The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Satyricon, Complete, by Petronius Arbiter

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Title: The Satyricon, Complete

Author: Petronius Arbiter

Release Date: October 31, 2006 [EBook #5225]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SATYRICON, COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

THE SATYRICON OF
PETRONIUS ARBITER

Complete and unexpurgated translation by W. C. Firebaugh,
in which are incorporated the forgeries of Nodot and Marchena,
and the readings introduced into the text by De Salas.

Among the difficulties which beset the path of the conscientious
translator, a sense of his own unworthiness must ever take precedence;
but another, scarcely less disconcerting, is the likelihood of
misunderstanding some allusion which was perfectly familiar to the author
and his public, but which, by reason of its purely local significance,
is obscure and subject to the misinterpretation and emendation of a later
generation.

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 Melmouth'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, today, could imbue a translation of the Golden Ass
with the exquisite flavor of William Adlington's unscholarly version of
that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke'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 wo