#petronius arbiter

[theceoofmusic]

1 paragraph in while translating Petronius I LOVE SATYRICON TOP 1 LITERARY WORK EVER (he mentioned gay sex)

[cowboyoneiros]

some time ago i was researching petronius, because, yes, and i must've accidentally signed up for something, because now once in a while i get an email that is titled like PDF by Someone and the pdf is something like "The archaeology of Petronius : engaging a social science with literature", or "Historical Fictions: the Oneiric, Erotic and Burlesque in Petronius' Satyricon and Apuleius' Golden Ass", and i think it's awesome. like I'm never gonna unsubscribe

[thefugitivesaint]

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), 'The Witches', 'The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter'', Vol. 1, 1922

[ladyofmelk]

The Satyricon (1969) | JOYRIDE

[karaviav]

the petronierrr

[eresia-catara]

in the unrelenting quest for Connections between all my school subjects to pass my finals I have noticed the Similarities between Tacitus' description of Petronius and Lord Henry Wotton....having socio-political Thots

[swallowtail-ageha]

I just know back then in 60 ad proto fujoshis Esquilina and Procula were reading the satyricon by petronius while kicking their feet and giggling

[dduane]

Today's small mystery

Reshelving some books that got out of their normal shelf in the upstairs bedroom, with the usual side revelations: (a) I need ebook copies of all the [Insert Color Here] Fairy Books, as it'd be good to have a collection of searchable texts*; (b) I need ebook copies (implying searchable texts) of the entire C.S. Lewis collection, as hunting for one of the more obscure quotes online is a waste of time that could be spent doing useful things like baking, or on creating crap renders of the recalcitrant manes of local demigods: (c) Hmm, some of these have bookmarks stuck in them. I wonder what those are about...?

I went through two or three books that had marks in them (blank sticky notes, usually), and in all but one case was able to figure out why I'd marked them, and make a note elsewhere of their content and implications. (I've been flirting with getting into Obsidian to see if it helps me stay on top of this kind of issue, but am not sure I really need it yet.)

This one, though, has left me baffled. It might have simply been where I paused in my reading... but that's not usually how I use my bookmarks. Normally I place them as a reminder that there was something on that page or spread that needed my attention for some reason, or was related to something else that was going on in life, or writing, or something. In this case... now all I have to try to recall is exactly what the issue was.

The bookmark tells me that we're almost certainly talking about something I was reading in 1994, because it's a train ticket from the 5th of September in that year, which I bought on the train (because there's no "from" marking on it), while heading to Wicklow Town. ("Cill Mhantain" is Irish for Wicklow.)

...The book is the Abbey Classics edition of Petronius's Satyricon: the Burnaby translation of 1694. (Interestingly, the National Library of Ireland has the same edition I do. Though I bet theirs is in better condition.) This is what we'd think of as a paperback, though it's actually bound with a soft cloth binding and has a paper dust jacket. (A scan of the front cover and front flap is below.) There are a lot of places I could have picked this up used in Dublin, but my guess is that it comes from one of a number of trips to Hay-on-Wye.

...And here are the pages where the train ticket was stuck in: a passage from the middle of Trimalchio's feast.

So now all I have to do is work out why I marked those pages... thirty years ago. (eyeroll) Yay.**

Something to occupy myself while I go off and make a flammkuchen...

*They're all online at Gutenberg, so that's all right.

**Though looking at the obscure idiom/metaphor "She's a very Pye at his Bolster," I wonder if it was something to do with that. ETA: So the thing to do when you run into a phrase like this in translation is to check another translator and see what they've got. It hadn't occurred to me on first glance that "Pye" wasn't a culinary reference, but a contraction of "magpie". And surprise, the 1913 Heseltine translation at Tufts' Perseus Digital Library has this as "a magpie belonging to a sofa": i.e. a bird that "henpecks" you in your own bed. Ow.