The Satyricon

...and what relationship the Dalecampius copy has with the Toulouse copy, and the Cujacius copy with that Benedictine one which I believe to have come from the monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire original: "S. Benedicti Floriacensi ad Ligerim" by the Loire, it is nevertheless my firm conviction that, having been derived from the same source, they were all very similar to one another as well as to that one. And do not doubt that the testimonies of Petrus Danielis, Claudius Puteanus, Hadrianus Turnebus, Henricus Memmius, and Janus Douza the elder—who held either the Benedictine or Toulouse copies or their corresponding transcripts—must be recalled to that same origin. Some authority is added to this judgment by Scaliger, who, regarding the Priapean poem LIII where he commemorated the Petroniana on page 173, 6, says, "For so the manuscript codex holds, not as that which Turnebus cites, diutius cinctos longer girded. Yet this codex, which Turnebus used, must have been described from that very ancient exemplar which today is in the hands of the most distinguished jurist, Master Jacobus Cujacius." Since these codices seem to have perished entirely during the seditions and turmoils of the civil war that ravaged France in the sixteenth century, so that their nature and agreement might be more easily recognized, I not only collated t and p fully in addition to L, but I also resolved to write out individually whatever learned men of those times had reported from them. Memmianus Know that I derived the memory of the Memmian codex only from the notes of Memmius himself or from Turnebus, Lambinus, and Sambucus; Boschius and Burmannus reported it according to the collation of that book inscribed in the Tornaesius exemplar, in which you should beware of placing too much trust. However, I deemed the Paris 8790 A codex to be neglected, into which Petrus, son of Claudius Puteanus, had transcribed in the year 1605 some sentences from Petronius, not from a manuscript but from a printed text.

I do not despair that a Petronius codex might be found somewhere that contains as many excerpts as Lpt, or, to use an example, does not omit page 11, 8, iam pro cella meretrix assem exegerat already for the room the prostitute had demanded an as; yet we have investigated none except the Scaliger transcript. For as to what is kept in the Munich library no. 12479, "Petronii Arbitri Satyricon castigated, transcribed word for word from the manuscript of the Reverend Father Jacobus Bidermann, S.J." in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, in duodecimo format, it is most foully interpolated with changed names—as for stuprum debauchery and fornix brothel, it says ganea cookshop and miseriarum cloaca sewer of miseries—with inverted events, as in chapter 11 a game of dice is substituted, and with added inanities such as it begins...