W. C. Firebaugh

W. C. Firebaugh was the author of two works on the history of inns and taverns, and also of a fine English translation of Petronius's Satyricon, the fragmentary realistic novel of low life under the Roman Empire. The translation was published in 1922 in New York, in a very expensive ($30) limited edition, by Horace Liveright, founder of the Modern Library. Like earlier English translations, but more completely, Firebaugh's Satyricon includes the spurious supplements devised by various early scholars and forgers in an attempt to round out the fragmentary story. Firebaugh was however careful to distinguish all these supplements from the real translated text. His is still the only English translation of the supplement by José Marchena, which, because of its obscenity, had previously been printed only in the original Latin.