The Satyricon

...the father of the family, and Cerellia Fortunata the wife, and A. Laelius Apelles the client of Encolpus, and the antescolarii subordinates/attendants of the Vestal Virgins, whereas in the satire of Petronius, Encolpius is a young man who experienced various and uncertain fates, and Fortunata is Trimalchio's wife bought from the slave-block, and Apelles is a most noble singer (p. 76, 10), and Menelaus is an antescolarius of the rhetorician (p. 95, 11). But to set aside the errors, Theophilus Studerus demonstrated in the New Rhenish Museum (II, pp. 50 and 202) that Petronius wrote around the times of Nero, after Lucan began to publish his Pharsalia, as Iustinus Moesslerus commented on the poem about the civil war in Wroclaw in 1842 and in Hirschberg in 1857. Neither the men, the things, the morals, the pursuits, nor the entire human and civil culture as described, nor the style of speech and the art of the meters, fit any other time than the Neronian. It is therefore certain that Petronius was a contemporary of Seneca and Lucan. From this, it follows not indeed by necessity, but very probably, that he is the same man whom Nero condemned to death in the year 66 after Christ. For if the life of a man is indeed discerned in his writings, those things which Tacitus said of him in Annals 16.18—"Sloth had brought him fame, and he was considered not a glutton and profligate, as most of those who squander their substance, but a man of refined luxury, and his words and deeds, the more unrestrained and displaying a certain neglect of self they appeared, were accepted the more graciously as a form of simplicity"—those words are said of this author of satires. And what that severe avenger of Roman depravity recounts next: "Having lapsed into vices or the imitation of vices, he was taken on as one of the few intimates of Nero, an elegantiae arbiter judge of elegance, since Nero thought nothing delightful or soft in abundance unless Petronius had approved it for him"—what forbids us from believing that the cognomen "Arbiter" was accepted in that direction through the jest of the Augustan court? As to this Petronius, who was once proconsul of Bithynia and later a consul suffectus, what his praenomen was is not clear.

The freedmen of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero were buried. However, the study of Greek learning—Augustus Meineke spoke last about the final distich in his commentary on Callimachus, p. 298—I very much doubt whether it is found equal in Roman inscriptions of the third century. Furthermore, the similarity of the names between this stone and the satire of Petronius happens so much by chance that I cannot even persuade myself of what I remember hearing from Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker: that those names were given to those people (Fortunata, Encolpius, and Apelles) from the memory of the Petronian book.