By Ronald F. Hock, University of Southern California

This brief survey follows up on earlier ones (see PSN 30 [2000] 9-11; 31 [2001]) and focuses largely on the recent and on-going work of those scholars who are associated with the Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative Group of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), for this Group is the only institutionalized mechanism for promoting the insights to be gained from using ancient novels for the interpretation of early Christian and Jewish texts. To be sure, ancient novels are only slowly becoming a part of the repertoire of most members of the SBL, but the Group has some progress to report.

The Group is in its second of two six year terms, after which it will either have to disband or re-organize as a permanent Section within the SBL; in any case, the first six year term ended with the publication, in 1998, of a selection of papers read during that term, with the title Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, edited by J. Bradley Chance, Judith B. Perkins, and me. A similar volume is planned for the second term. For a while, however, the Group's future was in jeopardy due to the sudden departure of the Group's chairman, Richard Pervo. Happily, the Group was saved at the last minute by the intervention of Dennis MacDonald of the Claremont Graduate University who got a program together for the SBL's 2001 national meeting in Denver (see below) and then aided in the re-organization and direction of the Group which is now under the capable leadership of Judith Perkins of St. Joseph College for the remainder of the second term. At this year's SBL national meeting in Toronto, the Group will have two sessions, one open for those who wish to read papers on any related topic and one for those who wish to prepare a paper on the theme Mimesis and Method. (The tentative theme for the Group's special session at the 2003 SBL national meeting in Atlanta will be The Religious Worlds of the Novels.)

I. The papers in the "Open Session" at the 2002 meeting at Toronto will be:

• B. Diane Wudel, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "The Seduction of Self-Control: Hermas and the Possibilities of Desire"
• Gerhard van den Heever, University of South Africa, "Novel and Mystery. Discourse, Myth, and Society"
• Judith Perkins, Saint Joseph College, "Resurrection in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles"
• Simon Samuel, University of Sheffield, "The Postclassical Novels as Post-Colonial Novels: A Postcolonial Reading of Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe as a Model for Reading Mark's Story of Jesus"
• H. Stephen Brown, Temple University, "Perfect First Person: A Preliminary Socio-Rhetorical Analysis of the Passio Perpetuae"
• Katrina M. Poetker, Fresno Pacific University, "Gender, Power, and Family in Tobit, Callirhoe, and the Gospel of Mark"

The papers for the session on "Mimesis and Method" will be:

• Dennis MacDonald, Claremont Graduate University, "Did Luke Know his Stories Were Fictions?"
• Loveday C.A. Alexander, University of Sheffield, "New Testament Narrative and Ancient Epic"
• Chris Shea, Ball State University, "Imitating Imitation: Vergil, Homer, and Acts 10-11"
• Jo-Ann Brant, Goshen College, "Ezekiel the Tragedian's Exagoge: Mimesis and Apologetics"
• Ruben Rene Dupertuis, Centre College, "Apostolic Guardians: The Summaries of Acts 2, 4, and 5 and Utopian Literary Traditions"

II.  The papers presented at the Group's recent sessions in 2000 at Nashville and in 2001 at Denver are as follows:

Nashville 2000:

• Jared Ludlow, Graduate Theological Union, "Humor and Paradox in the Characterization of Abraham in the Testament of Abraham"
• Andy Reimer, Canadian Bible College, "The Empty Tomb: A Biography of a Motif"
• Reviews of Dennis MacDonald's Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000), by Michele A. Connolly, Graduate Theological Union, and Charles Hedrick, Southwest Missouri State University
• Response by Dennis MacDonald, Claremont Graduate University

Denver 2001:

• Dennis MacDonald, Claremont Graduate University, "Iliad 2 and Acts 10-11: Imitations of Homer in the Visions of Cornelius and Peter"
  Respondents: Andrew Arterbury, Baylor University, Derek Dodson, Baylor University,
• Ronald F. Hock, University of Southern California, "Romancing the Parable of the Prodigal Son"

III.  Recently published and work in progress:

Bruce N. Fisk of Westmont College presented a paper, "After their Sufferings a Better Fate is in Store: Philippians 2:6-11 and the Conventions of Greek Romance," at the SBL Pacific Coast Region, Saint Mary's College of California, March 2002.

Dennis MacDonald, author of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) has continued his work on the use of the Homeric narratives by early Jewish and Christian writers, both through sponsorship of a symposium on the topic in 1998, whose papers are available in Dennis MacDonald, ed., Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Studies in Antiquity and Christianity; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001) and through his own work, especially now on Luke-Acts. Articles of interest in the edited volume include MacDonald, "Tobit and the Odyssey" (pp. 11-40); George W.E. Nickelsburg, "Tobit, Genesis and the Odyssey: A Complex Web of Intertextuality" (pp. 41-55); and Judith Perkins, "Space, Place, Voice in the Acts of the Martyrs" (pp. 117-37). Another set of papers on this topic is scheduled for the SBL annual meeting in Toronto in November 2002 (see above).

MacDonald's own recent work on the imitation of Homer's epics by the author of Luke-Acts includes: "The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul," New Testament Studies 45 (1999) 88-107; "The Scars of Odysseus and the Wounds of Jesus," a paper presented at SBL Pacific Coast Region, Azusa Pacific University, April 2000; "Paul, Hector, and their Farewell Speeches: Imitating Iliad 6," a paper presented at the SBL Pacific Coast Region, Claremont School of Theology, March 2001; "Casting Lots from Homer to the Apocryphal Acts," a paper presented at the SBL Pacific Coast Region, Saint Mary's College of California, March 2002; and "Did Luke Know his Stories were Fictions?" the paper cited above for the upcoming SBL national meeting at Toronto 2002.

Mikeal Parsons of Baylor University has put together a group of articles on the ancient novels and the New Testament for the next issue of the journal Perspectives in Religious Studies.

Ilaria Ramelli has published her dissertation at the University of Milan under Giuseppe Zanetto as I romanzi antichi e il Cristianesimo: contesto e contatti (Graeco-Romanae Religionis Electa Collectio 6; Madrid: Signifer Libros, 2001).

Whitney Shiner of George Mason University is finishing a book on oral performance and reading of narratives in the ancient world with special emphasis on the Gospel of Mark, to be published by Trinity Press International.

Christine Thomas of the University of California at Santa Barbara has published The Acts of Peter, Gospel Literature, and the Ancient Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Larry Wills of the Episcopal Divinity School, author of The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) and The Quest of the Historical Gospel: Mark, John and the Origins of the Gospel Genre (New York: Routledge, 1997), which includes an excellent translation of "The Life of Aesop" (pp. 180-215), has another book in press, Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology, to be published this year by Oxford University Press.

Finally, I presented the SBL Pacific Coast Region Presidential Address, "Romancing the Parables," at its meeting at the Claremont School of Theology, March 2001. This paper will be published in the issue of Perspectives in Religious Studies noted above. In addition, I am beginning a book-length study relating the ancient novels and related literature to the formation and development of the Gospel story; it has the tentative title, Romancing the Gospels: Novel Insights for Understanding Early Christian Narratives.

Up

Review by Nikolai Endres

A Companion to Petronius begins with Edward Courtney's remarks on Petronius the author and the date of the Satyricon, plus "preliminaries": MSS, the ancient novel, verse models, first-person narrative and the problem of Encolpius as narrator vs. actor, the main characters, the fragmentary state of the text and its ramifications on the Satyricon as a multi-volume work, and characterization. In this context he recants his earlier use of the term "Menippean satire" (Philologus 106 [1962]) because it is anachronistic and now prefers to speak of prosimetrum. Courtney also questions Gian Biagio Conte's emphasis on the characters as scholastici, discusses Encolpius' role as "scapegoat," and underlines Petronius' "message": the protagonists are "empty, ineffective, and sterile; they base themselves generally on an inn, have no goal in life and no place in society, and live outside the law" (50). Now Courtney takes a sequential approach.

The following chapter looks at episodes 1-26.6: rhetoric, the theatricality of the lovers' quarrels, and Quartilla's "orgy." The next chapter turns to the Cena (Sat. 16.7-78.8). With a wealth of detail, Courtney outlines the main themes of Trimalchio's dinner party: death and luxury; trickery and deception; social climbing, like Trimalchio's attempt "to assimilate himself to the high and mighty" (100); the guests' growing feeling of entrapment and oppression; allusions to other symposion literature (e.g., Horace, Plato, Xenophon); and cultural pretentiousness and parody. Often Courtney replicates many findings of Martin Smith's commentary. We move on to Eumolpus' replacing Ascyltos (Sat. 79-99): quarrels, the picture gallery and Platonic reversals in the story of the Pergamene boy, and events at the inn. Courtney next takes the reader on "The Voyage" (Sat. 100.1-115), where he elaborates on echoes of the Odyssey and the enigmatic "wrath of Priapus"; he also speaks high praise for the story of the Widow of Ephesus: "through the mouth of Eumolpus, by scrupulous selection of vocabulary and phraseology [Petronius] is able to make the feelings and state of mind of the characters emerge," and all that "without explicit factual intervention of the author and his narrator" (173). At last we arrive at Croton (Sat. 116-141.11). Courtney abstracts Lucan's influence on Eumolpus' poetics and the Bellum Civile and assesses the poem's "seriousness," but in the end he allows for "subjective" responses (189); he analyzes the literary texture of the Circe episode as well.

The last chapter promises a synthesis: Petronius uses wide-ranging literary models - a practice clearly different from the Greek novels - both to characterize his fictive creations and to promote theatricality and parody the court of a "stage-struck" emperor. Courtney explores how Petronius achieves these goals through his characters' self-interpretation, the narrator's looking back, and Petronius' own evocation of literary settings. Here Courtney acknowledges his debt to Conte's concept of the mythomaniac narrator. The following section looks at sex. Who has been involved with whom? (a moot issue in the Satyricon, I think). All in all, Courtney's ideas seem to recall J.P. Sullivan's "Freudian" approach, which has been rightly challenged by Christopher Gill. At the same time, Courtney correctly stresses Petronius' linguistic decorousness, the many sexual switches, and the perversion of the erotic relationships in the Greek novel; moreover, he reminds the reader: "Petronius' attitude to sex is humorous and not meant to arouse disgust" (225). The chapter ends with four pages on symbolism in the Satyricon: laughter, life-in-death, unreality, repetition, circularity, and Petronius' moral.

Courtney laments an age of "superfetation of bibliography," yet it seems that he has fallen prey to his own dismissal of "superfluous bibliography" (3). First of all, the bibliography features conspicuous absences: famous articles by William Arrowsmith, Helen Bacon, Gilbert Highet, and especially Froma Zeitlin (the "Waste Landers"), and by Peter George and Wade Richardson; Niall Slater's important book Reading Petronius and Costas Panayotakis' Theatrum Arbitri: the relevant chapters in David Konstan's Sexual Symmetry, Shadi Bartsch's Actors in the Audience, Amy Richlin's The Garden of Priapus, Michael Coffey's Roman Satire, Vasily Rudich's Dissidence and Literature under Nero, Craig Williams' Roman Homosexuality, or Frank Palmeri's Satire in Narrative; and the many recent essay collections on the Roman novel, on ancient fiction in general, and on Foucault's legacy on sex and gender. (Occasionally, some of these works are cursorily referred to but rarely engaged.) Second, a blurb on the back of the paperback copy promises:

"This book provides an integrated exposition of the Satyricon as a whole. Starting with some basic background information, Professor Courtney surveys Petronius' novel sequentially, drawing out the leading themes and motifs of each episode. Thus links and patterns build up. A final chapter looks at the general characteristics of the work, highlighting the abundant use of literary allusion and symbolism, and the treatment of sex."

Several words stand out: "exposition," "basic," "background," "surveys," "general," "highlighting." In an age of "superfluous bibliography," is such a work necessary? Third, the book is aimed at "graduate students and young professors (in the American sense)" (4). I am a young professor (in the American sense), but having read a standard sampling of Petronian secondary materials and the Satyricon in Latin, I find many of the discussions repetitive and unoriginal.

Let me end with Courtney's last words in the introduction: "a good book leaves some work for its readers to do themselves" (4). This statement, gratuitous and platitudinous as it is, deserves a comment. His book indeed needs "work." Is the reader really interested in Courtney's view of the Greek novels, "an air of effete and etiolated sentimentality," which he finds "distasteful" (24)? Does Plato's Alcibiades become "more charming" as he becomes "more tipsy" (110)? Alcibiades admits total ignorance of Socrates and even wishes him dead (Symp. 216c). Paranormally, what Alcibiades criticizes as Socrates' hubris is his very self-control, so can we really discern a "true love-relationship" between the two (225)? It is true that to perform both active and passive roles in sexual intercourse was problematic, but Courtney's examples (Nero, Otho, Caligula, Vitellius) skew the issue (223). Caesar and Augustus, as Eva Cantarella correctly proposes, despite their "passivity" and "effeminacy," were perceived as conquerors of empires and woman alike. In sum, Courtney is too coy about sex (224): no lesbianism (how about Fortunata and Scintilla?), no oral sex (the Priapean cake at 60.4-7 at least simulates oral sex and ejaculation), no masturbation (metaphorically, all the characters are auto-orgasmic)? Next, some dubious references to Christianity could have been omitted. Instead, a chapter on Petronius' Nachleben would have been helpful: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Gustave Flaubert, J.K. Huysmans, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, Gore Vidal, etc. On the other hand, Courtney hunts for classical parallels rather excessively. For example, after the shipwreck, Giton, Encolpius, and Eumolpus seek shelter in a fisherman's hut and fix a meager meal with food spoiled by salt water: "this is a recall of Aen. 1.177" (175). Or, to establish Petronius' greatness, Courtney compares him to a "second-rate novelist" (173). Last but not least, a page of "addenda" concludes the book (certainly a strange feature for a first edition), some of which "add" little.

Despite his old-fashioned, philological, and conservative approach, Courtney has a lot to offer. He guides the reader, step by step, through the Petronian text; he thoroughly analyzes crucial passages and presents diverging interpretations; he translates difficult Latin sentences; he is admirably versed in backgrounds and contexts; and he painstakingly traces Petronius' Quellen. Copious footnotes make suggestions for further reading, and an index and succinct subtitles help locate specific subjects. After all, the book is a companion.

review by Gareth Schmeling

Similar to his Masters of Roman Prose (Leeds 1989), von Albrecht's Roman Epic is best understood in the role of a teaching book and companion to his History of Latin Literature (Leiden 1997). Unlike the History, however, Roman Epic is intended to open up an interpretative path to Roman epic based on selected texts. This book is not a comprehensive introduction to all of Roman epic: "Our approach to Roman epic is interpretative; the reader is invited to study individual texts and draw conclusions from his observations, not to expect exhaustive textbook information" (p. viii). Nevertheless, I find that all the great names of Roman epic from Livius Andronicus to Claudian are represented, and even some of the lesser known names like Cornelius Severus, Albinovanus Pedo, Corippus. Silius Italicus, though often ignored by scholars, even in the booming market of late epic, is included here (291-316) because his use of intertextuality as a means of poetic inventio is essential to the subject of Roman Epic. Corippus is included (329-339), since he writes Roman imperial epic, but epic in the Bible is clearly and intentionally excluded, since it demands a separate discussion (p. viii, note 1). von Albrecht find space to include even the epic writer Eumolpus (created by Petronius) who seems to criticize Lucan for writing history in verse and not epic (227-228).

von Albrecht seems most at ease when he acts as a paedagogus and directs the travel of readers through the history of Roman epic via a close reading of the Latin, which encourages the reader to discover that even a traditional genre such as epic is less sclerotic than he might have feared. This approach reveals writers in a constant search for ever newer identities and ever newer means of expressions to reach their goals. In order to show the reader that there are many interpretative approaches to a text, von Albrecht attacks the texts like a good general with a variety of interpretative methods. Over a long and distinguished career in Latin literature von Albrecht had written many pieces on epic, some of which he has rewritten and put into English ("the language everyone understands" - Holzberg) and used in Roman Epic to demonstrate how he himself tries to interpret a series of epic texts. Because he rewrote a collection of older pieces, the joints between the pieces are sometimes apparent, as are statements about the state of scholarship on a particular subject (154, note). But through it all von Albrecht provides a unifying link to the texts studied: an ever-present interest in textual syntax, narrative structures, the interaction of language and literature, and of author and reader.

In today's atmosphere of literary criticism (post-something) von Albrecht will surely be faulted for not foregrounding his position and practice by theorizing them. Since he seems for one reason or another to eschew theorizing, let us look at examples of how he does proceed. The recognition of narrative tenses in Virgil is essential to the understanding not only of the linguistic but also of the artistic and intellectual framework of his text: in Latin epic in general the "regular" narrative tense is the present, not the perfect (a known fact but too often not remembered). In Virgil important actions especially those of the gods and psychological reactions are told in the historical perfect. von Albrecht's focus here is not on the understanding of Latin tenses but on their artistic use by Virgil. A reviewer's comments on Roman Epic that "The pursuit of such questions as what Virgil's uses of the present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect ‘contribute to our understanding of Latin tenses' (p. 139) is hardly a central consideration in an interpretative introduction to Roman epic," represents an alarming symptom of the loss of stylistic awareness in Literaturwissenschaft. Virgil's use of tenses reveals much about his artistic and intellectual approach to epic and the emphasis he puts on gods and psychology. Another example is the use of the present participle in Flaccus. The present participle allows the poet to evince the simultaneous presence of conflicting emotions, a technique which prepares for Tacitus' use of psychology. Many chapters are focused on the stylistic expression of the contact and complicity between author and reader: an example is Ovid's use of parenthesis. Since his readers were learned, intertextuality becomes part and parcel of the language of communication between author and reader.

The interpretative essays are linked one to another by epilogues which elucidate each chapter's contribution to the subjects of "rhetoric" and "intertextuality," terms which von Albrecht defines in the Introduction.

Given the public character of Roman epic, rhetoric studied by all Roman epic poets cannot be neglected when analyzing the relationship between author and reader. In Roman Epic von Albrecht does not apply rhetorical categories for their own sake but to cast light on the subtle interplay between author and reader. An example: the introduction to the Aeneid is considered as a device used by Virgil to prepare the reader for what is to come. "The use of rhetorical devices is studied as a phenomenon of ‘intertextuality' in the broader sense of the word. What matters is not a mechanical application of labels to poetic texts, but the discourse between author and reader in which the reader's knowledge of rhetoric is used as a tool to facilitate communication … [in poetry rhetoric is] no longer subservient to practical goals and the huge intellectual and emotional potential it commands lends wings to poetic invention and to a poetic study of psychology" (p. 32).

For von Albrecht intertextuality (in the larger sense of the word) includes the coexistence of conflicting cultural codes. An example of what he means is Ennius, whose reflective and "modern" approach to a traditional type of text (such as a horse simile) is that of a Hellenistic intellectual, whereas in Ennius' use of language he has to take into account the "archaic ear" of his audience. von Albrecht notes that such clashes of cultural codes are found at different stages of the evolution of Roman epic, until Corippus finally transfigures traditional epic imagery into a new context of Christian emperorship.

Intertextuality (in the narrower sense of the word) is the relationship between written texts (either within one and the same work or among different works). An example is chapter 5.5. on Aeneas' and Dido's encounter in Aeneid 6 (an intriguing case of intertextuality within the Aeneid (Books 6, 4, and 1), proving to be even more significant than the scene's transparent relationship to Homer. von Albrecht shows that a Roman poet, by following a Greek poet almost literally, might bring to the fore his own originality with great clarity. An example of intertextuality operating between different works is seen in von Albrecht's chapters on Statius and Claudian (11 and 13), which reveal a less well known line of tradition which runs from Homer through Ovid to these poets - and is no less intriguing and important than the Virgilian tradition.

There are those who will find von Albrecht's search for interpretations and sense old-fashioned. It seems that he still has some confidence in the validity of interpretation.

summary by V. Rimell

Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction is a close reading of the surviving portions of the Satyricon. Centrally, it examines the implications of reading this controversial text as a coherent and consistent whole rather than (or as well as) an episodic jumble of unrelated narratives and styles. Rimell suggests that we can see the Satyricon as "organized" in terms of its imagery, which paradoxically can be seen to unify the work even as it mirrors and enacts fragmentation. The study proposes that the Satyricon may be seen as an extended experimentation with familiar Neronian metaphors of the literary text as a human or animal body, arguing that Petronius works to reinvisage literary systems, taking Ovid's images of bodily-as-textual exchange/transformation from the arena of mythology to the fiction of "reality" to explore their threatening implications not only for the self, but for the containment and status of literary knowledge. Rimell aims to demonstrate the striking development in the text of the image of literature as an invasive force subject to corporeal flux and ephemerality, and investigates how this motivates readers to contemplate issues of freedom of speech and originality, as well as the concept of whether literary knowledge, which we must amass in order to read the ultra allusive texts of Neronian Rome, makes readers physically or intellectually vulnerable. The production and consumption of literature are relentlessly figured in the text, she suggests, through images of the body and bodily functions, often resulting in physical and epistemological crises.

An introductory chapter establishes focus and methods, discusses the limits of dominant 20th century views of the Satyricon as bawdy entertainment or superficial comedy, and works to deconstruct prevailing restrictions of Petronian corporeality to material or non-metaphorical realms. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 demonstrate the ways in which Petronius represents bodies as deceptive containers for food and texts: 1 uses Agamemnon's image of catching fish for attracting rhetoric students to introduce the ways in which Petronius links consuming food and consuming bodies, around which the rest of the study develops; 2 treats bodies and texts as sites of disguise and concealment; 3 explores consumption of flesh and texts in Trimalchio's Cena as a manifestation of the Satyricon's larger interest in the fusion or interaction of human and animal bodies. Chapters 4 and 5 treat Eumolpus' two long poems: chapter 4 connects the Trojan horse discharging its deceptive cargo to Eumolpus' effusion of the Troiae halosis itself, while 5 explores the Bellum Civile as an extended dramatization of the risks of imperial overindulgence. The subject of civil war becomes core to the poetics of the text. Chapter 6 considers Petronius' handling of Odyssean themes, especially the escape from the Cyclops' cave. Chapters 7 and 8 treat scenes of the consumption of texts during events aboard Lichas' ship: 7 explores the representation of bodies as texts as Encolpius and friends attempt disguise and are discovered, and 8 examines Eumolpus' tale of the Widow of Ephesus, taking a critique of Bakthin's reading as a starting point for further dissection of the tale's metaphorics and its interaction with narratives of incorporation throughout the Satyricon. Chapters 9 and 10 treat events at Croton (Sat. 125-141): 9 considers Croton as a site of transformation, via reflections on Circe and the mythical powers associated with her Homeric ancestry, as well as Pythagorean ideas about reincarnation from Croton's ancient past, and Petronius' transformation of literary models; 10 explores Croton as a site of various kinds of civil strife and cannibalism. The concluding chapter amplifies the findings of chapters 1-10, setting them in the context of Roman ideas about libertas, and exploring how the Satyricon's corporeality engages with the complex tension between poetry as oral and as material artefact in Latin literature.

summary by J. Rife

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between mortuary practices and social structure in Greece and Asia Minor during the first to third centuries A.D. as attested in Imperial Greek literature and the archaeological record. The three objectives are to outline the customs surrounding death and burial, to examine the discrepancies between the literary and archaeological testimony, and to explore the social dimensions of mortuary practices. Fundamental to this study are the theoretical concepts of social identity, social structure, ritual, and social memory. The first part examines Imperial Greek literature, in particular the novels and selected works by Lucian, Plutarch, and Philostratus. The contemporary society portrayed in this literature consists of two levels, an urban elite characterized by wealth, prestige, education, and other abstract qualities, and a lower class. A comprehensive investigation of the materials, spaces and behaviors surrounding death, burial, and commemoration in the literature reveals a close connection between these components and individual identity. Moreover, the homogeneous depiction of funerary practices over space and time reflects the shared social perspective of the authors and their readers, which was based in part on a common literary culture and which masked local affiliations and other ethnic or social differences. The second part examines the divergent testimony of the archaeological record. The monumental tombs of Celsus at Ephesus and Philopappus at Athens have complex symbolic programs that represent the exceptional prestige of eastern aristocrats who succeeded in the Roman administration. The cemeteries at Troezen, Phrygian Hierapolis, and Anemurium attest to consistency in burial forms among local aristocrats as well as a high degree of interregional variation. A case study of the Corinthia further reveals an acculturative interaction between Roman colonists and indigenous Corinthians that apparently led to an amalgamation of burial forms. The Corinthian burials also represent a complex range of identities and blurring of status boundaries. While the material evidence generally corroborates the literary testimony, it provides an alternative model for social structure in the Greek world during the Empire that is diverse on both a regional and an interregional scale. The appendices include a list of testimonia, discussions of funerary terminology, the authorship of the novels, and a passage in Apuleius on idolization, and catalogues of Roman Corinthian burial sites and epitaphs.

by Barry Baldwin

We are all obliged to Stephen Gaselee's Bibliography of Petronius, first published in Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 10, 141-233, then as a monograph with different pagination, both in 1910. The latter's cover-page describes it as "A Paper Read Before The Bibliographical Society" on (suitably enough) the Ides of March, 1909. What, all 76 pages (97, if you include the hand-list of titles)? The audience must have been as chalcenteric as the performer. I am reminded of J. B. Bury's characterisation of what went on at (if it was) Photius' book-club: "even lexica were intoned to the patient audience."

Interdum dormitat Homerus. In his round-up of the earliest English versions, Gaselee missed one intriguing item. So did Schmeling & Stuckey in their equally admirable Bibliography (1977), also (it seems) all editorial epigones. In the notice of Sir Kenelm Digby in his Brief Lives, John Aubrey (1625-1697) records: "Sir John Hosyns did enforme me that Sir Kenelme Digby did translate Petronius Arbiter into English." Aubrey is a marvellously readable mine of curious information about 17th-century Greek and Latin pursuits; cf. my sampling in Daedalus 1.3 (2000) 4-6, for easy instance "I have seen his (sc. Ben Jonson) studying chaire, which was of strawe, such as old woemen used, and as Aulus Gellius is drawen in," an item that eluded even the polymath LeoFranc Holford-Strevens' magnificent study (1981) of his Roman counterpart. Aubrey had no reason to disbelieve Hoskyns, nor do we. As Schmeling-Stuckey (15) remark, "as often as not, personality has played a major role in the history of Petronian scholarship," a train of thought pursued by those who in the words of K. F. C. Rose, The Date and Authorship of the Satyricon (1971) 45, maintain that the Satyricon exhibits a psychological/spiritual/temperamental affinity with the Petronius described by Tacitus.

Still, it is worth neutrally observing that in an age of literary rakes Sir Kenelm Digby led the field. Would that space allowed quoting the whole of Aubrey's delicious vignette; it is complemented by the Dictionary of National Biography's soberer and detailed entry. "Most accomplished cavalier of his time", "the Mirandula of his age", "great linguist and Magazen of Arts", are just a few of Aubrey's compliments. I subjoin only the gossip that he poisoned his wife, society beauty Venetia Stanley, with viper-wine (a prefiguring of Internet conspiracy theories vis-à-vis Diana, Princess of Wales; a modern Hon. Venetia Stanley was the "confidante" of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith), and his astonishingly opulent and expensive (1000 pounds) volume of the family history (cf. Petronius' fluospar dipper). Otherwise, his epitaph says it all:

Under this stone the matchless Digby lies,
Digby the great, the valiant, and the wise:
This age's wonder, for his noble parts;
Skill'd in six tongues, and learn'd in all the arts.
Born on the day he died, th'eleventh of June,
On which he bravely fought at Scanderoon.
'Tis rare that one and self-same day should be
His day of birth, of death, of victory.

The DNB notice simply refers to his Petronius as "unprinted". Has anyone looked for it in the troves of family papers? Perhaps a scoop lurks there for some ambitious Petronian; cf. C. Collard on F. A. Paley in "A Victorian Outsider." Tria Lustra (1993) 333 n. 14: "it is possible that his experiences can be reconstructed from the archives of the Kenelm Digby family."

Here, the more mundane question is: what part of Petronius did he render? Aubrey gives no title. A simple extract, like Walter Charleton (1659)? The Bellum Civile, like Richard Fanshawe (1655)? The Cena, in instant response (Digby died in 1665) to the 1664 publication of the Trau MS? Or the entire work, thereby anticipating William Burnaby's effort by thirty-some years? Digby, of course, was dead about the same length of time before the forgeries of Nodot (if it was he; cf. C. Laes, "François Nodot and the Fake Petronian Fragments," Humanistica Lovaniensia 47 (1998) 364-5, for other possible culprits).

Kenelm Digby was certainly a quick worker. In 1642, he secured a pirated advance copy of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, read it, and wrote his own book-length (124 pages) reply, Observations, in the space of twenty-four hours. If his Petronius was produced in similar circumstances near the end of his life, it might explain why it was not printed.

In 1736, the Works of Petronius Arbiter in Prose and Verse were Englished by a "Mr Addison", published by J. Watts and sold by J. Osborne at the Golden Ball in Pater-noster Row (a rather more exotic address than Amazon dot.com), the last complete 18th-century version. Gaselee equated this translator with the John Addison who brought out an Anacreon the previous year (no sign of this in, e.g., Bruno Gentili's 1958 edition), suggesting he might be the 1732 Oxford graduate of this name. If so, the speed of his transition from undergraduate to author is impressive - early signs of Publish or Perish? Gaselee poured scorn on Charles Carrington, whose translation (Paris 1902) comports the mystery of its publisher's attribution to "Sebastian Melmoth", the occasional literary alias of Oscar Wilde, for his belief that "Mr. Addison" (whose version he plundered) was actually Joseph Addison.

I have no access to the actual 1736 volume. But in front of me is the AMS Press reprint (New York 1975), reproduced from an original copy at Brown University. Its Library of Congress publishing data attribute the work to Joseph Addison, making it a distinctly posthumous affair - he died in 1719. Is this a simple blunder by some LC cataloguing minion? Or does the 1736 edition carry any suggestion that it was Joseph, not John? Samuel Johnson's Life of Addison makes no mention of a Petronius, not even in chapter 39 where Addison is playfully compared to an "Arbiter Elegantiarum" for the wit and wisdom of his Spectator/Tatler essays. It is relevant to what follows to subjoin that the only Petronius (Latin or English) known to have been owned by Johnson was the 1669 one of the mysterious Michael Hadrianides, pre-Nodot. Incidentally, Johnson was more familar with the Arbiter than Gaselee (53) thought, hence we can substitute "certainly" for the latter's "Dr Johnson probably knew Petronius." There is no sign of any Addison or Petronius in the Literary Anecdotes of those two vast contemporary bibliographers, William Bowyer and John Nicols. Their modern counterpart, Mr. Hugh Amory of Harvard, kindly informs me (per litteras electronicas) that John Addison is a mystery to him.

Two questions for which in Regis Philbin-speak we certainly need to ask the audience or phone a friend: which one might more plausibly be seen by his coevals under plain "Mr. Addison" - the famous Joseph or the obscure John? Despite Johnson's silence and the chronological problem, one instinctively prefers Joseph. But do we thereby fall into the trap set by a cunning publisher?

The frontispiece to "Mr. Addison" also lists "The Life of Petronius Done from the Latin", but when we reach it, this has mutated into "Done from the French". Its preface largely consists of a translation of the Essay on Petronius (1692) by St. Evremont.

"It is translated from a Nodotian edition; the rendering is fairly accurate and the English polished, but the whole lacks vigour and force." Lacking vigour is a common Gaselee complaint, also directed at (e.g.) Kelly's Bohn. "Mr. Addison" did not alert his readers to the fact that Nodot had long since been discredited - or did he himself not know? Though toned down, far more of the racy stuff was rescued from "the decent obscurity of a learned tongue" than would be the case with Heseltine's Loeb, the signal exception being the scene between Eumolpus and the girl (140), silently replaced by the tactful précis "she gave him possession of her beauties more than once." Such liberality is, of course, less surprising in Addison's 18th Century than Kelly's 19th. "Mr. Addison" also provided a sprinkling of footnotes with which further (his prefatory phrase) to oblige his countrymen. They are notable for several suggested allusions to Nero that are not in Rose's canonical list: 12. 1 (nocturnal pranks); 41. 6 (slave reciting master's poems); 47. 2 (Trimalchio's constipation, fortified by an apparently false reference to Suetonius); 53. 9 (inheritances); 59. 4 (Trimalchio's muddled mythology); 71. 5 (Trimalchio's monument); and 28. 6 ("supposed by some ingenious men to be a banter upon Nero for his visionary hopes of finding the treasures which Dido brought from Tyre," with an inaccurate mention of Tacitus' Annals 14 instead of 16).

The story of Henry George Bohn's (1796-1884) Classical and other Libraries (he had far more than Trimalchio) has recently been well told by H. MacLean Currie in (ed. H. D. Jocelyn) Aspects of 19th-Century British Classical Scholarship (1996) 51-3; cf. my review-article in EMC/CV 42 (1998) 709-22. The Bohn Petronius was issued in 1854, the first Englishing since "Mr. Addison". Something of a best-seller (reprinted in 1866, 1874, 1878, 1880, 1883), it (Gaselee's words) long held the field in England. Despite which, it didn't rate a word in Sandys' History of Classical Scholarship, whilst in Loeb-land its author has become an Orwellian unperson, listed by Heseltine, delisted by Warmington. Currie at least mentions the book, if not its creator. Petronius himself was not the above-the-marquee star of this volume, whose title (in short form) is: Propertius, Petronius, Johannes Secundus, and Aristaenetus - a lanx satura indeed. Explaining the inclusion of the "curious romance of Petronius," the preface avers "in giving a companion to Propertius, we have thought it better to choose a work of substantial merit, like the Satyricon of Petronius, than to sacrifice to a merely formal arrangement considerations of more real importance" - not the warmest of endorsements.

These words are from the volume's editor, Walter K. Kelly, a person not in the DNB and ignored both by Sandys and the above-mentioned Aspects... A request for information to the leading English authority on these matters (nomen eius praetermitto) has gone unanswered. H. L. Luard, Graduati Cantabrigienses (1873) lists a Walter Kelly, BA (1827), MA (1830): our man? Schmeling-Stuckey call this translation his work in their text (23), but append a question-mark to his name in their bibliographical listings (127, 285): in his preface (vi), Kelly states quite clearly "this translation, for the whole of which the editor of the present volume is responsible."

Gaselee (65) was crushing: "by no stretch of the imagination can it be called a good translation, though it is not inaccurate; but there is no vigour, and the merits of Addison's translation, which Kelly followed closely, are often watered down and palliated by a change to weak modern English." Currie (52) allows it one sentence on one issue: "the Bohn Petronius leaves in a surprising amount for its time of the more racy material, but some sections are retained in what Gibbon called the decent obscurity of a learned tongue."

Kelly distinguished the Nodot stuff from the genuine material by a different typeface, prefatorily warning his readers that these additions were "manifestly spurious". And he gets half a cigar for providing ("to gratify the reader's curiosity") the Latin Text (without translation, hence the deduction - Rose eventually supplied one in Arion 5 (1966) 268-9) of Joseph Marchena's lubricious fabricated addition to the already licentious Quartilla episode, a rare item almost unprocurable elsewhere as Kelly, Gaselee, and Schmeling-Stuckey all note.

Like all bowdlerisers, Kelly was inconsistent. When his nerve failed, he simply included the offending passage in Latin. This procedure at least showed readers they were missing something good in the Eumolpus scene, a more honest act than "Mr. Addison's" blithe omission. Overall, Kelly left a good deal more out than Addison, and was sometimes (e.g. 11) more pusillanimous even than Heseltine. Which makes it a particularly pleasant shock to see him rendering 131. 7, manus aniculae ingenti motu repleverunt, as "filled the old woman's hand with a huge erection." How often did THAT word appear in Victorian print outside such clandestine pornography as The Pearl and My Secret Life? The OED lists only one occurrence each for the 18th and 19th centuries, both times in legal texts. Compare Addison's "portentous swelling", Warmington's "huge upstir", Sullivan's "mighty throbbing", and Ehlers' "Leistungsfähigkeit".

Furthermore, though confined to Latin, Kelly - quite independently of Addison - sprinkled his notes with remarks on (e.g.) colei, mentula, homines bene vasati, and the anatomical double-entendre in prolato peculio (8.3) where the noun means not only money but prick, as in HA, Elag. 9. 3, a sense missed (albeit also Plautine) by the OLD though not Lewis & Short, and here by Addison, Warmington, and even Sullivan. On the other hand, Kelly was not obsessed by such things, e.g. deprecating "all the English and French translators who have erroneously ascribed an obscene meaning to" qui utrosque parietes linunt (39. 7), where Smith calls the double-meaning "certain".

Unlike "Mr. Addison", Kelly spends no time looking for allusions to Nero. Indeed, his lone note (29. 9) on that matter dismisses as a "groundless assumption" the equation by "many commentators" - unspecified: Addison was one - that the preserved first beard of Trimalchio alludes to Neronian whiskers. Kelly here both anticipates Smith's qualms and enhances them with a parallel from Statius, praef. Silvae 3. Other Neronianisms melt away in his choice of readings, e.g. the (thanks to the influence of Rowell's article) much-touted gladiator Petraites (52. 3, 71. 6) appears as Petronas, a useful reminder that the name (whatever it was) is quite uncertain - just look at Buecheler: Müller unscrupulously records no variants, Smith oddly failed to seize this ammunition for his dating scepticism, Addison cut the Gordian knot by leaving the name out altogether.

Kelly has many more notes than Addison. Some display acute scholarship and a flair for textual criticism. Thus, whereas Laes (art. cit. 391) not only misses the detail but calls the passage "an excellent addition", Kelly stigmatises one Nodotism by pointing out (courtesy of Festus, p. 318 Lindsay) that a sacellum never had a roof - "unless Petronius blundered strangely" - whilst his mataiotatos for the notorious matauitatau crux at 62. 9 - a possibility absent from (e.g.) Buecheler, Müller, and Smith - may be the most attractively simple solution yet offered. Another example of Kelly's clear-headed thinking is his simple explanation of why squinting people come under Sagittarius (39. 11): "because archers shut one eye when they take aim."

Yes, Kelly does sometimes lean on Addison. For notes as well as translation - only a very naive person would think this tralatician technique now extinct. For easy instance, his six-line note on 9. 9 (quem de ruina misit) is cribbed verbatim until the last three words. This, along with the cognate procedure of enlivening plagiarised material with the culprit's own errors, is something I became familiar with in over forty years of marking undergraduate essays. Take Kelly's opening note, on the Nodot insertion of Fabricius Veiento. When not copying Addison, Kelly was adding this fabricated version of what Tacitus, Ann. 14. 50, said about Veiento's lampoon against priests: "a tremendous satire, in which he described the method of getting up those divine frenzies with which they pretended to be visited in the performance of the sacred offices." All the historian actually said was multa et probrosa in sacerdotes composuit.

There are moments in Kelly's translation when he is not merely leaning on "Mr. Addison" but well up his backside, e.g. the opening paragraphs, also the quatrain at 23. 3 where his only change is "here" for "and". But more often than not he does strike out on his own - witness the above-mentioned "erection". And what, by the way, do we make of Warmington's "Heseltine's translation has been radically revised, though it remains as a whole his." Apart from restoring the censored portions, how can a radically-revised translation remain the original? At what point does revision become radical? Take the first page of the two Loebs. Warmington's only changes were "writing edicts" for "pen in hand" and "smell good" for "savoury", both closer to the Latin. And while Warmington's notes are often vastly superior, some (e.g. on 6. 2, 29. 5, 37. 7 & 10, the first three notes on 38) are reproduced verbatim or with minimal change that often reduces Heseltine's information (e.g. the textual note on 22. 2) - all this in what Warmington calls a "new and fuller commentary." Notice also such moments as at 24. 1 where Warmington credits the "night-cap" translation of the double-meaning in embasicoetam to Sullivan - Kelly had it first.

For a characteristically trenchant assessment of how translations are infused with their creators' own Zeitgeist, see Peter Green, "Medium and Message Reconsidered: the Changing Functions of Classical Tradition," in Classical Bearings (1989) 256-70. Meanwhile, the old adage still stands: nothing is improved by translation except a bishop.

("Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils" - Samuel Johnson)

by Barry Baldwin

Stephen Gaselee, The Bibliography of Petronius (London 1910), p.53, opined that "Dr Johnson probably knew Petronius." Quite a while ago (PSN 25, 1995, 14-15), I went some way towards nudging that "probably" into certitude. My excuse for returning to the matter is that there is something else I did not then know.

I owe this intelligence to A.L. Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings, vol.8 (London 1937; repr. New York 1968), p.108. He drew attention to Elkin Mathews' catalogue no.23, February 1929, item 47, this being a copy of Michael Hadrianides' 1669 Petronius, its inner cover containing Johnson's signature, dated 1727, price 80 pounds.

The catalogue claimed this was "the earliest known dated signature of Dr Johnson." But nobody has ever known as much, let alone more, about the Great Cham than Aleyn Lyell Reade, and he had already discovered Johnson's Latin Dictionary complete with a signature of 7 September 1726. So, Johnson acquired his Petronius - not, we note, Peter Burmann's epochal one of 1709 - during the two years between his finishing school and entering Oxford, a time (Boswell, Life I, 50) "where he may be said to have loitered in a state very unworthy his uncommon abilities." However, within a few pages the Scotchman changes tack to report what his hero claimed in later life to have then read: "All literature, Sir, all ancient, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod; but I looked into a great many books, which were not commonly known at the University, where they seldom read any books but what are put into their hands by their tutors."

The Arbiter may not have fitted all 18th Century definitions of manliness, but the last part of this sentence is "a truth universally acknowledged," and we need not doubt the literary boastings. Young Sam was not rich enough to buy many books, and the Satyricon will not have been a school or benefactor's prize. If anyone gave it him, the obvious candidate is the uncle with whom he had recently been residing, the disreputable Cornelius Ford, supposedly Hogarth's Parson at the Punchbowl. But Johnson's father, Michael, was a bookseller, so we may not need to look outside at all.

Everyone has unread books on his shelves. Mere Johnsonian possession of a Satyricon does not guarantee Johnsonian reading of it. Still, Petronius had long had a dubious reputation; it is hard to credit that our Latinly-talented constant reader did not at least peek into it. There is no sign of Petronius in any edition in Reade's inventory (Gleanings, vol.5, 213-229), based on the latter's own enumeration of titles in a letter of 18 May 1735 to one Gilbert Repington. He might have suppressed mention of it, but mere oversight is always a possibility. No trace of it either in Donald Greene's register (Samuel Johnson's Library; An Annotated Guide, Victoria 1975) of what was in Johnson's library at the time of his death. Like any volume, the Petronius could have been begged, borrowed, lost, sold, stolen. As Terentianus Maurus observed, habent sua fata libelli. The copy of Gaselee in the University of Calgary library here is signed by the (as he styles himself) compiler to a Ralph Butler. Many decades ago, browsing the second-hand bookshops of Oxford like Aulus Gellius (NA 9.4) at Brundisium, I bought for half a crown a dilapidated copy of Ernout's Budé, whose inside cover sports that editor's undated signed dedication "A monsieur Cyril Bailey hommage amical." When and why did the great Lucretian's Petronius end up there? About Michael Hadrianides I hope to write more another day. Having no copy available, he must be a pleasure deferred. To put it mildy, he enjoys a poor press. Sandys did not even mention him in his history of classical scholarship, nor does he get into Wade Richardson's Reading and Variant in Petronius (Toronto 1993). Gaselee (37) agreed with Burmann's withering "hominem, qui qualisve fuerit, minime novi, sed stultitia et ineptiis insignem fuisse notis eius facile perspexi." Burmann, of course, was hardly unbiased in this proto-Housmanic rant; it is with some satisfaction that we disinterested parties recall the book-length onslaught on him in the mysterious Chrestomathea Petronio-Burmaniana (1734; for details, Gaselee 51, also G. Schmeling-J.Stuckey, A Bibliography of Petronius, Leiden 1977, 19). Buecheler (ed. min. 8th ed., Berlin 1963, xli) likewise wrote Hadrianides off as "tam inertem iudicem quam interpretem futilem." In Gaselee's cold words, "however, the edition is in some ways convenient, having the notes briefly put, at the bottom of the page," as fine an example of damning with faint praise as any I've seen in a lifetime of exposure to odium academicum. Schmeling-Stuckey (18) differ in detail, not attitude: "one redeeming quality of the Hadrianic editions is that they were usually bound with Lucio's..." Heseltine's Loeb bibliography (xx) placed Hadrianides at the chronological head of his list of complete editions, without detail or remark; similarly Ernout (xxxii). Warmington's revised Loeb (xxvii) expanded this to "the first complete edition (with others' notes), not good." Martin Smith's widely-used Cena (Oxford 1975) mentions no pre-Burmann edition.

Not that Hadrianides is the only antique editor thus impugned. Gaselee (16) branded the 1654 text by Simon Abbes Gabbema "of no particular value," echoed by Schmeling-Stuckey (18), "commonplace." while Buecheler (xl) said of it, "praeterirem silentio, nisi eam se secutum Hadrianides testaretur," while no sign of him in (e.g.) Ernout, Heseltine, Müller, Richardson, or Warmington.

As Dudley Field Malone said, "I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me," and Mark Twain lamented "We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove." It may be that Hadrianides, Gabbema, and others in the same source-boat deserve these obloquies. But how many present-day Petronians have actually clapped eyes on them?

Who was Michael Hadrianides? Gaselee (37) desponded, "as Peter Burmann, himself a Dutchman, writing less than forty years later, knew nothing of Hadrianides, we are not likely to be able to discover more; possibly the name was assumed, because of some rather disreputable additions at the end of the Satirae." Schmeling-Stuckey (58) likewise suspect an alias. But Gaselee's reasoning is doubly naive. Pretending ignorance of a scholarly rival is an old academic trick, by no means extinct. And subjoining the likes of the Priapea to their Petronius editions did not drive (e.g.) Boschius and Gabbema at the same period into pseudonymity. Contrariwise, Priapic dirt was not the reason why somebody may have lurked under the name Rutgerus Hermanides, suspected (Gaselee 16, Schmeling-Stuckey 57, Buecheler xl) of being a nom de guerre, a notion perhaps enhanced by the fact that Scaliger polemicised over Petronius under the name Johannes Rutgers. There seems to be another puzzle here, of modern making: Gaselee (16) says he re-edited Gabbema in 1663, Schmeling-Stuckey (57) say Bourdelot, Buecheler (xl) that he was also responsible for the 1645 edition listed by the others as the work of an unknown Di.S.S. Whatever the truth of all this, we seem to end up with two pseudonymous editors in Amsterdam within six years of each other, at different publishers, both names ending with the patronymic -ides, possibly an identity clue for their contemporaries.

The title page of our 1669 edition (reproduced in Schmeling-Stuckey 59) concludes Concinnante Michaele Hadrianide. Not the customary editorial ablative. Other specimens in Schmeling-Stuckey advertise their labours by Accurante, Curante, Edente, Recensente, Repurgante. This distinctive choice of self-decriptive verbs may or may not say something about how Michael Hadrianides viewed his editorial task.

About which, in my current lack of his book, just a few adumbrations. To his credit, Hadrianides was not a founding father of the Interpolations industry that thanks largely to Fraenkel has been a bane of modern Petronianism; his name does not appear once in Sullivan's 17-page register in ProcCambrPhSoc 202 (1976), 106-122. On the contrary, his tastes ran more to sniffing out lacunae. One example serves also to throw light on other editorial procedures. His notion that something is missing after in eundem locum me conieci (9.1) was followed with acknowledgement by (e.g.) Müller and Warmington. Ernout ignored it. Heseltine marked a gap without crediting anyone. Buecheler's critical apparatus sports the statement lacunam significavi quoniam quae subsecuntur, non foris set in cellula aguntur. No mention of Hadrianides, nor in fact did Buecheler mark this spot with his customary textual asterisk - if Housman ever spotted such editorial goings-on, the London-Cambridge air would have indeed been blue. This passage, incidentally, never comes up in (say) Richardson or Smith's bibliography in ANRW II.32.3 (Berlin/New York 1985), 1624-1665.

Most modern editors mark a lacuna after significavit (131.4). Buecheler credits Hadrianides with this observation, Müller and Warmington give it to Boschius, Heseltine to nobody, likewise Ernout who combines confused copying of Buecheler's nulla lacuna in libris with garbling precise details of the Priapic ditty thought by some to belong here. Given Schmeling-Stuckey's (2) tribute to Ernout for continuing Buecheler's "scientific work on the manuscripts," this bears watching. As Sullivan remarked in the introduction (26) to his Penguin, "an important task of the editor - and therefore of the translator - of Petronius is deciding on the plausibility of competing emendations." Nisbet in his seminal review (JRS 52, 1962, 227-232) of Müller's first edition chided "he does not quote nearly enough old emendations." A glance at the 1995 Teubner shows to what extent Müller has taken this animadversion to heart over the years of revision. Not much, in the case of Hadrianides. In his second edition (1965), Müller acknowledged Hadrianides at 9.1, 54.5, 56.10, 69.2; the Teubner adds 61.9, 113.8, 127.9, these supplements being instructive: at 61.9, Müller credits Hadrianides with a textual transposition that Buecheler gave to the Trau ms H; at 113.8, he adduces Hadrianides' report of an anonymous (nescio quis) suggestion to delete vocabat, this replacing his own previous notion of provocabat, but not giving quite the full story, since Buecheler notes that Mr Anonymus' alternative idea was to change vocabat to vacabat. Buecheler includes another half dozen of the anonymous conjectures preserved by Hadrianides. It may be annoying to us that their identities are not given, but he may be applauded for not snaffling their credit.

Ernout, Friedlaender, Heseltine, Smith, and Warmington mention Hadrianides but rarely. Overall, our man has left a modest but enduring impress on the text of Petronius with his lacuna at 9.1, with poenae for cenae at 54.5, exciderunt for ceciderunt at 56.10, and defraudat for defraudit at 69.2.

But without every edition of Petronius at one's finger-tips - a tall order - the definitive story cannot be written. At 70.2, all modern editors read vulva for H's meaningless bulla. Smith credits Hadrianides with this; Müller gives it to Scheffer; Friedlaender to Buecheler, with Scheffer getting bulba as in Smith; also in Ernout who prints vulva without comment, likewise Heseltine with no variants acknowledged; Buecheler too printed vulva without comment, bulba going to Scheffer and Hadrianides out of the picture. Again, what a shame Housman did not edit Petronius - imagine the Preface!

Finally, Michael Hadrianides now has a new life on the Internet - just. Clicking Google yielded one item, an enquiry posted on 7 October 1999 by R. Laval Hunsucker, suitably from Amsterdam, about the source and significance of this gloss on pinacothecam at 83.1, which Hunsucker cites from the local copy of Hadrianides: tablinum in quo tabulae pictae, stragula vestis, et alia ornamenta reponi solebant.

Dr Hunsucker kindly informs me (per litteras electronicas) that he has had no takers. Ciceronian lists of private luxuries (notably in the Verrine Orations) regularly include stragula vestis. Horace (Serm. 2.3.118-119) has tablinum in the sense of pinacotheca, likewise Apuleius, Florida 23.9. The note seems to refer more to private domus rooms; cf. Pliny, NH 35.7. J.J. Pollitt, Art of Rome (Englewood Cliffs 1966), 148, doubts a provincial Southern Italian town would have a gallery containing such big-name masterpieces, and thinks Petronius has paintings owned by the imperial court in mind.

I feel obliged to append the following item from the London Sunday Telegraph (1 June 1997), adduced in (ed.) D.Braund & J.Wilkins, Athenaeus and his World (Exeter 2000), 584n35, about Greg Kulik, self-styled modern Cynic, who lived in a New York art gallery naked save for collar and chain: "the evolution of cognition involves a process of experimentation which allows observation from the point of view of the object" - what price Eumolpus' "performance art"?

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