The Satyricon

Petronius, the man who narrated the fates of Encolpius and the dinner of Trimalchio, was called by the cognomen Arbiter. Ancient writers testify to this, such as Terentianus, Diomedes, Victorinus, and Sidonius, whose words I have transcribed in the appendix of fragments, along with Macrobius in his commentary on the Dream of Scipio 1.2.8: "They soothe the ear like the comedies that Menander or his imitators provided for performance, or like the plots filled with the fictional adventures of lovers, in which Arbiter either exercised himself a great deal or [at which] we marvel that Apuleius sometimes amused himself." All the Petronian books testify to the same. Nor was that cognomen unheard of to the Romans, since in a Casinate inscription (among the Neapolitan inscriptions of Mommsen, no. 4279), one L. Lucius, freedman of L., Arbiter, was found. In the margin of the Paris manuscript 8049, he is further surnamed Afranius; likewise, it is reported that "in an old book of excerpts which belonged to John, Duke of Berry, not so very old, the fragments of Petronius had this inscription: 'Of Petronius Arbiter Afranius the Satirist'." Scaliger had known this book and was examining it when he was compiling his own transcript of Petronius; thus, in the Leiden manuscript as well, the names Arbiter and Afranius are associated. Finally, in a Virgilian scholium which I referred to on page 46, line 2, it is read "in the satyria of Afranius," so that I doubt whether the scribe corrupted the word "Petronius" or whether the author who wrote these satires called him Afranius. Pithoeus derived the origin of that appellation from the judgment which Quintilian passed upon the poet Afranius (10.1.100): "I wish he had not stained his plots with the foul loves of boys, thus confessing his own morals," and fittingly Wilhelm Wehlius, in his critical observations published at Bonn this year, p. 62, compared "Persius and Lucilius" and "Theocritus and Calpurnius," who drew these names from a kinship of studies.