Petronius Arbiter 
The Satyricon 

This manuscript is described as 'Fragments from the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Books of the Satire of Petronius Arbiter’; we may assume, therefore, that the whole Satire was immensely long, a life-work, like Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and like that work, perhaps, fatal to its author.