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 Niccol??
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.
This manuscript is described as "Fragments from the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Books of the Satire of Petronius Arbiter"; we may assume,
therefore, that the whole Satire was immensely long, a life-work, like
Marcel Proust's _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, and like that work,
perhaps, fatal to its author. Indeed, since Proust's death last year
the two have frequently been compared, and on more than the mere
alliterative ground that is in their names. Of Petronius we are told
"illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae
transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam
protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua
haurientium, sed erudito luxu.
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