The Satyricon

and Lucan and Statius, enumerating poets without order in poem IX, line 268, mentions Petronius between Septimius and Martial. The things which Priscian adduces (fr. V) he seems to have drawn from elsewhere, nor had John Lydus, who said these things about the magistracies I 41: "Turnus, Juvenal, and Petronius, having proceeded directly to lampoons, corrupted the satirical law," ever examined the satires themselves. Just as 'satires selected from Ennius, Lucilius, and Varro' are said to have been those of Julius Florus, to whom Horace sent his epistles, so also the satires of Petronius provided abundant material for those who, with the hasty speed of someone pruning a tree, restricted them. If credit is given to John of Salisbury, Virius Flavianus Nicomachus had also related the very witty story of the Ephesian matron, transcribed without a doubt from the book of Petronius. But even though he may have named Flavianus, deceived by an error, I easily believe that the Petronian satires had already been excerpted by the age of Theodosius. It is, however, most certain to me that from the seventh century onward, no one possessed a fuller Petronius than we do. In the ninth century, Heiricus, brother of Auxerre, had known the poem on the Civil War, from which monastery it is established that the best and most ancient manuscript of Petronius originated. For when he sent to Charles the Bald, around the year 876, the life of Saint Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, written in verse (it was published in the Acta Sanctorum of the month of July, Antwerp 1733), he expressed the preface of that poem word for word, and other verses committed to memory according to the sense. For example, these lines V 2, 131, p. 246:

"Hence it rises, higher than the airy Alps in merit, / This boundary separates Ausonian regions from the Gallic shores"

and so on, agree with the Petronian text on p. 162, 13, or these lines V 2, 132, p. 246:

"Which the swelling flood would not grasp with faithful tracks"

agree with the Petronian text on p. 165, 8. The same man placed the word septifluus in the preface of the third book, 64, p. 234, which is found in the books of Petronius on p. 187, 5, and seems to be found nowhere else. The manuscript, once of Auxerre, today of Bern, of which I am about to speak, was written in the tenth or eleventh century; in the twelfth century in Britain, John of Salisbury, and in the thirteenth century, Vincent of Beauvais in Gaul, were reading Petronius, both using a similar copy to ours.

A thousand years ago, there was one book of excerpts, from which, as if