Neven Jovanović
Petronius, Codex Traguriensis, and Marko Marulić
There is a town in Croatia - in Dalmatia, to be more precise - to which we owe an important
contribution to Latin literature. The story is as follows. Petronius' Satyricon (written probably
around year 60), first European masterpiece in the genre of comic, satiric, and paradoxical
adventure novel, is known to us only from fragments. The longest and most famous of these,
large part of book 15, known as the Cena Trimalchionis (“Feast of Trimalchio”), survives in
one manuscript only. This manuscript, written around 1420, is the codex Parisiensis lat. 7989
olim Traguriensis. Today it is kept in Bibliotheque Nationale de France, but it first resurfaced
in Dalmatian town of Trogir (Traù), some time around 1653, in the library of Nikola Cipiko.
These facts are well known in the history of Latin literature. But it was not known - until last
year, that is - that some of the handwriting in the Codex Traguriensis belongs to a famous
Croatian humanist from a Dalmatian city not far from Trogir. This humanist is Marko
Marulić (Marcus Marulus, 1450-1524) from Split (Spalato), author of the first epic in
Croatian language (Judita, 1501) and several Latin religious prose “bestsellers”, much read
all over Europe during at least three centuries.
In March 2005, Croatian philologist Bratislav Lučin, familiar with Marulić's handwriting,
recognized him as the scribe who used several free pages of the Codex Traguriensis to add a
poem by Claudius Claudianus (4th c.); the same handwriting is also seen in numerous
marginal notes all over the codex (though Marulić annotated other texts from the codex, and
not the Cena). These notes are often of philological nature, aimed at restituting the corrupted
text; such studious work and care invested in the codex led Lučin to guess that, at least for a
time, the Codex Traguriensis was property of Marko Marulić - and a treasured one at that.