Petronius 'Pot-House Odyssey Dulcified

THIS dulcified and emasculate redaction of Mr. Firebaugh's originally very satisfactory translation of Petronius, pot house odyssey has evidently been prepared with an eye to the smut smellers and moral snoopers who, a few years since, swore out a warrant for the apprehension and arrest of the author, patently a fellow named Arbiter, who could probably be located in the phone book. Their failure to lay hands on Nero's contemporary seemed in on way to discourage the crusaders, but rather encouraged them to harry the publishers to such good effect that soon the first impression was to be had only by the wealthy with good booklegging connections. The present adaptation seems desinged for the less affluent who must be satisfied with less than one half of one percent crotic content.

The original translation was completeracy and included an excellent and entertaining glossary devoted to certain unfamiliar aspects of Greek and Roman ethies. The present version is highly incomplete, so much so as to make little or no sense in placers, and even the most inoffensive passages have suffered clumsy and injudicious pruning. And, since an attempt to purify Petronius is much the same as preparing an edition of Fanny Hill for high school use, this version is at best, a sad, sad, business.

The Satyricon is an account of the wanderings and fantastic adventures of a coaple of tramp students whose lecheries, boozing, brawling, and generally disorderly conduct along the high roads of Italy are graphically recounted in the current slang of the period. Their activities are all charmingly debased and come under the main heads of alcoholic, criminal and amourous, and include almost constant indulgence in those pursuits which secured for two cities of biblical fame a bad reputation and a pyrotechnical destruction.

Probably the most famous passage, and one which takes up a very large portion of the whole story, is the description of the dinner party given by Trimalchio, the incredibly wealthy and entirely credibly regular parvenu, an entertainment which is a veritable miracle of extravagant bad taste, which even Mr. Cecil de Mille would find difficult to rival. This the rest from the editing of the over cantious publisher, but the subsequent omission of the chapters $6 and $2 complete is hardly an act which will recommend it self to the judicious and exacting reader. To be sure, these passages and the delightful interline included therein might not be missed by students unfamiliar with the original text, but without them and the sundry other amourous moments wherein the chastest of embraces have been substituted for move strictly anatomical descriptions, it is difficult to understand how Petronius acquired so great a reputation for unblushing realism. If the reader is persuaded that the affection of Enclopius and Ascyltos for Giton is a purely platonic one and such as is on more than proper between master and servant, he is missing as tasty a hit of aesthetic yohimbin as there is to be found this side of a celebrated international museum in Paris. And if he is missing it he can hardly be blamed for wondering why he ever purchased such dull stuff at a fancy price.

There are, of course, two alternatives for the student who wants his classics uncut and in the original bottles. He can either get hold of a costly complete translation or he can read them is the Latin or Greek. The latter is much to be desired, but often impossible, but either is better than to be led into believing that na incomparable literary masterpiece is such sour dishwater as the present offering of Messrs.. Boni and Live right.