The Satyricon

...the more recent Italian manuscripts seem to have derived, since Poggio, in the month of May 1423, wrote these things to Nicolaus of Treves (Epist. II 3, p. 91): "There was brought to me from Cologne the 15th book of Petronius Arbiter, which I had transcribed while I was traveling there: I pray you send to me the bucolics of Calpurnius and the portion of Petronius which I sent to you from Britain." The Trogir manuscript, therefore, provides assurance that we possess the remains of the 15th and 16th books, about the boundary of which, although nothing has been handed down, it will perhaps be permitted to place the end of the former in the final chapter 99, where Encolpius, having set out from a town in Campania with Giton and Eumolpus, boards a ship. Finally, in the Paris manuscript of Fulgentius (fragment VII), those things which we have on p. 22, 11 are attributed to the 14th book, from which I conjecture that the events described at the beginning, as if up to p. 28, 5, pertained to the fourteenth book.

Regarding the plan and reason for the whole work, although it is very difficult to judge with certainty, Petronius seems to have constructed the satires so that he would relate all the words and deeds, in the Greek manner, to the one person of Encolpius, who is narrating his own fates. Hence he says on p. 77, 16, "The recollection offends me, if there is any credibility in the speaker," and p. 83, 18, "I am ashamed to relate what follows." Furthermore, he arranged the deeds through various cities which Encolpius had visited while traveling. And indeed, the books that have been preserved take place in Campania and among the people of Croton; however, I conclude from fragments IV and I that another and earlier part of the satires was enacted among the people of Marseille. Moreover, I do not know if the writer invented the journeys undertaken by Encolpius to have occurred in the final years during which Tiberius reigned. For the man who is called Caesar, that is, emperor, in chapter 51 is Tiberius Augustus, who in the year 22 after Christ killed the inventor of the malleable glass. Furthermore, he is called Maecenatianus Trimalchio: therefore, he had been, as a small boy when he came from Asia to Rome, in the hands of Maecenas, who died in the year 746 of the city, before he was taken into the household of Gaius Pompeius, a man of Campania. For this master, from whom both he and his fellow-freedmen took their name, he was a favorite for fourteen years, and served even longer, finally was manumitted, and enriched by inheritance and trade, he was spending his early old age in luxury and had persuaded himself that thirty years of life remained to him when Encolpius arrived at his estate and house. If you compare these things with the surname "Maecenatianus," in defining...