Title: The Satyricon Author: Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter) Creation Date: c. 60 CE (Neronian period) Location: Rome
Summary
The Satyricon survives only in fragments, but what remains is extraordinary. We follow Encolpius, a disreputable young man wandering through the cities of southern Italy with his lover Giton and his rival Ascyltos, getting into scrapes involving theft, fraud, sexual misadventure, and narrow escapes from violent hosts. The surviving centrepiece is the "Cena Trimalchionis" (Trimalchio's Dinner Party) — one of the great set-pieces of world literature — in which the protagonists attend an extravagant banquet hosted by Trimalchio, a fabulously wealthy freedman (former slave) whose vulgarity, pretension, and morbid obsession with death are rendered in devastating comic detail.
Trimalchio serves impossible courses (a pig stuffed with live birds, a zodiac platter), weeps over his own future tomb inscription, and stages a mock funeral in the middle of dinner. Around him, his freedmen guests boast, gossip, philosophise, and display every variety of social insecurity. It is a portrait of new money in a decadent empire that remains hard to match for vividness or savage comedy.
Why This Book Matters
The Satyricon is the earliest surviving extended prose fiction in Latin and one of the earliest realistic narratives in any language. It captures a social world — the Roman Empire's commercial underclass of freed slaves, merchants, and adventurers — that is almost entirely absent from "respectable" classical literature. Where Virgil and Horace depict Rome from above, Petronius depicts it from below: its taverns, brothels, markets, and dining rooms. The Satyricon preserves one of the richest surviving samples of colloquial Latin — the language of ordinary people rather than literary elites. F. Scott Fitzgerald originally titled The Great Gatsby "Trimalchio," acknowledging his debt to Petronius' portrait of gaudy wealth.
The work is also a crucial document of the Roman Empire at its most decadent. It shows what happens to a civilisation drowning in wealth and stripped of meaningful public purpose — a portrait that has resonated with every subsequent age of excess.
Historical Context
Petronius almost certainly wrote during the reign of Nero (54–68 CE), and is generally identified with the "Petronius Arbiter" described by Tacitus as Nero's "arbiter of elegance" — a courtier of exquisite taste who was eventually forced to commit suicide during a political purge. Nero's Rome was a byword for extravagance, cruelty, and artistic pretension, and the Satyricon captures this world with an insider's knowledge and a satirist's eye. The prominence of freedmen in the novel reflects one of Roman society's most distinctive features: a vast population of former slaves who could become enormously wealthy.
Literary Significance
The Satyricon helped establish the comic-realistic novel. Its use of multiple literary registers — from high epic parody to obscene street slang — was revolutionary. The Trimalchio episode achieves an almost Dickensian density of social observation. Petronius' narrative technique is restless and improvisatory, mixing prose and verse, shifting between genres (romance, satire, epic parody, ghost story) with dizzying speed. The work's fragmentary state gives it a modernist quality — we enter in the middle, key connections are missing, the ending is lost. Fellini's 1969 film adaptation captured this quality brilliantly. The Satyricon's influence extends through the picaresque tradition (Cervantes, Smollett, Fielding) and into modern satires of wealth and decadence.
Research Notes
Included as the essential Roman satirical novel and as an irreplaceable portrait of the non-elite Roman world. Sarah Ruden's translation is colloquial and energetic. J. P. Sullivan's Penguin translation (1965, revised 1986) is a solid alternative. The fragmentary nature of the text means any edition involves editorial decisions about arrangement and lacunae; readers should be aware that we have perhaps a tenth of the original work. The Trimalchio episode can be read independently and is sometimes published on its own.
The Reading
I am Encolpius, and I am ruined before this account begins. A god I will name presently has taken against me, and the cities of Campania — Puteoli first, then wherever the next bed and the next meal can be cadged — have served as the stage on which I am made daily ridiculous. I had an education once. I read my Cicero, I know my Virgil well enough to misquote him at need, and yet here I am in a portico, listening to a man called Agamemnon — a rhetorician, a teacher of declamation, the sort who lives off the sons of provincial merchants — howl against the decay of oratory while the rain comes in sideways through the colonnade.
"The students are idiots because the teachers are idiots," Agamemnon is shouting, "and the teachers are idiots because the parents want entertainment rather than education." He says this as if he himself were not paid by precisely those parents to entertain precisely those idiots. The whole pretence of the schools is a swindle, and Agamemnon's tirade against the swindle is part of the swindle. I nod gravely. I am hungry. Nodding gravely is what I do when I am hungry and somebody else may be about to feed me.
Beside me stands Ascyltos, who is my friend in the sense that a wolf is a friend to another wolf at the same carcass. He is handsome, broke, and faithless. We share a lodging when we can afford one and we share a quarrel always, because we share also a boy — Giton, sixteen, with a mouth made for poetry and a calculating eye behind it. Giton is mine. Giton is also Ascyltos's, when my back is turned. The arrangement is a wound that opens fresh each morning and is bandaged each night with wine.
I should confess the curse, because everything that happens to me happens under it. The god Priapus — yes, that Priapus, the squat garden divinity with the enormous scarlet phallus carved out of figwood, the protector of orchards and the patron of every back-alley shrine in Italy — has decided to ruin me as Poseidon ruined Odysseus. Where the hero of Ithaca could not reach home, I cannot reach the more modest destination at the centre of my own lap. The wrath of Priapus expresses itself, in a man, as a comprehensive and humiliating failure of the appropriate apparatus. I will not pretend the joke is not on me. The joke is the entire engine of my misfortunes, and I am the wheel it turns.
Between Agamemnon's lecture and the dinner that follows there is a hash of misery I can scarcely keep in order. A stolen cloak: ours, then not ours, then in a market being haggled over by the thief while we and the thief pretend to argue about a different cloak entirely. Ascyltos and I trading Giton like a borrowed lamp. Priestesses of Priapus — a woman named Quartilla and her terrible household — who take us up, lock us in, and subject us to sexual rituals the precise mechanics of which I will not relate, since the act of relating them brought no relief at the time and I see no reason it should bring relief now. I emerged from that house with my dignity in worse condition than the cloak.
We attach ourselves to Agamemnon because Agamemnon has been invited to dine at the house of Trimalchio, and Trimalchio's table is the wonder of Puteoli, and we have not eaten properly in two days. So with Giton in tow we present ourselves at the gate of a freedman so wealthy he is rumoured to own estates he has never visited and slaves he has never counted.
The porter wears green livery. A magpie in a golden cage shrieks a greeting in Latin and possibly Greek, I cannot tell which is worse. Above the door a sign reads that any slave caught leaving the premises without permission will receive a hundred lashes — a tasteful welcome. The wall of the entrance hall is painted with the autobiography of our host: here Trimalchio arrives in Rome a long-haired slave-boy; here Minerva, goddess of wisdom, conducts him by the hand into the city; here he learns the keeping of accounts and is made a steward; here Mercury, god of profit, lifts him to a high throne; here Fortune empties her cornucopia at his feet, and the three Fates spin his thread of gold. I have seen the lives of emperors painted with less flattery. I have seen them painted with more accuracy.
We enter the dining room and there he is. Trimalchio is propped on a litter, swaddled in scarlet, his bald head poking from a napkin trimmed with the broad senatorial stripe to which a freedman has no right. Rings on every finger; a great gilt ring on the joint of the next; a silver toothpick at his teeth. He is playing terebinth on a board with green and white counters in place of dice, since dice are vulgar. The hors d'oeuvres arrive on the back of a bronze donkey with two panniers — white olives in one, black in the other — and above the donkey a silver gridiron holds dormice glazed with honey and rolled in poppy seeds, hot and steaming. Then a wooden hen on a straw nest, the guests scrabbling beneath her for what prove to be pastry eggs, each containing a small fig-pecker drowned in peppered yolk. Then a hare fitted with feathered wings, posed as Pegasus. Then a wild boar wearing a cap of freedom — the conical felt cap put on slaves at their manumission — and when the carver opens the beast, a flock of live thrushes blunders into the air to be netted by bird-catchers waiting in the corners. Then a pig, brought back from the kitchen because the cook claims to have forgotten to gut it; Trimalchio in mock fury orders him stripped for flogging; the cook is pardoned and told to gut it now, in front of us; he slits the belly and out tumble sausages and blood puddings already cooked, packed neatly inside. We applaud. We are meant to applaud. Each course is not food but conjuring, and the conjuring is the meal.
Alas for us wretches, what nothings we are! So will we all be, when Death takes us below. So let us live well, while we're able to do so.
The thing is grotesque and the thing is sincere, and I cannot, for the life of me, decide which condition is more pitiable. He is terrified of dying. The whole banquet is a noisy argument with his own mortality, and the silver bones are losing it for him.
He produces the inscription planned for his tomb. He reads it aloud, slowly, savouring each clause. The dimensions of the monument; the sculptures along its sides; the ships carved into the stone (representing his merchant fleet, which made him); a sundial, so that anyone who looks up to read the time must also read his name; and finally the epitaph itself: "Here lies Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus. He was voted a member of the priesthood in his absence. He could have been on every committee in Rome, but he chose not to. Pious, brave, faithful, he started with nothing and left thirty million sesterces. And he never once listened to a philosopher." At "thirty million" he begins to weep. His wife Fortunata — a stout woman in pearls who runs his household with the grip of a stevedore — weeps in answer. The freedmen weep. The slaves weep, because slaves weep on cue. I weep, professionally, the way a guest must weep, while wondering whether at the next course there will be eels.
The freedmen at the lower tables, meanwhile, are the part of this evening I would not trade for the price of my own freedom, were it for sale. They talk among themselves in Latin a grammarian would faint at — proverbs, vulgarisms, oaths that bend the cases out of true — and they talk about the things ordinary Romans actually talk about: the price of bread, the insolence of slaves, the price of bath fees, the weather, the price of grave-plots, the price of everything. Echion the rag-merchant defends the local games against some scholar at his elbow who has been sniffing at them: "We're going to have a wonderful show in three days — not just the same old gladiators, but real freedmen, fighting to the death! Our patron's not stingy — he's going to give us cold steel, no running away, pure butchery right in the middle of the arena where the whole crowd can see it!" Niceros, prompted for a story, gives us a werewolf — his friend Niceros knew once, who on a night of full moon stripped naked at a crossroads, urinated in a careful circle around his clothes, and turned at once into a wolf and bounded into the woods, leaving the clothes turned to stone where they lay. Niceros tells this as a man tells you what he ate for lunch. He believes it; he does not understand why anyone would not.
Habinnas the stonemason — a man who builds the very monuments Trimalchio dreams of being remembered by — arrives late and very drunk, having just come from another dinner, the menu of which he proceeds to describe in tedious inferior detail. Half of him is showing off. The other half is reminding Trimalchio that other rich men in this town also throw parties. Display answering display: that is the engine of the whole evening, and indeed of the whole city.
The end, when it comes, is the only ending such a dinner can have. Trimalchio, by now thoroughly drunk and maudlin, calls for his will to be read aloud — the whole document, every legacy, every freedom granted to faithful slaves — and weeps fresh tears at his own generosity. He commands the funeral trumpeters to play him a dirge as if he were already laid out on the bier. The trumpeters play. The neighbours, hearing the dirge, conclude that Trimalchio's house is on fire. The fire brigade arrives. The fire brigade breaks down the door with axes and floods the dining room with water from their leather buckets, and in that confusion — slaves shrieking, water everywhere, a soaked Trimalchio still trying to address his mourners — we get up and we go.
After such a night the world cannot help but be smaller. Giton and I quarrel and reconcile and quarrel again; Ascyltos drifts off, mercifully, into some other chapter of someone else's misfortune. In his place attaches himself to us one Eumolpus — a poet, he insists, though the audiences at the public baths who have just pelted him with stones for reciting his verses there appear to hold another opinion. Eumolpus has a face like a damp loaf and a vocabulary like a damaged Virgil. He delivers, in our hearing and at appalling length, his theory of the decline of all the arts: painting decayed since the conquest of Egypt, poetry decayed since money replaced honour, everything decayed, everything finished. He is, of course, himself a fraud, his own verses are worse than the ones he condemns, and his appetite for money is as undisguised as a beggar's hand. I cannot decide whether to despise him or adopt him. I adopt him.
And there, in the middle of a sentence — in the middle of a fraud, in the middle of a meal, in the middle of the city of legacy hunters under the dome of Italian sky — my account breaks off. The roll is torn. The next page is missing. Encolpius, the wretch, the scholar, the cuckolded boy-lover, the impotent darling of Priapus, walks out of the visible world still chewing.
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Sarah Ruden's translation (Hackett Publishing, 2000) is colloquial and energetic — the recommended starting point. J. P. Sullivan's Penguin Classics edition is a reliable alternative. Readers should know that we have perhaps a tenth of the original text; what we have is more than enough.
Translated by Sarah Ruden. Colloquial, energetic, and thoroughly annotated — the best modern English version.
Translated by J.P. Sullivan. The classic Penguin Classics edition — updated translation with a thorough literary and historical introduction.
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