Word: petronius
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...villa was apparently built by one Ancius Petronius Probus, Rome's proconsul for Sicily in 406 and an ancestor of Pope Gregory the Great. Down the corridors of time, conquering Byzantines, Saracens and Normans trod its glittering floors. About a third of them have now been uncovered...
...Rome. Some rhymes, they found, are at least as old as the city of Rome. Horace described little children playing Rex erit qul recte faciet-the first version of "I'm the king of the castle." Petronius heard a small boy say Bucca, bucca, quot sunt hie?, which later became "Buck she, buck she, buck / How many fingers do I hold up?" At least one rhyme in nine, say the Opies, was known in the time of Charles I; a good half are at least 200 years...
Phoenix is a blowup of Petronius' famous 1,900-year-old yarn, The Matron of Ephesus. It tells of an inconsolable widow mourning at her husband's bier; and of the soldier who .happens in and consoles her so wondrously that, when someone steals the body he was supposed to guard, she offers her husband's in its place. Petronius tosses the yarn off like a firecracker; Fry draws it out like an accordion, often brightening the proceedings but sadly blunting the effect. Heavy staging blunted it further...
Even before Author Anaïs Nin (rhymes with bean) had found a commercial publisher for her work, her name was a password among the avantgarde. Novelist Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller proclaimed her unpublished diary worthy to "take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Rousseau, Proust and others." By 1944 Paris-born Author Nin had arrived in Greenwich Village, privately published three books, and decided to "convert and transpose the diary of 65 volumes into a full, long novel . . ." Like her other two published novels Ladders to Fire (1946) and Children of the Albatross...
...PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY (653 PP-)-Edited by Louis Kronenberger -Knopf ($5). Subtitled "An Anthology of Civilized Writing" this is a connoisseur's selection of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, in which "urbanity, irony, elegance, skepticism, sophistication, wit, play a leading part." Twenty-one' polished pieces by Petronius, Lucian, Voltaire (all of Candide), Saint-Simon, De Maupassant, Congreve, Pope, Henry James (all of Washington Square), Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Henry Adams, etc. Excellent choices, in a finely printed volume...