Et tu, Petronius?

[alexpgp]

Don't ask me why, but I've been looking at my posts from last September. In my first post of the 13th, I included part of a quote attributed to one Petronius Arbiter, a courtier of the emperor Nero. The "full" quote is:

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.

"It ain't so!" says Jim Reeds on what appears to be a well-documented Web page, titled Petronius Arbiter, Time Traveller.

Reed's most telling evidence in debunking the attribution to Petronius is having read "all the surviving works" of Petronius. "The quote just ain't there," notes Reed.

By the way, among those surviving works is Petronius's Satyricon, which was the basis of a Fellini movie. The story structure loosely follows Homer's Odyssey, with a bit of a twist. Quoting Reed: "In Homer's work, every time the hero is about to reach home, the god Poseidon (because of a previous insult) thwarts him with a storm. In Petronius's [story,] every time the hero is about to have sex, the god Priapus (because of a previous insult) thwarts him with impotence." (No wonder it was made into a movie.)

At any rate, it is likely that - despite whatever the truth may be - the quote will forever be linked to Petronius's name. Things could be worse, of course: at least the words seem to find an echo in the minds of many readers.

Cheers...

Comments

Oh...

[taiyosan.livejournal.com]

how do you look up your posts from so long ago? Do you just keep clicking on the "previous 20" until you get there or is there a shortcut?

Re: Oh...

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

As an exercise in Perl and Web programming, some time ago I developed a fairly rudimentary search capability on my posts. You can check it out if you go to my LJ "home page" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/alexpgp/) and click on "Search".

Cheers...

Re: Oh...

[taiyosan.livejournal.com]

Ahh, yes ... i remember reading Steinbeck's Pearl once ... didn't realize they had computers then - heh,heh ...

Re: Oh...

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

The "Previous 20" only goes back so far. To go further, you can use your Calendar View to look at entries, but then you have to know the date to find something specific.