tradere: oblato tamen iudici servo, si iusta sit domini querella, sic poenae tradetur.⁴⁷

It is quite clear that Glyco acted suo arbitrio;⁴⁸ had he obtained the condemnation of his steward from a jurisdictional magistrate Echion would have used the technical expression dispensatorem damnandum dandumque ad bestias curavit. Moreover, had the Lex Petronia been in force, no magistrate would have been disposed to condemn the steward and admit that Glyco's was a iusta querella. Indeed, this was just the sort of case for which the law was drafted: a master's punishing his slave for a crime for which the master himself was directly or indirectly responsible. And if a steward had the opportunity delectari dominam, the dominus was, to put it as mildly as possible, negligent. The point is made by Echion himself: quid servus peccavit, qui coactus est facere? a direct echo of the phrase attributed by the elder Seneca⁴⁹ to the orator Haterius, impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas. Even on the very unlikely hypothesis that the magistrate had been "fixed" or was a zelotypus⁵⁰ and willing to condemn the steward, the facts would have necessarily been brought out in court. In this case Glyco, under the Lex lulia, would have had to proceed against his wife and divorce her: otherwise he would lay himself open to the savage penalties that the law comminated against complaisant husbands and to the great danger of prosecution by any delator. Echion's thumb-nail sketch of the unattractive Glyco proves not only that the wife was not punished for her peccadillo, but also that a divorce was the last thing the good-for-nothing Glyco would want. He had obviously married the daughter of Hermogenes, a prominent if not a highly respected citizen, for her money and for her family influence and connexions, and he would lose all by a divorce. Of course the facts were well known—hoc est se ipsum traducere—but only through gossip, and no delator, without concrete evidence, would dare launch a prosecution under the Lex lulia. This was the fundamental weakness of that law as of all statutes rendering adultery a criminal offence: the natural repugnance of husbands to prosecute, and the utter impossibility of compelling them to do so. The wisest man may not avoid getting cuckolded, but only a congenital idiot sticks antlers over his front door. Sensible people behaved like Trimalchio's own master; a too attractive slave was sent off to some distant country estate.⁵¹

Since Glyco certainly condemned his steward to the amphitheatre suo arbitrio, the only possible conclusion is that the Lex Petronia was not yet in force; and it consequently follows that the Satiricon was written before the passage of the Lex Petronia. Even if Petronius did not place the action of the novel in his own day, this is not the kind of accuracy an ancient author would be inclined to bother about, and, indeed, the whole point of the story would be missed if its readers were used to the conditions created by that statute. Unfortunately the date of the Lex Petronia de servis is uncertain: some civilians date it in A.D. 19,⁵² others in A.D. 61.⁵³ It would be easy to say that, since the Satiricon cannot be earlier than A.D. 58, the latter are right and Petronius furnishes the proof; but to date the Lex Petronia by the Satiricon and then date the Satiricon by the Lex Petronia is too much like that circular reasoning we have already condemned. We must try to establish the date of the Lex Petronia without reference to the Satiricon.

Four leges publicae populi Romani are designated as Petroniae and, since they have occasionally been confused, it may be well to examine them all, keeping in mind the following considerations. The gens Petronia, of Umbro-Etruscan origin, is not known in Rome till about the middle of the second century B.C.⁵⁴ and did not become prominent till the Civil Wars.⁵⁵ On the other hand, legislation by lex rogata submitted to the comitia fell gradually into disuse during the early Empire and ceased with Nerva, being replaced either by Senatusconsulta or imperial constitutions and rescripts. Moreover, during this period, the right to submit legislation to the comitia was, in practice, limited to the consuls, ordinary or suffect.

1. The Lex Petronia de praefectis municipiorum: known only through epigraphic evidence.⁵⁶ It is earlier than A.D. 79 since it is mentioned on an inscription at Pompeii.⁵⁷ If it is really referred to in the Fasti Venusini, it would be earlier than 32 B.C. and might in that case be tribunician,⁵⁸ but the interpretation of the reference in the Fasti is dubious.⁵⁹ The lex belongs probably to late republican or early imperial times, but its date, and even its purpose, are quite uncertain. It is mentioned here only because it has been confused with the Lex Petronia de servis.⁶⁰
2. Lex Petronia de adulterii iudicio:⁶¹ mentioned in a rescript of Valerian and Gallienus of 256, C 9. 9. 16. 2: … quia et decreto patrum et lege Petronia ei, qui iure viri delatum adulterium non peregit, numquam postea id crimen deferre permittitur. The rescript distinguishes quite clearly the lex from a decretum patrum, i.e., a Senatusconsultum, that preceded it. Given the subject-matter of the lex there can be little doubt that this Senatusconsultum is the famous SC Turpilianum de abolitionibus D 48. 16 and C 9. 45; indeed the lex is merely a particular application of the general principle. It follows therefore that both the SC and the lex were proposed by the same person, P. Petronius Turpilianus, consul ordinarius in A.D. 61. He probably proposed the Senatusconsultum a few years earlier when praetor.
3. Lex lunia Petronia de liberalibus causis.⁶² Known from D 40. 1. 24. pr. (Hermogenianus, libro primo iuris epitomarum): lege Iunia Petronia, si dissonantes pares iudicum existant sententiae, pro libertate pronuntiari iussum. This is an extremely puzzling statute: it obviously deals with suits de libertate before the centumviral court. Its range was later extended by a constitution of Antoninus Pius (Paul, D 42. 1. 38. pr.), probably to the courts of the provincial governors. Its date can hardly be disputed; it was passed in the second half of A.D. 19 by the consul ordinarius M. lunius Silanus and the consul suffectus P. Petronius P. f. who succeeded the other ordinarius L. Norbanus Balbus. There is no reason whatever to connect this law in any way with the lex Petronia de servis;⁶³ indeed the two laws deal with entirely different fields of law. The lunia Petronia belongs to the Law of Civil Procedure, the Petronia de servis to the Law of Property, and no Roman jurist would confuse the two. To think of a Roman Law of Slavery is entirely modern; for a Roman slavery was merely a special section of the general law of property, or, in certain cases, of persons. The real difficulty is the relation between this law and the Lex lunia (Norbana) that gave birth to that horrible abortion, Junian Latinity. If the latter was passed at the beginning of A.D. 19—and this is the more widely held opinion—it seems very strange that legislation should have to be introduced only a few months later to deal with a point of procedure that had been overlooked by the drafters of the original statute, especially as there is no doubt whatever that Roman legal draughtsmanship was of a very high order. The Iunia Petronia seems rather to be ad hoc legislation, designed to meet a practical difficulty that had arisen in the courts, i.e., the centumviral court in a particular case tried a short time previously had divided fifty-fifty. The institution of Junian Latinity must have enormously increased both the number and the complexity of the causae liberales, and therefore the lunia Petronia would logically appear to have been passed after disputes on status had been before the courts for some time. Since the date of the Iunia Petronia is far more certain than that of the lunia Norbana, this would seem to be a strong argument in support of those who date Junian Latinity to the earlier part of the reign of Augustus.⁶⁴
4. We now come to the Lex Petronia de servis.⁶⁵ We have seen that there is absolutely no reason to connect it in any way with the lunia Petronia of A.D. 19, and thus the only possibility of dating it is by considering its position in the development of the Roman concept of slavery. In this connexion the revolutionary nature of the Lex Petronia does not seem to have been fully appreciated. From the point of view of Roman Law slaves are merely a particular type of property, and it is a basic principle of law that an owner can do what he pleases with property to which he has a clear title. That in practice this absolute right was limited—and not only in the case of slaves—by custom, public opinion, self-interest, and other extra-legal but important considerations, does not affect the strictly legal position in the slightest.⁶⁶ Now the Lex Petronia explicitly prohibits an owner from disposing of certain property suo arbitrio, explicitly recognizes that this right existed, and explicitly abolishes it; potestas ablata est. So revolutionary an innovation seems to me incredible under the principates of either Augustus or Tiberius, in such matters rather rigidly conservative, admirers of ius, fas, mos maiorum, and other equally repulsive Roman ideals.⁶⁷ The Iunia Petronia, as I have pointed out, merely establishes a presumptio iuris in procedure, but does not touch in any way the, so to speak, "common law" rights of ownership.

The Lex Petronia would appear to be the legal expression of that growing feeling of humanity towards slaves that is so marked in both Seneca and the Satiricon. This feeling was expressed also in the legislation by Claudius which is the first attempt, and a rather halfhearted one, to limit the unfettered rights of slave owners. If Suetonius⁶⁸ is to be trusted, the Claudian law consisted of two parts. The first part, the main one, laid down that, if a master exposed a sick slave to avoid the trouble or expense of curing him and the slave recovered, the slave was free and his former master could not claim him. In itself this would hardly be a restriction of property rights, but rather an enactment that, under certain circumstances, if an owner abandoned certain property, he lost his title to it.⁶⁹ The real object of the law was to oblige owners to look after sick slaves, but it was obvious to the legal draughtsmen that this object could be easily defeated and the law circumvented by an owner who, finding he could no longer expose his slave and being still unwilling to look after him, simply put him to death. It was therefore further enacted that in such a case—and in such a case alone—the killing of the slave would be held as equivalent to murder.

There was left, however, a further loophole. If a slave, sick, old, or unproductive, could not be in practice either exposed or killed, he could still be used to provide entertainment at the games, and the person who gave the munus would probably pay the owner something for him. The Lex Petronia effectively plugged this loophole and, under the influence of the humanitarian ideas of the time, enacted the first general limitation of the rights of slave owners. The Lex Petronia is therefore later than Claudius.

To this conclusion there is one objection that must be examined. Aulus Gellius (5. 14. 27), in telling the famous story of Androcles and the Lion, places the following words in Androcles' mouth: (dominus) me statim rei capitalis damnandum dandumque ad bestias curavit. The phrase expresses in technical legal language the procedure followed after the Lex Petronia. Since the incident almost certainly took place under Gaius,⁷⁰ the Lex Petronia would appear to have been in force at this time. But we must remember that Gellius is writing in the second half of the second century after Christ, and is, moreover, translating from the Hellenistic Greek of Apion, a native Egyptian. It is highly improbable that the latter made use of such technical legal language. Aelian also tells the story (de Nat. An. 7. 48) and, though he summarizes and turns direct into indirect speech, he is probably verbally closer to the original.… This is nothing like as specific a statement as that of Gellius, indeed it is a masterpiece of ambiguity. We can only conclude therefore that Gellius, who, though not a jurist, was familiar with and fond of using legal Latin, finding in Apion a vague expression such as "my master held an inquiry on what I had done wrong, and I was condemned to the beasts,"⁷¹ translated it by the technical phrase that would be used by his own contemporaries, forgetting, or more probably not knowing, that the procedure before a magistrate was not yet in force in the time of Apion.

Having thus proved, I hope, that the Lex Petronia de servis is a post-Claudian lex rogata strongly influenced by the general humanitarianism of the time, seen in both Seneca and Petronius, we must try to establish its precise date. There is no indication that comitial legislation was continued under the Flavians, whose policy indeed was directed at decreasing the authority of the consuls, and the only consul of the gens Petronia that we know of in this period is M. Petronius Umbrinus, suffect in A.D. 81.⁷² The revival of comitial legislation under Nerva is itself open to a good deal of doubt,⁷³ and in any case we know of no Petronius who held a consulship in those years. It therefore follows that the probabilities in favour of a Neronian date are overwhelming. Since the lex must have been sponsored by a consul, ordinary or suffect, we have four possibilities during this period:⁷⁴ A. Petronius Lurco, suffect during the latter part of A.D. 58; P. Petronius Turpilianus, ordinary consul in 61; T. Petronius Niger, suffect in some year between 63 and 70; and the Arbiter himself, suffect in some year of Nero's reign before A.D. 66. Unfortunately our only complete lists of consuls for the reign are those for the years 56-59 and 62.

Until we can complete these consular lists it is impossible to choose between the various possibilities with any degree of confidence; in the present state of our knowledge the most we can do is to examine and weigh certain probabilities. That the author of this legislation was A. Petronius Lurco seems to me improbable in the extreme. This conjecture would oblige us to assign the Satiricon to the first part of A.D. 58, a date which, though not actually impossible, is highly unlikely, given the relationship not only with Lucan's poem but also with Nero's own Troiae Halosis. Most writers on the subject of the Lex Petronia have attributed it to Petronius Turpilianus during his consulship in the first part of A.D. 61, and on the whole, in the present state of our knowledge, this is perhaps the most probable hypothesis, for he was the author of the SC Turpilianum and of another lex rogata, the Lex Petronia de adulterii iudicio. The comitia must have met only rarely in this period, and presumably as much legislation as possible would have been presented to them. On the other hand we do not know whether Petronius Turpilianus was influenced by the humanitarian movement of the time—we know of him only as a reliable man in an emergency and a good administrator of unquestioned loyalty—and the two leges Petroniae have nothing in common except their name.

There is, moreover, a general consideration which, while not being real evidence and still less proof, deserves to be kept in mind. Legislation so revolutionary as our Lex Petronia is usually passed after some particular case has drawn the attention of both lawyers and public to the unsatisfactory state of the law. Such an event occurred in A.D. 61 when the city prefect, Pedianus Secundus, was murdered by one of his slaves. From the account of Tacitus⁷⁵ it would appear that the crime took place in the second half of the year, after Turpilianus had left for Britain. In such cases the law prescribed that the whole familia—in this case over four hundred people—should be executed, and the Senate refused to modify the law, notwithstanding the entreaties of the populace, covertly supported by the Emperor himself. Any humanitarian proposal would be popular in such circumstances, and, given the temper of the people and the attitude of the Senate, it would be more likely to be submitted to the comitia as a lex rogata, rather than enacted by Senatusconsultum or imperial constitution. If this reasoning is correct, the author of our legislation was either the Arbiter or T. Petronius Niger.

The possibility that Petronius "Arbiter" may have been the author of this legislation cannot be excluded. Tacitus states that, as consul, he was surprisingly and unexpectedly active, and it is not easy to see what activity, except legislative, was possible for a suffect consul under the later Julio-Claudians. The Lex Petronia is also the kind of legislation we might expect both from the person described by Tacitus and from the author of the Satiricon. Since he was a favourite of Nero's, we can reasonably conjecture that the Arbiter reached the consulship when he was at the height of his influence, that is to say after Seneca's had begun to decline and before Tigellinus' had become overwhelming. We should therefore expect his consulship to fall in one of the two years A.D. 60 and 61.⁷⁶ In favour of the year 60 is the consideration that Nero might want a close personal friend, his own arbiter elegantiarum, to be consul for the celebration of the Neroneia; and this, of course, might be the chief activity to which Tacitus referred. On the other hand, it is quite possible that two members of the same gens, close relations and favourites of the Emperor, might hold the consulship in the same year as a particular mark of imperial favour.⁷⁷ Finally, the candidature of our only recently resurrected T. Petronius Niger cannot be absolutely dismissed. In its favour is the confusion made by Pliny and Plutarch about the praenomen of the Arbiter, which they both give as T(itus).⁷⁸ It is not outside the range of possibility that they confused the author of a well-known lex with the author of a notorious novel. In this case the Lex Petronia might be of any date between 61 and 70.

To resume: I hope I have proved, without reference to the Satiricon, that the Lex Petronia de servis was enacted under Nero, probably by Petronius Turpilianus in A.D. 61, possibly by Petronius Arbiter or by T. Petronius Niger between A.D. 60 and the end of the reign.

I have already said that the question of the authorship depends on that of the date. If the Satiricon is of the time of Nero it follows inevitably that it was written by the Petronius of Tacitus. Having proved that the Satiricon was written between A.D. 58 and 65 I submit that it was written by Petronius "Arbiter." That an anonymous work written at this time should have been fathered on him is so intrinsically improbable and so devoid of any semblance of proof as to require no contradiction. The main arguments of those who consider the "Petronian" authorship of the Satiricon a question that cannot be answered are best put by Emile Thomas:

Pour la question de l'identité de personne entre le Pétrone de Tacite et l'auteur du roman, l'obstacle principal est toujours celui-ci.… Dans le portrait si vivant que Tacite a tracé du consulaire et de sa fin, il n'est pas question de son talent d'écrivain; en fait d'ouvrage de Pétrone, Tacite ne cite que le pamphlet envoyé à Néron: comment expliquer ce silence, si ce même consulaire avait écrit un roman très lu, très répandu et qui lui a survécu? D'autre part, nous ne connaissons pas la vie de l'auteur du Satiricon: mais nous constatons que, dans tant de pages, il n'y a pas une allusion, pas un mot qui se rapporte à la vie publique: comment comprendre qu'un homme, mélé de si près à la politique de son temps, ait pu écrire un long ouvrage où rien ne rappelle ce qu'il a fait, ce qu'il a vu, ni même, avec pleine clarté et en toute précision l'histoire de son temps?⁷⁹

M. Thomas' book is as full of good things as a plum pudding, but in this particular case his observations are not arguments, they are impertinences. M. Thomas who, like nearly all Frenchmen, is an admirable writer, is here quite calmly telling two of the very greatest artists in prose, Tacitus and Petronius, how to write history, and how to write novels. He joins those critics, ancient and modern, who blame Jane Austen for not depicting English sentiment during the Napoleonic Wars, Charles Dickens for dealing with "low" life, and Rudyard Kipling for ignoring the struggles of Indian nationalism. Any great artist has the right to make his own rules of relevance. It is obvious that all ancient historians, Polybius not excluded, had very different ideas from modern historians on what was relevant. No doubt a modern historian, with his academic career in mind, would, in the text and in the footnotes, have given us a complete biography of Petronius, the exact date of his birth, his full cursus honorum and list of works, with dates, places of publication, and variant editions. It would all be extremely useful and valuable; but how dull!

The space that Tacitus devotes to Petronius is actually a confirmation of the importance of Petronius as an author. Tacitus gives him two full chapters, twice as much as he gives Lucan, whose epic poem also is not referred to. Petronius was not one of the more important political figures of the time; the interest that Tacitus so clearly shows must be due to some other reason, and that reason can only be literary. The author of the Dialogus de oratoribus had read and studied the Satiricon; and a master of prose, such as Tacitus, could hardly fail to admire another great artist, however different. To a specialist in antithesis, the contrast between the fldneur, the dandy, the writer of salacious novels, and the capable administrator, the acute critic, the artist in living and writing, must have been fascinating. It is the same contrast, the same antithesis that we ourselves find so fascinating in Pepys, the hedonist, and Pepys, the saviour of the Navy; in Boswell, the friend of Johnson, and in Boswell, the friend of Wilkes. Of course we can hardly expect that Tacitus, that high-minded and serious Stoic, that Olympian dispenser of eternal praise or infamy, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that superlative prig, should openly avow his fascination and admiration. But he devotes to Petronius an amount of space which, given the general economy of the Annals, is not otherwise explicable. And I cannot help feeling that, in his description of the death of Petronius, the Stoic Tacitus was uncomfortably aware that the way this dandy met his death was far more dignified than the Stoic posturings of Seneca or Thrasea.

The authorship and, within very narrow limits, the date of composition being thus established, the purpose and the occasion of the publication follow with a high degree of probability. The Satiricon was written for the amusement of Nero and his pauci familiares on the occasion of the Neroneia of A.D. 60. The general assumption in the Satiricon that the simplest way of getting a fortune is to find hidden treasure would seem to refer to the early Neronian legislation on treasure-trove and echo the passage of Calpumius (Ecl. 4. 117 ff.).⁸⁰ By this time the influence of Seneca was declining and the sly digs at philosophers in general and Seneca in particular would be appreciated. The Troiae Halosis and the de Bello Civili, in this case, are neither parodies nor criticisms, but merely exercises on themes that were popular in the small coterie for which Petronius was writing. Momigliano's remark: "he described the big themes of the literary life of his days (the Imperial poetry on Troy included) as subjects not for emperors and lofty people but for dubious, amusing, and vulgar members of a low society"⁸¹ is true and penetrating. A highly sophisticated society would enjoy the joke: that the joke was also a very subtle indictment of that society itself would scarcely be apparent, and may not have been deliberately intended by the author. It would therefore appear more probable that Lucan, in revising his poem for publication, took some hints from Petronius, than that Petronius was attacking Lucan's poem.

The subsequent consulship of Petronius proves that Nero appreciated the work. But, as an author, Petronius had overreached himself. In writing a highly topical skit for the amusement of a very restricted group he forfeited his popularity with a wider public and with the professional critics and literary historians. The Satiricon is, and must always have been, a most disconcerting work. Like Peacock's novels, which in certain ways it rather resembles, it obstinately refuses to be fitted into any literary genre. After the passing of the society for which he wrote, and the growing emphasis in the following generations on "high seriousness" and formal education, Petronius was naturally neglected. No one could really expect Quintilian, or any "educationist" ancient or modern, to recommend the Satiricon as a model to his pupils. Tacitus had read him and reluctantly admired him, but we can hardly blame him for not publicly declaring his admiration. The best thing schoolmasters, rhetoricians, and literary historians can do is to ignore so original an author. The Satiricon is relegated to the category "curious" and to grammarians on the look-out for strange expressions and usages. It is not surprising that so much of Petronius has been lost: what is really surprising is that so much has been preserved.

The Satiricon will continue to remain a puzzling and fascinating work. It is true enough that Petronius' avowed purpose was to amuse Nero's court and that he apparently succeeded in accomplishing this purpose, but is this all? Can anyone be as completely detached as Petronius seems to be? What does he really think of the society he is describing or the society for which he is writing? Is he really a satirist? a moralist? The Sphinx smiles and remains inscrutable.

Notes

¹ J. Whatmough, CP 44 (1949) 274, reviewing Marmorale, Questione: cf. W. Suess, Gnomon 23 (1951) 312-317, and A. Emout, RevPhil 24 (1950) 120.

² Marmorale, Questione 317-323.

³ Momigliano, 100.

⁴ Burman, Satyricon² (Amsterdam 1745) 1. 372.

⁵ Tacitus, Ann. 12. 53.

⁶Petroniana 101-128.

⁷CR 63 (1949) 12.

⁸ W. B. Sedgwick, The Cena Trimalchionis² (Oxford 1950) 115. A salutary warning that one must not take any statement of Petronius too seriously had been issued by A. D. Nock, CR 46 (1932) 173.

⁹ Though Charles Churchill's Prophecy of Famine was published early in 1763, these lines (273-274) are directed against the Scots in general, not against Lord Bute in particular, and still less against Boswell, even though the latter arrived in London that very year, and on one occasion characteristically informed George III that he was the Pretender's cousin in the seventh degree (Malahide Papers 16. 101). The early Empire seems to have attributed as much importance to quarterings as a minor German court. Besides the claim that Maecenas and Pallas were alavis editi regibus, a royal pedigree was also provided for Nero's concubine Acte (Suet., Nero 28. 1), while the Vitellii were given a descent from Faunus, King of the Aborigines (Suet., Vitell. 1. 2).

¹⁰ Letter to his son of 28 February O.S. 1751 (Letters, ed. Bonamy Dobree, 4. 1685).

¹¹ Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill-Powell, 1. 267, n. 2.

¹² Most of the alleged allusions have been effectively examined and criticized by Marmorale, Questione 63-104. He convincingly refutes, 99, L. Hermann's attempt in AntCI 11 (1942) 87-89 to place the Cena in A.D. 34: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that Scaurus, Pompeius, and others mentioned are historical or even real persons. Recent attempts at allusion-hunting, equally ingenious and unconvincing, are those of P. Grimal, RevPhil 16 (1942) 161-168, and of Richard H. Crum, CW 45 (1952) 161-170. Trimalchio's second cognomen Maecenatianus does not necessarily indicate that he had been a slave of Maecenas; H. W. Haley, HSCP 2 (1891) 13.

¹³Ann 16. 17: inter paucos familiarium Neroni adsumptus est, elegantiae arbiter… (and cf. infra 49, n. 13).

¹⁴ Maiuri, Petroniana 127. In dealing with this point Marmorale, Questione 324-325, is more than usually unconvincing. I shall forbear discussing the long controversy started by U. E. Paoli, "L'Eta del Satyricon," StItal 14 (1937) 3-46. Since there is no reason whatever to see in Sat. 70. 10 a case of manumissio per mensam (it is clearly contradicted by the fact that Trimalchio intends to manumit all his slaves testamento, 71. 1), cadit quaestio: cf R. Henrion, RBPh 22 (1943) 198.

¹⁵De Metris 2489 (GLK 6. 399) "Arbiter"; and 2852 (ibid. 6. 409) "Petronius."

¹⁶ Schanz-Hosius, Gesch. d. Röm. Lit. 3³ (Munich 1922) 27.

¹⁷ Marmorale, Questione 290-291: cf Schanz-Hosius, he. cit.

¹⁸ The attempt to prove that Terentianus considers Petronius one of the poetae novelli (E. Castorina in Giorn. it. di Filologia 1. 213) is wholly unconvincing.

¹⁹ Collignon, 149-165 and 291-311; Maiuri, Cena 17-24; Marmorale, Questione 224-235.

²⁰ Maiuri, Cena 19.

²¹ Collignon, 149-226; H. Stubbe, "Die Verseinlagen im Petron" Philologus, Suppl. 25, 2 (1933) 67-151; a summary of the various theories in Sage, 207.

²² R. J. Getty, CP 46 (1951) 29.

²³ Though, as Momigliano, 97, points out, Miss Toynbee's interpretation, 87, of the passage in Suetonius is open to doubt, the fact is not.

²⁴ Collignon, 63-108; Marmorale, Questione 275-286; Sage, 207; E. Paratore, R Satyricon (Florence 1933) 2. 1-24; L. Alfonsi, RFIC, N.S., 26 (1948) 46-53.

²⁵CR 46 (1932) 173, pointing out the close connexion between this passage of Petronius and Philo, de Plantatione 157-159.

²⁶ Collignon, 83; Marmorale, Questione 284-286. Sage, 146, rightly suspected that "Petronius was following some Greek source and failed to remove the evidence." If, however, the whole passage is a deliberate parody of stock arguments, the failure is intentional.

²⁷ There is a summary of the question and a fairly complete bibliography in Marmorale, Questione 124-223; but cf Excursus I.

²⁸ Marmorale, Questione 292.

²⁹ Or that Horace and his contemporaries were unable to scan them, even as the English Augustans were unable to scan Chaucer or Donne. Lucilius might have answered in the words of Alfieri, son duri, duri, disaccentati? … non son cantati! G. Suess, "Petronii imitatio sermonis plebei," Acta et Comment. Univ. Tartuensis, B13, 1 (Dorpat 1927) rightly points out the close dependence of Petronius on Lucilius, but this does not mean that Petronius necessarily admired him.

³⁰Cena 186; Petroniana 110-112.

³¹Questione 297-313; for a discussion of the problem of the Historia Augusta see S. Mazzarino, Aspetti Sociali del Quarto Secolo (Roma 1941) 345-370.

³² The close connexion between manners and customs as depicted in the Cena and the life of Pompeii and Herculaneum has been admirably brought out in Maiuri, Cena. If 53. 3, Mithridates servus in crucem actus est, quia Gai nostri genio male dixerat, could be taken seriously, the date of the work would be earlier than Hadrian, who seems to have forbidden masters to put slaves to death arbitrio (Mommsen, Strafrecht 617; W. W. Buckland, Law of Slavery [Cambridge 1908] 37; F. Schulz, Principles of Roman Law [Oxford 1936] 220—though we should like to have better evidence of the fact than the Historia Augusta). It would be dangerous, however, to stress this point since the whole episode of the recitation of the Acta is farcical in the extreme.

³³Sat. 45. 10 (Echion): subolfacio quia nobis epulum daturus est Mammaea, binos denarios mihi et meis.

³⁴ The case for Puteoli has been excellently put by Maiuri, Cena 5-14 and Petroniana 106-108; contra, Marmorale, Questione 117-133, Paratore, In Satyricon 1. 179-211 and Paideia 3 (1948) 265. I do not believe with Paratore that the Graeca urbs is imaginary nor with Maiuri that the name was deliberately concealed. If the Satiricon was written in the time of Nero, the identification with Puteoli is highly probable since it is still the most important town of Campania, but it is impossible to identify the city with such certainty as to date the work itself. Moreover Cumae is excluded only on the basis of Trimalchio's reference to it in 48. 8, and it seems to me extremely difficult to take this as a reference to the Italian Cumae. Either he is referring to the Aeolic Cumae (so Marmorale, Cena 78), or, more probably, the text is corrupt.

³⁵ J. G. W. M. De Vreese, Petron 39 und die Astrologie (Amsterdam 1927), has greatly elucidated these passages, but has made the fundamental mistake of taking them seriously, cf infra 58, n. 52.

³⁶ It is enough to compare the point of view of Petronius in such matters with that of Dio Cassius, a highly educated Senator, to exclude the possibility of their being contemporaries. Cf M. A. Levi, Nerone e i suoi tempi (Milan 1949) 219.

³⁷ Contempt for the official religion is even more marked in the Ludus de morte Claudii; Collignon, 28.

³⁸Sat. 44. 18: antea stolatae ibant nudis pedibus in clivum, passis capillis, mentibus puris, et Iovem aquam exorabant. itaque statim urceatim plovebat—aut tunc, aut nunquam—et omnes redibant udi tanquam mures (redibant udi, Jacobs, Biicheler, Maiuri; ridebant udi, Sage, Ernout, Terzaghi; ridebant uvidi, Marmorale; ridebant ut dii, H).

³⁹ Collignon, 40-46; Marmorale, Questione 247-262.

⁴⁰ C. Marchesi, Petronio (Milan 1940) 41-42. The same considerations apply to the generally accepted theory that the plot of the novel is the Wrath of Priapus. Far too little is left of the work to allow us to consider the various attempts at reconstructing the plot as anything more than exercises in ingenuity. From fr. 4 it seems probable—though not certain—that part of the action took place in Massilia, but the Memphitides puellae of fr. 19 are no kind of proof that anything took place in Egypt.

⁴¹ G. Highet, "Petronius the Moralist," TAPA 72 (1941) 176-194.

⁴² Boswell, Life, 3 April 1773 (ed. Hill-Powell, 2. 212).

⁴³Ann. 3. 55.

⁴⁴Sat. 13. 4: iure civili dimicandum, ut si nollent alienam rem domino reddere, ad interdictum venirent.

⁴⁵ F. Schulz, Classical Roman Law (Oxford 1951) 62, 'quoting an alleged statement of Frontinus: magna alea est ad interdictum deducere, cuius est executio perplexissima. But this sentence is to be found not in Frontinus, but in Agennius Urbicus (Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, ed. C. Thulin [Leipzig 1913] 1. 1. 34, lines 2-3) and, though his source is undoubtedly Frontinus, his verbal accuracy is by no means certain. The phrase with which Frontinus, in the certain fragments of his work (Corpus, 1. 1. 6, lines 13-14), refers to the interdict, de possessione controversia est, de qua ad interdictum, hoc est iure ordinario, litigatur, hardly supports Schulz, and is almost an echo of Petronius.

⁴⁶ A Flavian date was suggested by G. H. Kraffert, Neue Beitrage (Verden 1888) 8.

⁴⁷ The text seems sound and uninterpolated, except that the term iudex has been substituted for that of the original jurisdictional magistrate, praetor, or prefect: cf Index interpolationum 3. 536.

⁴⁸ Marmorale's note on this passage, Cena 64, "la Lex Petronia riconosceva al padrone ad bestias depugnandas suo arbitrio servos suos tradere," is simply not true. L. Friedländer, Cena Trimalchionis² (Leipzig 1906) 265, supposed that Glyco had obtained a judgement fom the urban prefect. I deal with this supposition in the text.

⁴⁹ Seneca Rh., Controv. 4, Praef. 10; and cf. Trimalchio's own remark (75. 11): nec turpe est quod dominus iubet. L. Debray, NRHD 43 (1919) 42, n. 6, interprets peccare in the technical sense "to commit a delict."

⁵⁰ That zelotypus could also mean "cuckold" would seem to be indicated by its survival in this sense well into the Middle Ages; cf J. Gessler, AntCl 11 (1942) 85.

⁵¹Sat. 69. 3.

⁵² Girard, Manuel elmentaire du droit romain⁸ (Paris 1929) 109; Leonhard-Weiss in RE 12. 2. 2401.

⁵³ A. Bouche-Leclerq, Manuel des institutions romaines (Paris 1886) 410: Rotondi, Leges publicae populi romani (1912) 468 followed by P. de Francisci, Storia del Diritto Romano (Milan 1938) 2. 1. 434 and H. H. Scullard in Oxford Classical Dictionary 501.

⁵⁴ F. Miinzer in RE 19. 1. 1193: in Wirklichkeit sind Petronier in Rom vor der Mitte des 2 Fhdts. v. Chr. nicht bekannt, und es sind in der republikanischen Zeit immer nur wenige und unbedeutende gewesen; and cf infra 51 and n. 30.

⁵⁵ The first Petronius to have been politically important would appear to have been the one proscribed for some unspecified participation in the murder of Caesar; RE 19. 1. 1231 and infra 52.

⁵⁶ Rotondi, Leges publicae 439.

⁵CIL 10. 858 = ILS 6359.

⁵⁸ So G. Niccolini, Fasti dei Tribuni della Plebe (Milan 1934) 444, followed by T. R. S. Broughton, Magistrates of the Roman Republic 2 (New York 1952) 474.

⁵⁹Cf A. Degrassi, Fasti Consulares (II 13. 1 [Rome 1947]) 1. 256 with bibliography: cf infra 52, n. 36.

⁶⁰ It is frequently asserted that the L. P. de servis is mentioned in an inscription at Pompeii; Buckland, Law of Slavery 36, n. 7, and G. A. Petropoulos, Historia tou Romaikou Dikaiou (Athens 1944) 385, n. 5. The inscription CIL 10. 858 (see above, n. 57) refers to the L. P. de praefectis.

⁶¹ Rotondi, Leges publicae 468.

⁶²Ibid. 464.

⁶³ As does Karlowa, Rom. Rechtsgeschichte 1. 620, followed by R. Hanslik in RE 19. 1. 1999 and all those who date the L. P. de servis to A.D. 19.

⁶⁴Cf H. Last in CAH 10. 888-890.

⁶⁵ Rotondi, Leges publicae 468.

⁶⁶ The statement of F. Schulz, Classical Roman Law 335, that "classical ownership did not imply an unlimited right over a thing" is true enough for the classical period, but the fact that it had to be restricted by law and imperial constitutions proves that it was originally as free as possible. Of course a slave though a "res" was always a "persona"; cf. Buckland, Law of Slavery 3-4.

⁶⁷ N. A. Mashkin, Principat Augusta (Moscow 1949) as reviewed by Ch. Wirszubski FRS 42 (1952) 117, advances the thesis that the whole of the policy of Augustus was dictated by slave owners and directed to increase their power and rights. This is, of course, fantastic, but undoubtedly the Lex Aelia Sentia and above all the SC Silanianum of A.D. 10 (D 29. 5; C 6. 35; Buckland, Law of Slavery 95-97) aggravated the position of slaves and might be considered reactionary legislation. The Lex Iunia Petronia may well be an attempt by Tiberius to modify the stringency of his predecessor's statutes, in much the same way as he dealt with the Papia Poppaea: it would be characteristic of Tiberius to adopt so indirect an approach to a problem.

⁶⁸ Suet., Claud. 25. 2: cum quidam aegra et adfecta mancipia in insulam Aesculapi taedio medendi exponerent, omnes qui exponerentur liberos esse sanxit, nec redire in dicionem domini, si convaluissent; quod si quis necare quem mallet quam exponere, caedis crimine teneri, confirmed by Dio Cassius 60. 29. 7 and Modestinus in D 48. 8. 2. From the phraseology it would appear that Suetonius is copying from the actual law or from some law book.

⁶⁹ It would be an exception to the general rule that ownership in res mancipi is not lost by derelictio; cf Schulz, Classical Roman Law 362. If C 7. 6. 1. 3 (Justinian) is to be trusted, it would appear that Claudius also determined that slaves who gained their freedom in this way should have Latin status. On this legislation of Claudius see G. May, RHD 15 (1936) 215.

⁷⁰ The text of Gellius does not preserve the name of the Emperor in whose reign the incident is supposed to have occurred: in 5. 14. 15 some editions print a C(aio) Cesare, but the praenomen is a conjecture of L. Muller's. Apion, however, taught in Rome under Tiberius and Claudius, and was a member of the Alexandrine embassy to Gaius; cf FHG 3. 506.

⁷¹ … We have already pointed out that this whole passage is farcical in the extreme (supra 11, n. 32) and here Petronius is possibly satirizing the trials inter cubiculum principis; but the joke would be pointless if such informal trials had not been a common practice.

⁷²Cf infra 53 my reconstruction of the stemma of the Petronii, and RE 19. 1. 1230, n. 80.

⁷³Cf V. Arangio-Ruiz, Storia del Diritto Romano3 (Napoli 1942) 231.

⁷⁴Vide infra the stemma of the Petronii on p. 53 and notes.

⁷⁵Ann. 14. 42-45.

⁷⁶ Some as yet unpublished tablets from Herculaneum have completed the consular lists for A.D. 62 (see the Aggiunte in Degrassi's Fasti Consolari). Of course Petronius might have been consul in 63, 64, or 65, but his influence during these years would have been on the wane. Moreover, had he been consul at the time of the great fire or the year before his death, we should expect Tacitus to have made some reference to the fact. The way the historian speaks of his consulship would indicate that it had taken place some time before his death.

⁷⁷ For example, the case of the two Vitellii quoted infra 47, n. 4.

⁷⁸Vide infra 50 and note 21: it is quite impossible to identify this Petronius with the Arbiter, even admitting that the latter's praenomen was Titus. In the name of the former, Niger is no nickname but the official cognomen since it appears in an official act. He therefore had the tria nomina. The "Arbiter," like the prefect of Egypt and the consul of A.D. 19, had only praenomen and nomen. Had he had a cognomen Tacitus would certainly have given it.

⁷⁹ É. Thomas, Pétrone—l'envers de la société romaine³ (Paris 1912) 50, n. 1.

⁸⁰ On the legislation concerning treasure-trove cf. Momigliano, 98.

⁸¹ Momigliano, 100. Petronius would have heartily subscribed to Chesterfield's dictum (of 10 May O.S. 1748; Letters ed. Dobrée 3. 1146): "Whatever poets may write, or fools believe, of rural innocence and truth, and of the perfidy of Courts, this is most undoubtedly true—that shepherds and ministers are both men; their nature and passions the same, the modes of them only different."

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AJP:

American Journal of Philology

AntCI:

L'Antiquité Classique

BPW:

Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift

C:

Codex lustinianus

CAH:

Cambridge Ancient History

CIL:

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Collignon:

A. Collignon, Étude sur Pétrone (Paris 1892)

CP:

Classical Philology

CQ:

Classical Quarterly

CR:

Classical Review

CW:

Classical Weekly

D:

Digesta lustiniani

FHG:

Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (Müller)

GLK:

Grammatici Latini, ed. Keil

H:

Codex Traguriensis, Parisinus 7989

HSCP:

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

II:

Inscriptiones Italiae

ILS:

Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (Dessau)

JRS:

Journal of Roman Studies

Lud.: Ludus de morte Claudii, quoted from the edition by Carlo F. Russo, L. Annaei Senecae Divi Claudii'[Apokolokyntosis], Biblioteca di Studi Superiori, Filologia Latina III (Florence 1948)

Maiuri, Cena: A. Maiuri, La Cena di Trimalchione (Naples 1945)

Maiuri, Petroniana: A. Maiuri, Petroniana, PP 3 (1948) 101-128

Marmorale, Cena: E. V. Marmorale, Petronii Arbitri Cena Trimalchionis, Biblioteca di Studi Superiori, Filologia Latina I (Florence 1947)

Marmorale, Questione: E. V. Marmorale, La Questione Petroniana (Bari 1948)

Momigliano: A. Momigliano, "Literary Chronology of the Neronian Age," CQ 38 (1944) 96-100

NJbb:

Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum

NRHD:

Nouvelle Revue historique de droit français et étranger

PIR:

Prosopographia Imperii Romani

PP:

La Parola del Passato

RBPh:

Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire

RE:

Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

RendLinc:

Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei

RevPhil:

Revue de Philologie

RFIC:

Rivista di Filologia e d'Istruzione Classica

RHD:

Revue historique de droit français et étranger

RhM:

Rheinisches Museum

Russo: C. F. Russo's introduction and notes to Lud.

Sage: Petronius, The Satiricon, edited with introduction and notes by Evan T. Sage (New York 1929)

Sat.: Petronii Satiricon; if not otherwise stated references are to the text edited by A. Ernout (3rd ed., Paris, Bude, 1950)

StItal:

Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica

TAPA:

Transactions of the American Philological Association

Toynbee: J. M. C. Toynbee, "Nero Artifex: The Apocolocyntosis Reconsidered," CQ 36 (1942) 83-93

WS:

Wiener Studien

ZSS:

Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, Romanistische Abteilung