Petronius

Then the whole lot also tends to have rice and other fixings mixed in at each stuffing stage.

Going back to the ancients, beyond cooked animals stuffed inside other animals, Petronius wrote of dishes staged to make the animals appear as if they were still alive.

Fish arranged as if they were literally swimming in a sea of sauce, and a rabbit with a fowl's wings attached posed to look like the mythical Pegasus.

Medieval royals continued the hosting of banquets so elaborate as to be almost grotesque.

They were reminders of mortality, intended to encourage people to enjoy life while they could.

At Roman banquets, according to the writer Petronius, a small silver skeleton might be brought out and placed on the table, and the host would remind his guests that they would all soon be like this, and so they should drink and be merry.

The idea was summed up in the Latin phrase carpe diem, seize the day, from a poem by Horace.

Roman philosophers too thought deeply about death.

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The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter.

Translated by W.C. Firebell.

Preface and Introduction.

a translation worthy of the name is as much the product of a literary epoch as it is of the brain and labor of a scholar and melmoth's version of the letters of pliny the younger made as it was at a period when the art of english letter-writing had attained its highest excellence may well be the despair of our twentieth century apostles of specialization who to-day could imbue a translation of the golden ass with the exquisite flavour of william adlington's unscholarly version of that masterpiece who could rival arthur golding's rendering of the metamorphose of ovid or francis hickey's masterly rendering of lucian's true history but eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever-changing tissue of the living were it not for this no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision except in instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts had improved the text in the case of an author whose characters speak in the argot proper of their surroundings the necessity for revision is even more imperative the change in cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral for example stephen gasily in his bibliography of petronius calls attention to henry thurston peck's rendering of bal um bomum by he's a daisy and remarks appropriately enough that this was well enough for eighteen ninety eight but we would now be more inclined to render it he's a peach again peck renders illud errat vivere by that was life but in the words of our lyric american jazz we would be more inclined to render it that was the life but as professor gasoli has said no rendering of this part of the satyricon can be final it must always be in the slang of the hour Some, writes the immortal translator of Rabelais in his preface, have deservedly gained esteem by translating, yet not many condescend to translate, but such as cannot invent, though to do the first well requires often as much genius as to do the latter.

I wish, reader, thou mayest be as willing to do the author justice, as I have strove to do him right.

Many scholars have lamented the failure of Justice Lepicius to comment upon Petronius, or edit an edition of the Satyricon.

Had he done so, he might have gone far towards piercing the veil of darkness which enshrouds the authorship of the work, and the very age in which the composer flourished.