PETRONIUS (PETRONIUS ARBITER), Roman satirist, under whose name we have some considerable fragments of a remarkable satire or satirical romance (Petronii Arbitri Satirae). We find various references to the author in later writers, e.g., Macrob., Somn. Scip., i. 2.8 "plots full of the fictitious adventures of lovers with which Arbiter occupied himself a great deal," Lydus, De Magistratibus, 41 "Turnus and Juvenal and Petronius who by merely pursuing abuse injured the law of satire," Sidonius Apole., Carm., xxiii. 155, etc., but none of these throw any clear light upon the date or personality of the writer. Modern scholarship inclines to identify him with Gaius (so apparently Tac., Ann. xvi., 17 and 18, though in both passages the reading is disputed : Titus is given as his praenomen in Plin. N.H. xxxvii. 20 and Plutarch, Mor. 6o E) Petronius, the one time favourite of Nero, of whose character a remarkable picture is presented by Tacitus Ann. xvi 18: "Regarding Gaius Petronius a few words must be said by way of retrospect His days were passed in sleep, his nights in social engagements and the pleasures of life. The fame which other men attain by diligence he won by indolence, and he was not considered a debauchee and a profligate, like others who exhaust their substance, but a man of refined luxury. His sayings and his acts, in proportion as they were free and osten tatious of recklessness, were so much the more gladly taken as a type of simplicity. Yet as pro-consul of Bithynia, and presently as consul, he showed himself a vigorous and capable man of affairs. Then declining again upon vice, or aping vice, he was admitted by Nero among the select few of his friends—the arbiter of elegance, those things only appealing to the jaded emperor's eyes and other senses which the approval of Petronius commended to him. Hence the jealousy of Tigellinus, as toward a rival and superior in the science of pleasure. And so he played upon the emperor's cruelty—the lust which now occupied him beyond all other lusts—charging Petronius with being a friend of Scae vinus. . . . The emperor, as it happened, had at that time
started for Campania and Petronius, on reaching Cumae, was arrested. He refused to endure the suspense of fear or hope. Yet he did not put away his life precipitately, but he had his severed veins bound up and again re-opened at his pleasure, while he spoke to his friends, not in serious language or such as might win him fame for his firmness, and listened to them repeating— not anything about the immortality of the soul and the doctrines of the philosophers—but light poetry and frivolous verse. To some of his slaves he gave largesse, to others stripes. He dined too and indulged in sleep, that so his compulsory death might resemble a natural one. Nor did he, like most men in their last moments, flatter in his will either Nero or Tigellinus, or any other powerful person, but he wrote out a full account—with the names of his associates, male and female—of the emperor's excesses and of every novel debauchery. This he sealed and sent to Nero, and then broke his signet-ring in order that it might not be used presently to imperil others." This last act is paralleled by Plin. xxxvii. 20, who tells how the dying Petronius broke a precious bowl to prevent it falling into the hands of Nero.
While the identity of this Petronius with the author of the Satirae is perhaps incapable of definite proof (I) the cognomen Arbiter—which is not a cognomen in the proper sense, but only a nickname—strongly recalls the expression—arbiter elegantiae applied to C. Petronius by Tacitus; (2) it is clear that the Petronius of Tacitus had the social experience, the temperament, and the ability to compose just such a satire; (3) the internal evidence, vague as it is, seems to suit the age of Nero better than any other. On the other hand, to imagine that the work represents the actual document which Tacitus describes Petronius as send ing under seal to Nero is, of course, absurd.