question as to the date of the narrative of
the adventures of Encolpius and his boon companions must be regarded as
settled," says Theodor Mommsen (Hermes, 1878); "this narrative is
unsurpassed in originality and mastery of treatment among the writings of
Roman literature. Nor does anyone doubt the identity of its author and
the Arbiter Elegantiarum of Nero, whose end Tacitus relates."

In any case, the author of this work, if it be the work of one brain,
must have been a profound psychologist, a master of realism, a
natural-born story teller, and a gentleman.

b--His principal object in writing the work was to amuse but, in amusing,
he also intended to pillory the aristocracy and his wit is as keen as the
point of a rapier; but, when we bear in mind the fact that he was an
ancient, we will find that his cynicism is not cruel, in him there is
none of the malignity of Aristophanes; there is rather the attitude of
the refined patrician who is always under the necessity of facing those
things which he holds most in contempt, the supreme artist who suffers
from the multitude of bill-boards, so to speak, who lashes the posters
but holds in pitying contempt those who know so little of true art that
they mistake those posters for the genuine article. Niebuhr's estimate
of his character is so just and free from prejudice, and proceeds from
a mind which, in itself, was so pure and wholesome, that I will quote it:

"All great dramatic poets are endowed with the power of creating beings
who seem to act and speak with perfect independence, so that the poet is
nothing more than the relator of what takes place. When Goethe had
conceived Faust and Margarete, Mephistopheles and Wagner, they moved and
had their being without any exercise of his will. But in the peculiar
power which Petronius exercises, in its application to every scene, to
every individual character, in everything, noble or mean, which he
undertakes, I know of but one who is fully equal to the Roman, and that
is Diderot. Trimalchio and Agamemnon might have spoken for Petronius,
and the nephew Rameau and the parson Papin for Diderot, in every
condition and on every occasion inexhaustibly, out of their own nature;
just so the purest and noblest souls, whose kind was, after all, not
entirely extinct in their day.

"Diderot and a contemporary, related to him in spirit, Count Gaspar
Gozzi, are marked with the same cynicism which disfigures the Roman;
their age, lik