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.
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