Petronius (Loeb) (1925) - Page 21

This love of style brings readily to his pen the proverbs with their misleading hints of modernity See especially chapters 41–46 and 57–59., as well as the debased syntax and misuse of gender that fell from common lips daily—reproduced here alone in its fullness. For example, the notes of Buecheler or Friedlaender on the verbs apoculamus (c. 62), duxissem (c. 57), plovebat (c. 44), percolopabant (c. 44), the nouns agaga (c. 69), babaecalis (c. 37), bacalusias (c. 41), barcalae (c. 67), burdubasta (c. 45), gingilipho (c. 73), and such expressions as caelus hic (c. 39), malus Fatus (c. 42), olim oliorum (c. 43), nummorum nummos (c. 37), and the Graecisms saplutus and topanta (c. 37). Side by side with these mirrored vulgarisms, we find the gravity of the attack on professional rhetoric with which the novel begins; the weight of the teacher’s defense, that the parent will have education set to a tune of his own choosing; Eumolpus’s brilliant exposition of the supremacy of the poet’s task over that of the rhetorician or historian; and the curious, violent, epic fragment by which he upholds his doctrine.

Petronius employed a pause in literary invention and production to assimilate and express a view upon the makers of poems, prose, pictures, philosophies, and statues who preceded him, thereby deepening his interpretation of contemporary life. His cynicism and his continual backward look at the splendors and severities of earlier art and morals are the inevitable outcome of this self-education.

By far the most genuine and pathetic expressions of his weariness are the poems that one is glad to be able to attribute to him. The best of them speak of quiet country and seaside, of love deeper than desire and founded on the durable grace of mind as well as the loveliness of the flesh, and of simplicity and escape from the Court. See, for example, Poems 2, 8, 11, 13–15, and 22; of the love-poems, 25 and 26, but above all 16 and 27, which show (if they are indeed by him) a side of Petronius entirely hidden in the Satyricon.