Declamations on the decline of rhetoric, polymetric poetry containing a disquieting number of interpretive cruces on the one hand, shady business in the forum and the escape from a lupanar on the other, not to mention lacunas, alleged interpolations, or the author's virtuoso play with not only Roman, but also Greek literary traditions — the first fifteen chapters of the preserved text of Petronius (certainly not ‘the opening of the Satyrica’, as the publisher's promotional text refers to it) have much to offer a tiro desiring to obtain a PhD in the Classics in the old-fashioned way of our great ancestors, i.e. by preparing a commented edition of an ancient text. The revised version of Breitenstein's thesis, completed in 2008 at the University of Bern, is yet another weapon, alongside G. Vannini's 2010 commentary on Sat. 100–15 and P. Habermehl's on 79–141 (the first volume was published in 2006), used by de Gruyter in a recent campaign to remind us that what survives of Petronius is not limited to the Cena. A comparison between B.'s work and those two commentaries is difficult to avoid, but I will put B.'s book on the bookshelf next to A. Aragosti, P. Cosci and A. Cotrozzi, Petronio: l'episodio di Quartilla (Satyricon 16–26.6) (1988), since with these two volumes we have a complete commentary on the preserved fragments of Sat. preceding the Cena — a fact overlooked by B., who does not even mention the Italian book.

As is clear from the preface, B.'s book was conceived primarily as a commentary, but its main part is preceded by a brief general introduction to the study of Petronius, also specifically, to the part of Sat. treated in B.'s volume, and by the Latin text, which is accompanied by a German translation, intended, as B. tells us, to facilitate study of the text while having no literary pretensions (1). A bibliography and general index are at the end of the book. The introduction is extremely concise, yet well-written and instructive. The list of alleged interpolations is particularly useful (xiv). B. athetizes only five out of the twenty-eight words or phrases that have been suspected, from which we can infer that her methodological preference is to defend the transmitted text. The reader should not be disappointed by the briefness of remarks on the style, language and literary merits of Sat. in the introduction, as they receive proper treatment in the excellent introductory discussions of each episode within the commentary. But B. does not do full justice to Petronius' work when she dismisses the problem of the Prosarhythmus to a single footnote and declares that the study of rhythmical clausulae as part of editorial practice seems to her ‘sehr unbefriedigend’ (xii, n. 12). Vannini recently showed in his commentary on Sat. 100–15 that the rhythmical properties of Petronius' text deserve at least a mention; would a heroic clausula not be unbefriedigend in the artful stream of Petronius' prose (cf., e.g. Vannini on 112.1 uellet uiuere vs. uiuere uellet)?

It is certainly useful for the reader to have the Latin text to accompany the commentary — unlike in Habermehl's book — but B.'s decision not to provide the reader with a critical apparatus is unfortunate, even though her meticulous discussions of the textual problems within the commentary always deserve the highest praise.

The list of the eighteen passages where B.'s text differs from Müller's Teubner edition precedes the text and translation (1). She has no new conjecture to offer. B.'s strategic decision to stay close to what the mss. have seems to me prudent, although at several points her Solomonic, all-embracing comments on competing textual variants made me think that a more unorthodox choice and departure from the mss. reading could be given a chance in the printed text. In the case of 2.1 ‘qui inter haec nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt quam bene olere qui in culina habitant’, Salmasius' ingenious coriaria ‘tannery’ in place of culina (the reading of L and ϕ), deduced from B coria (P curia, R choris), and recognized by B. as noteworthy (39), would be a fine improvement, since culina is more banal and may be easily explained as a scribal emendation (relatively early — culina was apparently read by John of Salisbury) of the already corrupt curia, whereas it is harder to explain how culina could have become curia or coria. Similarly, B. is ready to admit that de more in 14.7 ‘cociones, qui ad clamorem confluxerant, nostram scilicet de more ridebant inuidiam’ is suspect, but she nevertheless prints it, though at the same time she suggests in her comment that ‘qui ad clamorem <de more> confluxerant, nostram scilicet [de more] ridebant inuidiam’, as proposed by G. Ammannati (and independently by M. Zawadzka, Mnemosyne 62 (2009), 111–12), might be a desirable improvement (200). But it is in fact a merit of B.'s comprehensive commentary that it encourages such speculations, and I am sure that many readers will find her cautiousness laudable.

Perhaps the most controversial consequence of the somewhat dogmatic reverence with which B. approaches the text of the mss. is her decision to leave the poem from ch. 14 (‘Quid faciunt leges, ubi sola pecunia regnat’), where L has it, i.e. after 13.4 ‘… ad interdictum ueniret’ (Encolpius addressing Ascyltus), instead of moving it, as with most editors, to follow Ascyltus' response introduced by ‘contra Ascyltos leges timebat’ (14.1/2). I agree with B. that the poem on money and justice is, contrary to how editors have preferred to see it, the narrator's comment on the episode rather than Ascyltus' (181) — is this not much like Alan Price's song in Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (‘We all want justice but you got to have the money to buy it’)? — but still I am not convinced that this insertion should split up the dialogue between Encolpius and Ascyltus, even if its first part is reported in indirect speech. B. has no comment on the ‘contra’ introducing Ascyltus' response, and if she had had one, she would have noticed that elsewhere in Sat. the word is used to introduce a direct reaction to what precedes it (e.g. 14.6, 74.13) — so how can ‘contra’ come immediately after the poem to which what Ascyltus says is not contrary?

However, it must be emphasized that the above remarks, dictated by my idiosyncratic belief that there is no commentary (and no translation) without an edition, do not do justice to B.'s work. Her commentary is a fine achievement: I never ceased to be impressed by the succinctness, erudition and instructiveness of her remarks on the polymorphic text of Sat., regardless whether she comments on the poetry, rhetorical prose, court jargon or Petronian irony, on textual problems or on Petronius' sources and parallel texts, both Greek and Roman. I was helped to understand several passages which I had previously found difficult, and in several other cases I learned that I am not alone in my feelings of being lost. The more casual reader should keep in mind not to overlook the introductory mini-essays, with which the commentary on each episode begins by highlighting the main problems to be encountered. Additionally, they include suggestions for further reading.

The proofreading was good; the more serious errors which I noticed include πόωτον on p. 58, which should be πόντον, ‘apud Graecos’ unitalicized on p. 85, and spaces missing after the apostrophes in the Greek quotations on p. 150 (there is no such error elsewhere in the volume). The general index with which the book ends will surely be useful, but in this relatively small book — it comments on eleven pages of the Teubner text — for typically no small de Gruyterian price I would expect to find more than one index, which does not even include proper names.

To sum up, numerous enthusiasts of an inexhaustible source of fun and pleasure which we owe to Petronius will be grateful to B. for what her much-needed commentary on the relatively poorly explored portion of the preserved text has to offer. But when you use this book, be sure to have a good critical edition around, otherwise be careful to avoid anyone resembling Friedrich Leo, from whom you would risk hearing, ‘Oh, you read Petronius without a critical apparatus’.