Edward F. Rimbault.
POPE, PETRONIUS, AND HIS TRANSLATORS.
The vindication of Pope from the charge of borrowing his well-known sentiment—"Worth makes a man," &c.—from Petronius, is not so completely made out by "P.C.S.S." as it might be; for surely there is a sufficient similitude of idea, if not of expression, between the couplet of Pope and the sentence of Petronius, as given in all four of the translations cited by him (No. 23. p. 362.)—"The heart makes the man," &c.—to warrant a notion that the one was suggested by the other. But the surmise of plagiarism originates in a misconception of the terms employed by the Latin author—virtus, frugalitas, and more especially corcillum,—which have been misunderstood by every one of these translators. Virtus is applied to mental as well as bodily superiority (Cic. Fin. v. 13.).—The sense in which frugalitas is employed by Petronius may be collected from a preceding passage in the same chapter, where Trimalchio calls his pet puerum frugalissimum—a very clever lad—as he explains the epithet by adding that "he can read at sight, repeat from memory, cast up accounts, and turn a penny to his own profit." Corcillum is a diminutive of corculum (like oscillum, from osculum), itself a diminutive of cor, which word, though commonly put for "the heart," is also used by the best authors, Lucretius, Horace, Terence, &c, in the same sense as our wit, wisdom, intellect. The entire passage, if correctly translated, might then be expressed as follows:
"The time has been, my friends, when I myself was no better off than you are; but I gained my present position solely by my own talents (virtute). Wit (corcillum) makes the man—(or, literally, It is wisdom that makes men of us)—everything else is worthless lumber. I buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. But, as I said before, my own shrewdness (frugalitas) made my fortune. I came from Asia no taller than that lamp stand; and used to measure my height against it day by day, and grease my muzzle (rostrum) with oil from the lamp to make a beard come."
Then follow some additional examples of the youth's sagacity, not adapted for translation, but equally instances of worldly wisdom. Thus every one of the actions which Trimalchio enumerated as the causes of his prosperity are emanations from the head, not the heart; the results of a crafty intellect, not of moral feeling; so that the sentiment he professes, instead of being similar to, is exactly the reverse of that expressed by Pope.
This explanation seems so satisfactory that we might be well contented to rest here. But some MSS. have the reading coricillum instead of corcillum. If that be received as the genuine one, and some editors prefer it, the interpretation above given will only be slightly modified, but not destroyed, by the introduction of another image, the essential point remaining the same. The insertion of a vowel, i, precludes all connection with cor and its diminutives, but suggests a derivation from [Greek: korukos], dim. [Greek: korukion], a leathern sack or bag, which, when well stuffed, the Greeks used to suspend in the gymnasium, like the pendulum of a clock (as may be seem on a fictile vase), to buffet to and fro with blows of the fist. The stuffed bag will represent the human head on the end of its trunk; and the word may have been a slang one of the day, or coined by the Asiatic Trimalchio, whose general language is filled with provincial patois. The translation would then be, in the familiar style of the original,—"The noddle makes the man," &c.
Anthony Rich, Jun.