The Satyricon

...the fault of the scribes: T. is read in Pliny’s Natural History 37.2.20, where the word placebat precedes; Titos in Plutarch’s On the Distinction between a Flatterer and a Friend ch. 27, p. 60 E; Publi in the scholiast on Juvenal 6.638; C. in Tacitus 16.18; the praenomen is missing in the same author at 16.17 after the letters ac. Nipperdey approved the praenomen Titus; I, since in Greek writing T. and Γ. can scarcely be distinguished, prefer to call him Gaius with Scaliger, who placed the mark C. before the name of Petronius in his book.

Petronius, when he was about to die, sent to Nero a scroll about his crimes and debaucheries; he had released into the public a more copious book, a portion of which survives, inscribed as saturae or rather—because the vowel i had then begun to prevail in this name and similar ones—satirae. This title, through the memory of the centuries, has been variously changed, not deleted. In the Bern manuscript it is inscribed as Petronii Arbitri satiricon, in some as Petronii Arbitri satirici or satyrici book or excerpts, in the Trogir manuscript as Petronii Arbitri satyrici fragmenta, in others as Petronius Arbiter satyricon or book, so that the title of the book seems to have been added only later to the name of the author; in Marius Victorinus, fragment XX, it is read as Arbiter satyricon. But in the Paris manuscript 8049, Petronii Arbitri satirarum book begins, in the Munich manuscript Petronii Arbitri satyrarum (which is the only one that exists complete) begins, and Petronii Arbitri ends in the complete sathura, and similarly in the edition of the poem on the civil war edited by Hermann Buschius in Leipzig in the year 1500, Petronii Arbitri satyra on the vices of the Romans and ends in Petronii Arbitri in the complete satyra. In the old glossaries which Petrus Daniel used, three times Petronius in the first of the satyrae (Frellonius edition, Lyons 1615, pp. 299, 301, 305), in the Virgilian scholium in Junius, in satyria, that is, satira. Now, as for the fact that in the glosses those which even now exist are said to have been taken from the first of the satyrae, that was done by error, whether the scribe confused the mark I with l, or the glossator thought he was holding the first book of the satyrae. For, on the contrary, in the Trogir manuscript it is written twice: "fragments from the fifteenth and sixteenth book," and in the glossary of St. Benedict of Fleury, those things which are read on p. 105—"but I see you are stuck entirely on that painting which shows the destruction of Troy" original: "Troiae halosin"—are said to be taken from the fifteenth book of Petronius Arbiter. Nor did that copy differ from which...