The Satyricon

from a riverbed, manuscripts and copies, however many remain, have flowed forth like streams and ditches. For although they generally disagree with each other on individual matters, the communion of many serious lacunae and corruptions proves that the origin was common to all. That primary book contained, besides the excerpts of Petronius, both lesser Latin poems and collected glosses, so that you might suspect the Trogir, Bern, and Leiden manuscripts were composed in some resemblance to it. Thus it happened that verses from the Aetna, by Vincent of Beauvais, and some epigrams in a book which the library of Beauvais had supplied to Claudius Binet, and in the manuscripts of the fifteenth century—Vatican, Venetian, Florentine—fragments or excerpts concerning the meaning of words or ancient dictions were attributed to Petronius. I have deemed it useless to repeat here this slurry of glosses born from the reading of Gellius, Isidore, and Jerome the ecclesiastical writer—about which, after Carolus Beckius, Augustus Reifferscheid disputed accurately in the New Rhenish Museum XVI, p. 1 ff.—because it is named under the title of Petronius Arbiter no more correctly than it is under Plautus, Cicero, or Martial.*)

*) Some support for that reasoning by which we explained the origin of that inscription is provided by the fact that in two glossaries of the Bern manuscript which formerly followed, but now precede, Petronius, I discovered several glosses that agree either entirely or in part with those which you have written down in the Rhenish Museum, l. s. s. p. 5 n. 1, p. 6 n. 5, 9, and 11, p. 7 n. 12, 13, and 18, p. 10 n. 37, p. 12 n. 51. These are:
Nitrum niter/soda is born in Nitria. For it has the virtue of salt and is medicinal, and the filth of garments and bodies is washed away from it.
Excedra exedra is an apse or a place for seating separated a little from the main hall, which the Greeks call a cycle.
Peribolus in Ezekiel signifies a wall.
Classicus is the sound of trumpets.
Synodus is a gathering, a collection.
Anaglypha are items carved in relief.
Reuma in Greek, in Latin an eruption or flux.
Vestibulum is so called because it is the place where the doors of a temple or house are dressed, or from standing. For it is joined to the house.
Situla here referring to a serpent is called a serpent because the one it bites dies of thirst. It is the same as the dipsas.
And in the same place, several glosses are read concerning the Hebrews and sacred matters. Most emanated from the Etymologies of Isidore, with whom, in the Beauvais book, Binet had seen the epigrams of Petronius connected. However, even of those words which Petronius uses, there is no lack of interpretations, such as grassator highwayman/assailant.