Le ‘pretese’ di un maestro (nota a Petronio, Sat. 46.5)

Abstract

In Petronius, Sat. 46, during the cena Trimalchionis, the freedman Echion tells the rhetorician Agamemnon about the education of the little boy Primigenius. This article addresses the textual and exegetical problems of the passage concerning the two teachers of the boy (46.5). It deals in particular with the vexata quaestio of the reading sed venit dem litteras (H), for which it proposes a minimal correction (velit) and a new interpretation.