Author: Francesca Lughi

In the second half of the 600th century, a few years apart from each other, the travellers Jacob Spon (1675) and Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1679), travelled along the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia following the Bailo (ambassador) of Venice on his way to Constantinople, thus having the opportunity to visit its main centres, and to observe and describe its monuments and ancient documents. Jacob Spon[1], a doctor from Lyon well known in the erudite circles of France, after a stay in Rome was headed to Greece, Constantinople and Asia Minor, to see, study and recover for Western culture the vestiges of its past. It is no coincidence that he was the first to introduce the term "archaeology" in its modern meaning. Among other things, he stopped in Trau to personally verify the authenticity of an extraordinary manuscript, discovered about twenty years earlier, the Codex Traguriensis containing the Trimalchionis Dinner of Petronius. He wrote a detailed account of the journey in three volumes, the third of which consists of a collection of documents and inscriptions, which was published in Lyon in 1678. (Voyage d'Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grece et du Levant) and had enormous success among his contemporaries. The Bolognese Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili[2], instead, found himself involved almost by chance in the journey to Constantinople, during which emerged some of the themes and interests that he would later cultivate during his career as an officer in the army of Leopold I of Habsburg: geographical reconnaissance, natural observations, the study of the habits and customs of peoples, the annotation of the traces of Rome. His travel report remained unpublished (the manuscript is now preserved at the University Library of Bologna), even if the experiences acquired contributed to the drafting of some chorographic maps (Croatia, Bosnia) or topographic maps (Split, Zadar), and profoundly influenced the subsequent twenty-year experience in the Illyrian hinterland. The final fruit of the travels and research carried out in the Balkans is constituted by theDanubius Pannonian-Mysicus, a work printed in 1726, in Amsterdam, in six volumes, of which the second is entirely dedicated to Roman antiquities. Through the works of these two scholars, the first coherent attempt to recover Roman antiquities in the lands of Dalmatia took place. Widely used and imitated by scholars who later became interested in the Illyrian area, the writings of Spon and Marsili still maintain a significant interest today. In addition to the contribution offered to the search for a coherent method of investigation, both travel reports, rich in descriptions and illustrations, in fact preserve numerous often irreplaceable testimonies regarding realities and monuments that subsequently disappeared. The so-called Satyricon,as is known, it is a long narrative fragment of a prose work, with some inserts in verse, of unquestionable artistic quality: the fragment in our possession corresponds to an entire book of the work, the 15th, and to some parts of the 14th and 16th books, therefore the overall extension of the work must have been notable, according to some comparable to that of War and peace of Tolstoy or to Betrothed by Manzoni. Its author, the so-called Petronius Arbiter elegantae it is unknown to official culture, or ignored, until the 3rd century AD[3] On Petronius Arbiter[4] author of Satyricon the criticism is divided into two: some critics suppose that he is not Nero's courtier and give as reasons, first of all, that no ancient testimony explicitly admits the identification between the two characters (as on the other hand none excludes it). Secondly, those who speak of Petronius who lived at Nero's court, like Tacitus, do not make the slightest reference to his literary activity. Thirdly, as has been said, the author is mentioned only from the third century AD and his work is cited, albeit rarely, from the second century AD: previously no one shows knowledge of either the author or the work. If therefore Petronius was Nero's courtier, involved in the "Pisonian conspiracy"[5] and committed suicide in 66, there would be an inexplicable silence on his account and on the account of his work, of more than a century. Thirdly, the language of the Satyricon, at least as far as the "Trimalchio dinner" is concerned, seems to be at least a century earlier than that of the Neronian age, known to us through many other authors and, finally, consequently the author of the Satyricon would be an unknown genius who lived no earlier than the 2nd century AD Other critics note first of all how not only the name is identical (Nero's courtier was called Titus o Gaius Petronius Niger), but also the surname attributed to the author of the Satyricon, or that of Arbitrator, surprisingly coincides with the function of elegant arbiter (= «judge of refinement», «arbiter of the chic») assigned by Tacitus to his character within the Neronian court. Subsequently, the fact that Tacitus does not allude to a literary activity of his Petronius could be explained both by the poor relevance of this specification for the purposes of historical narration, and by the desire to avoid compromising allusions to a notoriously scandalous work since quoting it would be equivalent to admitting to having read it. Furthermore, the silence of the sources on Petronius the novelist and his work for about a century is not difficult to explain, if one thinks precisely of the embarrassment of the official culture towards such an anomalous and irreverent work, entirely based on a homosexual “triangle” and on the impotence of the protagonist. Furthermore, the linguistic mix that Petronius uses in the Trimalchio's Dinner[6] It does not correspond to the expressive norm, much less the written one, of any particular era, but reflects the speech of a very specific social class, that of the freedmen who had become rich with the desire for cultural emancipation: it is therefore a snake, moreover deliberately caricatural, from which it would be incorrect to formulate any chronological deduction; finally, Tacitus' portrait of the refined decadent aesthete who lived at Nero's court, and above all the story of his spectacular parodic suicide, are too much in tune with the exasperated aesthetic sensibility and the taste for paradoxical provocation typical of the author of the Satyricon, to think that this is another Petronius. If this were the case, we would be faced with an authentic alter ego of Nero's courtier. We might as well think that it is the same person, as common sense instinctively leads us to believe. As for the title, it is attested in the following variants: Satyricon, Greek genitive plural implied bible, or "books of the Satyrs"[7] (cf. Virgil, Georgicon books), or Satirical,neuter plural in Greek, Satyrika, implied bible, with the same meaning. Satirical o Satirical, neuter plural suffix -ika in Greek, but combined with the Latin prefix satire- / contains-with the meaning of "books of satire", or Saturarum books, fully Latin title, with the same meaning. Finally Saturated, fully Latin title: «satire». What is important to note is that in the first two cases the etymology is traced back to the Satyrs, mythical creatures traditionally connected with the sexual sphere, and therefore with allusion to the obscene content of the work. In the last three cases the etymology is instead traced back to the Latin, and even before that Etruscan, saturate, the well-known literary genre characterized by a mixture of styles and the presence of parts in prose and parts in poetry, thus alluding to the form of the work. It should be noted, however, that with the satire in verse of Ennius, Lucilius, Horace and Persius, and later of Juvenal, theSatyricon it has nothing to do with it at all: in that case, it would therefore be a question of the Menippean satire, cultivated in Rome by Varrone Reatino[8] and from Seneca. Of all these titles, it seems that the one to be rejected is almost certainly the one most in use,Satyricon, which derives from an evident misunderstanding: in fact, those who use it no longer perceive it as a genitive plural, but as a neuter singular («Work concerning the Satyrs»), which it certainly is not. As a genitive plural, it cannot stand alone and would require integration books. As far as we know, however, the Satyrs have nothing to do with the work, except, at most, in a metaphorical sense. It is therefore probable that the most reliable etymology is precisely the one that refers to satire, and that the correct spelling is satire- and not Satyr-. Everything concerning the date of composition, the time of setting, the number of books and references to a particular literary genre, remains very uncertain. All this is evidence of a laborious and difficult tradition, most likely due to the scabrous nature of the subject. What is known is that the 14th and 16th books were already known in the XNUMXth century in the so-called short excerpts, containing parts preceding and following theTrimalchio's Dinner. The "long extracts", containing much larger parts of the before and after, date back to the end of the 13th century. Price and parts of the Price same. In 1420 Poggio Bracciolini[9] found in England a code containing an extract of the Price, which he calls the 15th book. Essential bibliography GB CONTE - E. PIANEZZOLA, History and texts of Latin literature, Florence, Le Monnier, 2003. GB CONTE, The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of the Satyricon, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997. D. GAGLIARDI, Petronius and the modern novel. The fortune of the Satyricon through the centuries, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1993. E. RATTI, The Age of Nero and the History of Rome in the Work of Petronius, Bologna, Pàtron Editore, 1978. E. AUERBACH, Mimesis: Realism in Western Literature, Turin, Einaudi, 1956, pp. 35-36.