PetroniusThree interconnected factors have dominated the transmission and reception of Petronius' Satyricon (as it was, and is, predominantly known): the fragmentary nature of the text, its linguistic and generic characteristics, and the sexually explicit episodes in the story. The identity of the author (see Tacitus, Annals 16, 17-20) and the extent to which his characters and plot relate to the society in which he lived have proved a further puzzle. The text was lacerated early on: homoerotic scenes had been eliminated by Carolingian times. Late Latin and medieval authors preserve fragments or poems attributed to Petronius that are not found elsewhere. The most extensive fragment, the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio's Feast), was known to the 15th-century Humanist Poggio Bracciolini but not rediscovered until the mid-17th century. Meanwhile, other passages (the intercalated tale of the Widow of Ephesus and the poem on the civil war) sparked traditions of their own. Almost 400 years after the editio princeps (Milan ca. 1482), the first reliable edition of Petronius was established by Franz Bücheler in 1862. The maze of the text's transmission and its interpolation, however, has not yielded all its secrets yet...