This eBook was produced by Gordon Keener.
The Satyricon
Petronius Arbiter
Translated by William Burnaby
Introduction by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
My dear ————,
On a bright afternoon in summer, when we stand on the high groundabove Saint Andrew's, and look seaward for the Inchcape Rock, we candiscern at first nothing at all, and then, if the day favours us, anoccasional speck of whiteness, lasting no longer than the wave that isreflecting a ray of sunlight upwards against the indistinguishabletower. But if we were to climb the hill again after dinner, you wouldhave something to report. So, in the broad daylights of humanity,such as that Victorian Age in which you narrowly escaped being (and Iwas) born, when the landscape is as clear as on Frith's Derby Day, theruined tower of Petronius stands unremarked; it is only when the darknight of what is called civilisation has gathered that his clear beamcan penetrate the sky. Such a night was the Imperial Age in Rome,when this book was written; such was the Renaissance Age in Italy,when the manuscript in which the greater part of what has survived isonly to be found was copied; such, again, was the Age of Louis XIV inFrance, of the Restoration, and the equally cynical Revolution inEngland, during which this manuscript, by the fortune of war, wasdiscovered at Trau in Dalmatia, copied, edited, printed, in rapidsuccession, at Padua, Paris, Upsala, Leipzig and Amsterdam, and,lastly, "made English by Mr. Burnaby of the Middle Temple, and anotherHand," all between the years 1650 and 1700; such an Age wasemphatically not the nineteenth century, in which (so far as I know)the only appearance of Petronius in England was that renderednecessary—painfully necessary, let us hope, to its translator,Mr. Kelly,—by the fact that the editors of the Bohn Library aimed atcompleteness: but, as emphatically, such is the Age in which you and Iare now endeavouring to live.
O fortunate nimium, who were not bred on the Bohn, and feel noinclination, therefore, to come out in the flesh: were you so foolishas to ask me for a proof that this Age is not like the last, what moreanswer need I give than to point to the edition after edition ofPetronius, text, notes, translation, illustrations, and even acollotype reproduction of the precious manuscript, that have beenpoured out upon us during the last twenty years. But you canread—and have read, I am sure—a whole multitude of stories in thenewspapers, which are recovering admirably the old frankness innarration, and have discarded the pose of sermonising rectitude whichled the journalists of a hundred years ago to call things (the namesof which must have been constantly on their lips) "too infamous to benamed"; and from these stories you must have become familiar with theexistence in our country to-day of every one of the types whom youwill discover afresh in Mr. Burnaby's and the "other Hand's" pages.It is customary to begin with Trimalchio, not that he is the chief, oreven the most interesting figure in the book, but because his is thetype most commonly mentioned in society. To name living examples ofhim would be actionable; besides, you are old enough, surely, toremember the Great War against Germany, and the host of Trimalchionesand Fortunatæ whom it enknighted and endamed. But to go back toour hill above Saint Andrew's, Wester Pitcorthie yonder was thebirthplace of James, Lord Hay, of Lanley, Viscount Doncaster and Earlof Carlisle, the favourite of James VI and I, of whom the reverendhistorian tells us that "his first favour ar