But all this time I have said nothing to you about Petronius "the man," as literary critics say, and this, as you may have suspected, is because I know as little about him as anyone else. You have not long since laid down your Tacitus: I need do no more than refer you to the Sixteenth Book of the Annals, where, in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th chapters, you will find what is almost the only historical proof of his existence.
A detailed account of him, which must be divinely inspired since there is no human material for it, has been made popular in the last half-century by the author--a foreign gentleman, whose name for the moment escapes me--of a novel entitled _Quo Vadis_. Fond as he must have been of oysters, there is no evidence that Petronius ever visited England, but it should be borne in mind that the law for which he is generally regarded as showing insufficient respect was not enacted here until more than eighteen hundred years after his death. Moreover, suicide, the one offence with which he is definitely charged, was not in his or his contemporaries' eyes the horrid felony which, I hope, it will always be in yours. That his work--of which this volume forms but a fragmentary part--had made its way into this country, with unusual rapidity, in little more than ten centuries from its publication, is shown by its being frequently quoted by the English churchman John of Salisbury, the pupil of Abelard and friend and biographer of Becket (the Saint, not the boxer), who died (as Bishop of Chartres) in the year 1180. We may suppose that John took a copy of the _Satyricon_ home with him from Paris, as undergraduates do to-day from Oxford and Cambridge. Two and a half centuries later, in 1423 (I owe this display of erudition to Mr. Gaselee's collotype reproduction of the Trau manuscript), Poggio writes to Niccolò Niccoli that he has received from Cologne a copy recently ordered by him, of the fifteenth book of Petronius, and asks his friend to return the extract from Petronius "which I sent you from Britain." This last, Mr. Gaselee spiritedly assumes, was the part known as _Cena Trimalchionis_ (pages 41 to 118 in this volume) from which John of Salisbury makes three separate quotations, but which is not otherwise on record before the discovery of what may have been Poggio's own manuscript (for it also is dated 1423) at Trau in Dalmatia, in the middle of the seventeenth century.