Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
About this Book
Who Was Petronius?
Episodic Outline of the Extant Satyrica
Glossary of Important Names
Introductory Reading
1 Reading the Satyrica
Reading Fragments and Fragmented Readings
Genre, Narrator, Narrative
Reading a Poet and his Poetry
The Wrath of Priapus?
(Without) a Sense of an Ending
Further Reading
2 Petronius and Greek Literature
Homer
Plato
The Greek Novel
Conclusion
Further Reading
3 Petronius and the Roman Literary Tradition
Petronius and Horace
Petronius and Virgil
Petronius and Ovid
Encolpius’s Penis and Dido
Petronius and Greek Novels, Roman Rhetoric, and Low Drama
Petronius and Publilius (No, I meant Seneca)
Petronius and Petronius
Conclusion
Further Reading
4 Letting the Page Run On
Talking, Eating, and Characterization
Pump Up the Volume: Music and Metaphor
Language Breakdowns and Civil War
Conclusion
Further Reading
5 Sex in the Satyrica
Sex Norms
The Satyrica as Document
Outlaw Sex
Further Reading
6 The Satyrica and Neronian Culture
Close Reading
Beyond the Cena
Putting Nero in Context
Further Reading
7 Freedmen in the Satyrica
Further Reading
8 A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to the Market
A Rogues’ Market and Commodity Culture
Go to School and Get a Good Job
Big Business
Money Makes the World Go Round
To Live Off the Land
Conclusion
Further Reading
9 At Home with the Dead
Introduction
Death, Dying, and the Dead
A Fictional Tomb
Real Tombs and Real People
Conclusion
Further Reading
10 Freedmen’s Cribs
Vulgarity and Villas
Importance of the Domus
Insularity of Trimalchio’s Domus
Layout of the Domus
Memory and Autobiography
Myth and Education
Hunting
Theatricality
Reality and Fantasy, Deception and Naturalism
Conclusion
Further Reading
11 Petronius’s Satyrica and the Novel in English
Introduction
Dormice and Honey: The Cena Trimalchionis through the Novelistic Ages
The Man and the Book: Petronius and the Satyrica as Fictional Subjects
Conclusion
Further Reading
12 Fellini-Satyricon
Fellini and the Birth of Fellini-Satyricon
The Narrative of Fellini-Satyricon
The Sights and Sounds of Fellini-Satyricon
“The Meaning should Become Apparent Only at the End” (Fellini)
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index locorum
General Index
This paperback edition first published 2013
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petronius : a handbook / edited by Jonathan Prag and Ian Repath.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-4051-5687-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-118-45137-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Petronius Arbiter–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Satire, Latin–History and criticism.
I. Prag, J. R. W. II. Repath, Ian.
PA6561.P37 2009
873′.01–dc22
2008028318
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Eleanor Antin, The Death of Petronius from The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001, chromogenic print, 469/16 × 941/2 × 13/4 inches (framed). Copyright © Eleanor Antin.
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates
For Ewen Bowie
magistro optimo et ingenti flumine litterarum inundato
Map of Italy showing locations mentioned in the text, with an inset of the Campanian coastline. | |
5.1 | Title page from The Satyrical Works of Titus Petronius Arbiter in Prose and Verse (London 1708). |
5.2 | Frontispiece from The Satyrical Works of Titus Petronius Arbiter in Prose and Verse (London 1708). |
9.1 | Tombs fronting the road at the Nocera Gate necropolis, Pompeii. |
9.2 | Tomb 43, the Isola Sacra necropolis, Portus. |
9.3 | The tombstone of Publius Longidienus, a ship-builder, Ravenna. |
9.4 | The funerary altar of Caius Calventius Quietus, an augustalis, the Herculaneum Gate necropolis, Pompeii. |
9.5 | The tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, Porta Maggiore, Rome. |
10.1 | The Priapus in the vestibule of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii. |
10.2 | Cave canem (“beware of the dog”) mosaic in the vestibule of the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii. |
10.3 | The view from the entrance through the House of the Vettii, Pompeii. |
10.4 | A wall of the “Corinthian oecus” in the House of the Labyrinth, Pompeii. |
12.1 | Federico Fellini and Donyale Luna (Enotea) on the set of Fellini-Satyricon. |
12.2 | Dining at the “feast of Trimalchio,” Fellini-Satyricon. |
12.3 | Guests at the “feast of Trimalchio,” Fellini-Satyricon. |
12.4 | Martin Potter (Encolpio) and Fanfulla (Vernacchio), Fellini-Satyricon. |
Jean Andreau is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He specializes in the economic and social history of the Roman world. In 1999 he published Banking and Business in the Roman World (Cambridge). His most recent book is J. Andreau and V. Chankowski (eds), Vocabulaire et expression de l’économie dans le monde antique (Bordeaux 2007). He is currently working on a history of the Roman economy and collaborates, along with Jonathan Prag, in a group directed by Sylvie Pittia which is preparing a new edition and commentary of Cicero’s third speech against Verres (the De frumento).
Shelley Hales is Senior Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol and specializes in the roles and meanings of Roman domestic art and architecture. She is the author of Roman Houses and Social Identity (Cambridge 2003). She is currently working on the reception of Pompeii in nineteenth-century culture.
Stephen Harrison is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature in the University of Oxford. He has written widely on the Roman novels and was a co-founder of the journal Ancient Narrative (www.ancientnarrative.com). He is editor of Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel (Oxford 1999) and author of Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford 2000).
Valerie Hope is Senior lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at the Open University. Her main research interest is Roman funerary monuments and funeral customs. Publications include Death and Disease in the Ancient City (London and New York 2000, co-edited with E. Marshall); Constructing Identity: The Funerary Monuments of Aquileia, Mainz and Nimes (Oxford 2001); and Death in Ancient Rome: A Sourcebook (London 2007).
J. R. Morgan is Professor of Greek at Swansea University. He has published widely on ancient fiction, particularly the Greek novel. His commentary on Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe was published in 2004 (Warminster). He is co-editor, with Meriel Jones, of Philosophical Presences in the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 10, Groningen 2007), and, with Ian Repath, of another forthcoming Ancient Narrative Supplementum on lies and metafiction. Other projects include an edition of Heliodorus for the Loeb Classical Library, and a monograph on Longus for the Duckworth Classical Literature and Society series. He is Leader of the KYKNOS Research Centre, which brings together colleagues working on the narrative literatures of the ancient world at Swansea and Lampeter (www.kyknos.org.uk).
Costas Panayotakis is Reader in Classics at the University of Glasgow. He researches on the Roman novel and Roman drama, and he is the review editor of the journal Ancient Narrative. His books include Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical Elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden 1995) and annotated book-length translations into Modern Greek of one play of Plautus and two of Terence. His new book, Decimus Laberius: The Fragments, is forthcoming in the series Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries. He is now collating manuscripts to establish a new critical text of the sententiae attributed to the mimographer Publilius, and he has recently undertaken to write a new commentary on Petronius’s “Dinner at Trimalchio’s.”
Joanna Paul is Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University. Her research specialism is modern receptions of the ancient world, especially in the cinematic medium. She has a particular interest in adaptations of ancient literature for the cinema, and is working on a book entitled Film and the Classical Epic Tradition for Oxford University Press.
Jonathan Prag is a university lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow of Merton College. He has published briefly on Petronius (in CQ 2006), but his main areas of research are Hellenistic and Republican Sicily and the Roman Republic. He is the editor of Sicilia nutrix plebis Romanae: Rhetoric, Law, and Taxation in Cicero’s Verrines (London 2007) and collaborates, along with Jean Andreau, in a group directed by Sylvie Pittia which is preparing a new edition and commentary of Cicero’s second and third speeches against Verres. He is currently co-editing (with J. C. Quinn) a series of papers on The Hellenistic West (forthcoming, Cambridge) and working on a book on the non-Italian auxiliaries of the Roman Republican army.
Ian Repath is Lecturer in Classics at Swansea University. His principal research interests are Greek and Latin prose fiction, and literary aspects of Plato. He is author of “Plato in Petronius: Petronius in platanona,” and co-editor, with John Morgan, of Where the Truth Lies: Fiction and Metafiction in Ancient Narrative (forthcoming). He is a founding member of KYKNOS, the Swansea and Lampeter Centre for Research in Ancient Narrative Literatures.
Amy Richlin is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works on the history of sexuality, Roman humor, women’s history, and feminist theory. Her most recent books are Rome and the Mysterious Orient (Berkeley 2005) and Marcus Aurelius in Love (Chicago 2007).
Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor of Latin Literature in the Department of Greek and Latin Philology at La Sapienza, University of Rome. She has published books on Petronius (Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction, Cambridge 2002) and on Ovid, and edited Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts: Orality and Representation in the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 7, Groningen 2007). Martial’s Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Niall W. Slater is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek at Emory University. His research interests focus on the prose fiction and drama of the ancient world, as well as the conditions of their production and reception. His books include Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton 1985; second, revised edition 2000), Reading Petronius (Baltimore 1990) and Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (Philadelphia 2002). His current project is a study of Euripides’ Alcestis.
Koen Verboven is Lecturer in Ancient History at Ghent University. He specializes in ancient social and economic history, Roman friendship, and voluntary associations (collegia). He is the author of The Economy of Friends (Latomus, Brussels 2002), and co-editor (with K. Vandorpe and V. Chankowski) of Pistoi dia tèn technèn: Bankers, Loans and Archives in the Ancient World. Studies in Honour of Raymond Bogaert (Leuven 2007).
Caroline Vout is a University Senior Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. She is a cultural historian and art historian with a particular interest in the Roman imperial period and has published widely on topics related to Rome and its reception. Recent publications include Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (Cambridge 2007) and “Sizing up Rome or Theorising the Overview,” in D. Larmour and D. Spencer (eds), The Sites of Rome (Oxford 2007). Her interest in the Satyrica stems from several years of teaching it at the University of Nottingham.
The idea for this book was born over a couple of pints of beer in a pub in Nottingham. While chatting about teaching and related matters we came to realize that one of us, Jonathan, was using the Satyrica as part of a course on ancient society and economy at the University of Leicester while the other, Ian, was teaching a literary course on the ancient novel at the University of Nottingham. It seemed a good thing that a text could be used in such different ways, but also a shame that such different approaches are often segregated. We decided, therefore, to propose a volume in which we would invite leading scholars to write chapters on a range of topics, a range both broad and mutually complementary, all focusing on the one text: Petronius’s Satyrica. That our contributors were so eager to help seemed to suggest we had struck a chord, and we hope that this book will be valuable for all those with an interest in this novel and its influence.
We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Eleanor Antin and of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, for their willingness to let us use the image reproduced on the cover; Merton College, Oxford, for financial assistance with other illustrations; and Paul Dilley for translating the chapter by Jean Andreau.
We are indebted to Al Bertrand and his colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell for being so receptive to the idea in the first place and so helpful throughout the editorial process. We are no less grateful to the contributors, who have been both prompt and patient – editing a volume by multiple academics can, in the unforgettable words of one of our contributors, be rather like herding cats – but happily not on this occasion!
All references to chapters of the Satyrica are prefaced with a §. Although the division into chapters is almost certainly later than Petronius himself (and the numbering sequence in use today certainly is), they have been universally adopted, are now printed in all texts and most translations, and are the standard form of reference.
References to all other ancient authors and their works follow the standard abbreviations listed in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (third, revised edition 2003, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Oxford University Press), at pp. xxix–liv.
Other abbreviations used in this volume are:
CIL = Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, consilio et auctoritate Academiae litterarum regiae Borussicae editum. Berlin. 1863–. The standard collection of Latin inscriptions, arranged in multiple volumes, organized primarily on a geographical basis (for example, vol. 6 is the city of Rome, vol. 10 is central and southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia). Production of the series is ongoing.
LGPN = Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, edited by P. M. Fraser and E. Matthews, I (Oxford, 1987); II (M. J. Osborne and S. G. Byrne eds; Oxford, 1994); III.A (Oxford, 1997); III.B (Oxford, 2000); IV (Oxford, 2005). See the website: www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk
P.Oxy. = The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, edited with translations and notes by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt et al. London. 1898–.
Petronius’s fragmentary novel, the Satyrica, is a text as amazing as it is puzzling. It combines startling originality, outrageous and raunchy humor, literary genius, and brilliant characterization. It provides an insight into the seedier side of life in the ancient world and an unusual perspective on first-century municipal Roman Italy and beyond. It has a unique place in the history of literature as the first substantial novelistic text and has been enormously influential on writers of fiction and on those trying to understand ancient Rome. Its attractiveness as a text to be read, studied, and researched, whatever one’s interest, has long been clear, and, as is evident from the bibliography to this volume, there is no shortage of material written on it. What, then, does this book aim to achieve?
In this volume there are a dozen especially commissioned, original essays by leading scholars in the fields of the ancient novel and of the culture and history of the early Roman Empire. These essays have Petronius’s Satyrica as their sole focus and students as their primary audience, although we are confident that anyone interested in this text will find much that is useful and illuminating. The essays each present a survey of one aspect of the Satyrica taking into account the vast amount of scholarship, both specialized and general, and, in a “Further Reading” section, point the reader towards other works on the particular topic. (Works are referred to by author and date, and full details can be found in the comprehensive bibliography towards the back of this book.) The aim is not a synthesis of material so that you do not have to read anything else; rather, the essays act as introductory pieces to provoke thought and guide you on your way. They enable you to gain a valuable insight by themselves, but they can also form the basis of in-depth research. However, they will be much more valuable if you read the text of the Satyrica first. This book cannot be, and is certainly not intended to be, a substitute for reading the text itself: it is a handbook to it, a help in interpreting it and making sense of it. In addition, we hope that this volume will prove invaluable for not only students, but also those who are lucky enough to teach this text, whether exclusively or as part of a broader course.
The rich variety of Petronius’s Satyrica means that there are many angles from which it can be approached, and we have tried to reflect this range. You might be interested in Latin literature, for instance, or Roman art, or the Roman economy, or Classics in the cinema: whichever aspect of the ancient world you find most appealing there is something for you in the Satyrica and its influences, and there is something for you here. However, one of the main problems when approaching the Satyrica is the frequently sharp divide between literary and historical studies; this volume seeks to challenge and overcome that division. A full understanding of a text involves an appreciation of all its aspects, and, although the essays are free-standing and may be read independently and in any order, in the course of their different approaches they often provide complementary readings of the same passages; cross-references will usually alert you to this. We think that this multi-dimensional approach is essential to studying the ancient world, and that Petronius’s Satyrica is one of the best texts that survive with which one can attempt an integrated interpretation of one snapshot of ancient life. It can be read as a literary text, as a social document, or as evidence for historical reality, but none of these readings can properly exist without the others. Our advice, then, whether you are an ancient historian whose focus is funerary monuments or a literature student who is keen to see what Petronius does with the literary heritage of the ancient Greeks, is the following: read the other approaches presented here, since they are not long and you should soon enough get an idea of what they are about and, more importantly, you may well find your understanding and appreciation deepened by alternative perspectives. Having said all that, and although the chapter titles should make it clear enough, a brief summary of how the volume fits together now follows.
In the next section of the Introduction we will briefly consider the questions of who Petronius might have been, and when we might date the text. This is followed by a short outline of the Satyrica, a glossary of the main characters’ names, some initial suggestions for background reading, and a map of Italy. Then, in the first of the chapters, we start by looking at what kind of text the Satyrica is and the state in which it has come down to us, asking questions about its fragmentary nature, its genre, its narrator, how its narrative functions, the use of poetry as well as prose, and whether there have might been an overall narrative thread: in short, the fundamentals for being able to read the text (Slater, READING THE SATYRICA). We move on to look at how the Satyrica relates to other literature, since, for a Roman writer, and reader, how one reacts to both Greek (Morgan, PETRONIUS AND GREEK LITERATURE) and Roman (Panayotakis, PETRONIUS AND THE ROMAN LITERARY TRADITION) texts is a crucial part of the literary process and can tell us a great deal about what kind of text we are dealing with and what its author is up to. The Satyrica is a densely literary and allusive work, and an understanding of how it relates and reacts to other literature is essential to a full appreciation of the text. Next comes a chapter on the extraordinary language of the Satyrica and the interplay that takes place in the narrative between sound-effects and metaphors; in addition, the Satyrica not only alludes verbally to other texts, but it also demands in its use of repeated vocabulary that the reader have a keen eye and ear for detail (Rimell, LETTING THE PAGE RUN ON).
The extent to which “literature” is part of culture and society will already be apparent from these first few chapters; literary effects do not exist in isolation either from literary traditions, or from the wider world of language and the senses. The next two chapters consider aspects of the society within which the Satyrica belongs: the fascinating problems of gender and sexual practice in a society that is ultimately very different from our own, and the ways in which this is presented in the Satyrica (Richlin, SEX IN THE SATYRICA); and the no less intriguing problems raised by deciding which socio-cultural context we should put the Satyrica into in the first place – in this book, as in most studies of Petronius, into the world of Nero (Vout, THE SATYRICA AND NERONIAN CULTURE).
We continue the exploration of the social and historical context of the Satyrica with four chapters which increasingly focus upon the historical, and material, world of the Satyrica. The first of these (Andreau, FREEDMEN IN THE SATYRICA) begins with the important question of how we can use such a text to write “history” before going on to examine what we can learn about the social class of the “freedmen” in first-century AD Italy, whose central role in Roman life is reflected by their prominence in the Satyrica, and in particular in the Cena Trimalchionis, “Trimalchio’s Dinner Party.” This is followed by a study of the Satryica as a source for what might loosely be called economic history (Verboven, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO THE MARKET), but which, as the chapter reveals, is a much bigger topic than the word “economic” suggests, and one for which, again, the Satyrica provides both important and unusual evidence to place alongside what we know from elsewhere. Two further chapters develop this particular approach, examining the ways in which comparison between the archaeology of the Roman world and the text of the Satyrica can illuminate our reading of the text, but also give us invaluable perspectives on the surviving evidence from other sources. In the first of these (Hope, AT HOME WITH THE DEAD) we consider the unique and unusual light which the Satyrica casts upon the subjects of death and burial, and on contemporary attitudes to them, comparing this with the rich material evidence that survives from the Roman world. In the second (Hales, FREEDMEN’S CRIBS), we confront the question of domestic space and the nature and use of the house and its decoration – something which, again, the Satyrica presents differently from any other source.
To bring the discussion up to the present day, we conclude with a pair of chapters on the more recent reception of what remains of the Satyrica in two distinct media – novelistic fiction and film. The first (Harrison, PETRONIUS’S SATYRICA AND THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH) examines the use and impact of our surviving text, and in particular of the Cena Trimalchionis – something which can be traced from literary works of the eighteenth century through to the most recent works of fiction. The second (Paul, FELLINI-SATYRICON) discusses the famous and challenging film by the Italian director Federico Fellini, inspired in diverse ways by both the content and the nature of Petronius’s text. The volume concludes with a bibliography for all the contributions, an index of ancient passages cited in the text, and a general index.
Before taking a brief look at who Petronius might have been, two general points:
Among the questions that can be crucial for understanding and interpreting a text we might single out four particular ones in this instance:
Such questions may seem obvious if we want to use the text as a source for historical information, but they are no less relevant when trying to locate a text in its literary context. In the case of Petronius the answer is unfortunately not a simple one. If we could answer the question of his identity with confidence then the rest would of course follow; but, for the very reason that we cannot be entirely sure of the identification of the author, it remains possible to dispute the other questions also, and in particular that of when he wrote. Much the fullest discussion of this problem is to be found in Rose (1971), with shorter summaries in, for example, Walsh (1970: 67–8, 244–7).
The basic elements of the problem are these:
Petronius deserves a brief obituary. He spent his days sleeping, his nights working and enjoying himself. Others achieve fame by energy, Petronius by laziness. Yet he was not, like others who waste their resources, regarded as dissipated or extravagant, but as a refined voluptuary. People liked the apparent freshness of his unconventional and unselfconscious sayings and doings. Nevertheless, as governor of Bithynia and later as consul, he had displayed a capacity for business. Then, reverting to a vicious or ostensibly vicious way of life, he had been admitted into the small circle of Nero’s intimates, as Arbiter of Taste (elegantiae arbiter): to the blasé Emperor nothing was smart and elegant unless Petronius had given it his approval. So Tigellinus, loathing him as a rival and a more expert hedonist, denounced him on the grounds of his friendship with Flavius Scaevinus. This appealed to the Emperor’s outstanding passion – his cruelty. A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius. No defence was heard. Indeed, most of his household were under arrest.
The Emperor happened to be in Campania. Petronius too had reached Cumae; and there he was arrested. Delay, with its hopes and fears, he refused to endure. He severed his own veins. Then, having them bound up again when the fancy took him, he talked with his friends – but not seriously, or so as to gain a name for fortitude. And he listened to them reciting, not discourses about the immortality of the soul or philosophy, but light lyrics and frivolous poems. Some slaves received presents – others beatings. He appeared at dinner, and dozed, so that his death, even if compulsory, might look natural. Even his will deviated from the routine death-bed flatteries of Nero, Tigellinus, and other leaders. Petronius wrote out a list of Nero’s sensualities – giving names of each male and female bed-fellow and details of every lubricious novelty – and sent it under seal to Nero. Then Petronius broke his signet-ring, to prevent its subsequent employment to incriminate others. (Trans. M. Grant.)
Because Tacitus describes Petronius’s position at Nero’s court as elegantiae arbiter, “Arbiter of Taste,” many scholars from the sixteenth century onwards have been tempted to identify the Petronius described here by Tacitus with the author of the Satyrica. This is the most likely source of the use of the term “Arbiter” in some later writers mentioned in Point 2 above. It will doubtless be apparent that the description of Petronius’s character provided by Tacitus would seem to fit the author of the Satyrica extremely well – although the suggestion which is sometimes made, that the Satyrica is the same document as Petronius’s list of Nero’s debaucheries mentioned here by Tacitus, is surely going too far.
When the ex-consul T. Petronius was facing death, he broke, to spite Nero, a myrrhine dipper that had cost him 300,000 sesterces, thereby depriving the Emperor’s dining-room table of this legacy. Nero, however, as was proper for an emperor, outdid everyone by paying 1,000,000 sesterces for a single bowl. That one who was acclaimed as a victorious general and as Father of his Country should have paid so much in order to drink is a detail that we must formally record. (Pliny, Historia Naturalis 37.20, trans. D. E. Eichholz.)
But we come now to matters that are a serious problem, and do great damage to the foolish, when the flatterer’s accusations are directed against emotions and weaknesses the contrary to those that a person really has. […] Or again, on the other hand, they will reproach profligate and lavish spenders with meanness and sordidness, as Titus Petronius did with Nero. (Plutarch, Moralia 60D, trans. F. C. Babbitt.)
With all of the above taken into consideration, most scholars are prepared to accept the identification of the author Petronius (‘Arbiter’) with the Petronius described in Tacitus (and Pliny and Plutarch), even if the further identification of that Petronius with a specific consul in the reign of Nero remains an open question. It should, nonetheless, be emphasized that the identification is not certain, and that consequently a Neronian date is not formally proven by this route, however likely it may be thought to be.
There is another way to try to resolve this problem, and that is to tackle the last of our four original questions, instead of the first, namely, “When was the Satyrica written?” The first reference to the work of Petronius appears in an author called Terentianus Maurus writing around AD 200 (fragment XX in Müller’s edition (2003: 181) of Petronius), so external evidence does not narrow down the answer very much. There are two remaining ways to confront this question: to examine the content of the Satyrica and look for things which can only have been written before or after a certain event or other text; and to consider the text more generally in terms of the world it describes and what else we know of the Roman world at the time of Nero and at other periods.
Scholars have found many things in the Satyrica which they have claimed support a particular date, such as the names of famous individuals who can reasonably be identified with known figures from the Neronian period (for example, the gladiator Petraites at §52.3, or the lyre-player Menecrates at §73.3 [cf. Suet. Nero 30.2]); or else the echoes of Lucan’s De bello civili / Pharsalia in the Bellum Civile of Eumolpus (§118–24; see Slater, READING THE SATYRICA, p. 27, and Panayotakis, PETRONIUS AND THE ROMAN LITERARY TRADITION). Most of these, however, provide no more than a terminus post quem, a fixed point after which we can assume our own text to have been written. Only if one also accepts the identification of Petronius with the suicidal consul in Tacitus can these be used, for instance, to suggest a very narrow time-span for the composition of certain parts of the Satyrica, between Lucan’s death in April AD 65 and Petronius’s own death in AD 66. Without this two-stage argument, this method cannot, technically, rule out a later date for the Satyrica, and for this reason some scholars have suggested that we should consider, for example, a date in the Flavian period (that is, AD 69–98, as Martin (1975); see, in general, the discussion in Vout, THE SATYRICA AND NERONIAN CULTURE).
A number of the chapters which appear in this book, such as those by Vout (on Neronian culture) and Verboven (on economic history), make it very obvious that the Satyrica can be read perhaps most productively in the context of the 60s AD. By themselves, such readings do not prove that the Satyrica is a Neronian text, or that the author was T. Petronius, the elegantiae arbiter of Tacitus’s Annales. Indeed, put as bluntly as that, the argument is simply circular. But what we might term “historical readings” are a two-way process, and unless clear contradictions emerge, the reinforcement is not merely encouraging, it is highly informative. Unless we choose to reject all such apparent correspondence as pure coincidence, which becomes ever more unlikely as the process itself continues – and the richness of what can be learned in both directions should become clear in the chapters that follow – then it becomes little short of perverse not to accept the general consensus and read the Satyrica as a Neronian text of the mid-60s AD. Although our contributors will on occasion remind the reader of the ultimate uncertainty in this question, and rightly so, in general all the chapters in this volume accept the basic hypothesis of a Neronian dating.
Two of our four questions remain – without a secure identification of the author the answers to these cannot be certain. But, accepting the general hypothesis that the author was T. Petronius, a consul in the reign of Nero, and the elegantiae arbiter of Tacitus, then he was a senator and a member of Rome’s elite. This poses one very serious further question: as such, how much could he really have known about the sorts of people and the sides of life that the Satyrica describes? (The question is raised, for example, by Richlin, SEX IN THE SATYRICA, p. 91.) A superficial answer may be offered from the accounts in Tacitus (Ann. 13.25, 13.47), Suetonius (Nero 26.3–4), and Cassius Dio (61.8.1) of Nero’s excursions into the city disguised as a private citizen or even a slave – if Nero could do this, then Petronius could doubtless have done the same. But it is probably unnecessarily modernizing to imagine that Petronius was writing a fully-researched “investigative” novel exposing the underclasses of his time. A second response, accepting the senatorial authorship, would be either to keep this authorship in mind throughout, with all its implications for skepticism or at least a very top-down perspective; or else to be prepared to rethink our assumptions about the true solidity and exclusivity of the “class-divide” in the ancient world.
However, Petronius was writing a work of entertaining literature, whose realism is not to be pushed too far, although presumably his aim was to create a world that was recognizable, or realistic, or at least plausible to his readership/audience. Many of the contributors make this kind of point: see for example, Panayotakis on dining/satire (p. 51), Richlin (p. 84) on “The Satyrica as Document,” and in particular Andreau’s chapter on freedmen. As mentioned above, and notwithstanding the problem of dating, there is no evidence as to who Petronius’s contemporary readership might have been. However, such a sophisticated, ambitious, and richly allusive text would only be appreciated fully by those with the education to understand its far from straightforward Latin (see Rimell) or recognize the extensive and playful allusions to other literature (see Morgan and Panayotakis), and with the time to read it (or listen to it: see Slater, p. 16). Such people could realistically come only from the elite: Petronius was writing for those of his own social class, and it is important to bear this in mind when assessing to what extent we can take the Satyrica to be an accurate or useful historical source on the life and behavior of low-lifes, freedmen, and slaves.
The extant remains of the Satyrica are full of incident: as far as we can tell, the overall plot concerns Encolpius and his affairs (primarily with Giton), and this is then interspersed throughout with what seem to be smaller episodes. The following outline is designed to help you keep your bearings when considering different aspects of the text and to locate within the overall narrative the passages and episodes discussed; it is not intended to be a comprehensive summary (cf. the outline of the “plot” of Fellini-Satyricon in Paul’s contribution to this volume, p. 202, and Slater on the fragmentary nature of the Satyrica, p. 17).
1–5 | Encolpius and Agamemnon at the school of rhetoric | |
6–11 | Encolpius and Ascyltos fight over Giton | |
12–15 | arguments over stolen clothing at a market | |
16–26 | Quartilla and a bisexual orgy | |
26–78 | the Cena Trimalchionis, or Dinner of Trimalchio (the whole episode is full of eating, drinking, and Trimalchio being boorish): | |
26–31 | arrival and preliminaries | |
31–6 | food, drink, and entertainment | |
37–8 | Encolpius learns about those present | |
41–6 | Trimalchio goes out and the guests, other freedmen, take the opportunity to talk | |
61–2 | Niceros tells a story about a werewolf | |
71–8 | Trimalchio’s will, tomb, and mock funeral | |
79–82 | Encolpius and Ascyltos fight over Giton; Encolpius loses | |
83–90 | Encolpius meets Eumolpus in an art gallery | |
85–7 | Eumolpus tells the story “The Boy of Pergamum” | |
89 | Eumolpus recites a poem on the Sack of Troy (Troiae Halosis, TH) | |
91–8 | Encolpius regains Giton, but then fights with Eumolpus over him (during which Ascyltos appears and leaves) | |
99–115 | voyage on Lichas’s ship: disguise, discovery, mock trial, brawl, reconciliation | |
111–12 | Eumolpus tells the story “The Widow of Ephesus” | |
113–15 | storm and shipwreck; Lichas’s body washed ashore and cremated | |
116–41 | adventures in Croton: Eumolpus, Encolpius, and Giton try to con legacy hunters | |
118–24 | Eumolpus recites a poem on the Civil War (Bellum Civile, BC) | |
126–32 | Encolpius (as “Polyaenus”) suffers from impotence in his affair with “Circe” | |
133–8 | Encolpius gets into trouble with the witches Proselenus and Oenothea | |
138–41 | the text becomes increasingly fragmentary and breaks off |
We list only those who play a significant part in the action, and not those who appear briefly or who are mentioned by other characters and do not appear; of course, it goes without saying that the contents of this list are affected by the fragmentary nature of the text. We do not list those historical characters, deities, or mythical persons referred to in the text since they can be found in standard reference works. The vast majority of the names are etymologically Greek; Latin names are denoted with *, and those of Semitic origin with #. It is worth noting that almost all the names employed are attested for historical persons – see LGPN – and also that all the freedmen names at Trimalchio’s house are attested on inscriptions from CIL 10 (which covers southern Italy; for both these references, see the list of abbreviations). However, many of the names are not especially common, and some are very rare: what is of primary importance in the majority of cases is the literary and/or etymological significance of the name, as indicated below. We are indebted to Costas Panayotakis for the rendering of many of the characters’ names and for the descriptions of their roles and characters. Slightly fuller lists for comparison can be found in Sullivan (1986: 179–81) and Branham and Kinney (1996: 169–71). Particularly useful on names is Courtney (2001, especially 40–3).
Agamemnon (“Very Resolute”): hypocritical teacher of rhetoric; the name of the leader of the Achaean fleet against Troy (see, in particular, Homer’s Iliad)
Ascyltos (“Untroubled” or “Indefatigable”): Encolpius’s formidably well-endowed former lover and lover of Giton
Circe: Attractive but insecure nymphomaniac; the name of an immortal witch in Homer’s Odyssey
Corax (“Raven”): servant of Eumolpus
Daedalus (“Artist”): Trimalchio’s cunning cook; the name of the archetypal ingenious inventor, who built the labyrinth to house the Minotaur
Dama: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; his name is frequently found belonging to a slave in literature
Echion: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; his name is redolent of Greek words to do with snakes
Encolpius (“In The Bosom/Lap”): bisexual protagonist and principal narrator
Eumolpus (“Sweet Singer”): lecherous and terrible versifier
Fortunata* (“Mrs Blessed/Wealthy”): wife of Trimalchio
Ganymede: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; in mythology Ganymede was taken up to Olympus by an eagle to be Zeus’s (Jupiter’s) cupbearer. From his name derive the Latin word catamitus and its English equivalent “catamite”
Giton (“Neighbor/Boy Next Door”): unfaithful male concubine of Encolpius
Habinnas# : freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner and monumental mason
Hermeros: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; his name means “a pillar with a bust of Eros”; he shares it with a gladiator mentioned at §52.3
Lichas (“Captain Blowjob”): superstitious ship-captain
Menelaus: another teacher of rhetoric, Agamemnon’s assistant; in epic the name of King Agamemnon’s brother, husband of Helen of Troy
Niceros: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; his name combines elements of “victory” and “desire”
Oenothea (“Goddess of Wine”): old witch
Phileros (“Amorous”): freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner
Philomela: unprincipled fortune-hunter; this was the name of a mythical woman transformed into a nightingale (see, for example, Ovid Metamorphoses 6.424–674)
Proselenus (“Older Than The Moon”): old witch who tries to cure Encolpius of his impotence
Quartilla* (“Quartan Fever Lady”): orgiastic priestess of the phallic god Priapus
Scintilla* (“Spark”): Habinnas’s wife
Seleucus: freedman at Trimalchio’s dinner; the name of the founder of the Seleucid dynasty, which inherited control of Alexander the Great’s conquests in Asia
Trimalchio# (“Thrice Blessed/Lord”): excessively wealthy and eccentrically vulgar freedman
Tryphaena (“Luxurious Woman”): seductive lady
Each of the chapters has its own section of further reading, pointing you to scholarship relevant to its particular topic. What follows here is a list of readily available translations and texts and some (necessarily selective and subjective) suggestions of introductory works and resources for the study of Petronius.
Two recent and accessible translations into English are Sullivan (1986) and Walsh (1996); Sullivan’s translation is due to be re-issued shortly with a new introduction and notes by Helen Morales. Other translations available include Arrowsmith (1959, often reprinted), Branham and Kinney (1996), Heseltine (1913, revised 1969, with facing Latin text in the Loeb Classical Library series), and Ruden (2000, with brief chapters on a number of topics). A number of translations (normally those out of copyright) are also available online, including Burnaby (1694), courtesy of Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
The standard edition of the Latin text is Müller (2003, in the Teubner series). Other editions include Smith (1975, text and commentary of the Cena only), Sage (1969, including commentary), Habermehl (2006 and Forthcoming, §79 to end, with detailed commentary in German), and Schmeling (2011, comprehensive English-language commentary).
There are several general introductions to the ancient novel, including Hägg (1983), Holzberg (1995), and the collection of papers in Schmeling (2003). On the Latin novel in particular, recent surveys include Walsh (1970), Harrison (1999) and Hofmann (1999). On Petronius specifically, Courtney (2001) provides a commentary-style companion, and there are a number of monograph-length studies of the Satyrica, including Sullivan (1968a), Slater (1990), Conte (1996a), and Rimell (2002).
General introductions to the Roman Empire can be found in Potter (2006) or, more briefly, in Wells (1992). On Nero, see the biography by Griffin (1984). For the historical context of the Satyrica / Trimalchio in particular, see D’Arms (1981) and Veyne (1961, in French).
There are several comprehensive bibliographies on past scholarship on Petronius: Schmeling and Stuckey (1977), Smith (1985), and Vannini (2007). The primary tool with which to find recent bibliography (and a full list of journal abbreviations) is the annual French publication L’année philologique.