Petronius Arbiter, Gaius°
PETRONIUS ARBITER, GAIUS°
PETRONIUS ARBITER, GAIUS° , Roman author and a companion of Nero in some of his pleasure ventures. Petronius links Jewish circumcision with the pierced ears of the Arabs and with the chalked faces of the Gauls (Satiricon, 102). In a poetic fragment he says that the Jews revered a porcine deity (Fragmentum, 97, in Poetae Latini Minores, ed. by Baehrens, 4 (1882), 98; = no. 24 in Loeb edition (1913), p. 354). This may be an allusion to Jewish abstinence from pork, or Petronius could be really ascribing a pig-god to Jews either out of ignorance or malice. He writes also of circumcision whereby Jews distinguish themselves from non-Jews and of the oppressive laws of the Jewish Sabbath. Some take this to refer to Sabbath observance, though most commentators regard it as an allusion to the mistaken notion, common to many Roman writers, that the Jews fasted on the Sabbath (cf. Strabo, Augustus, Trogus Pompeius, and Martial).
bibliography:
Reinach, Textes, 266.
[Jacob Petroff]