What we in our modern editions read as the 141 chapters of the Satyrica is not a continuous and coherent narrative but a collection of larger and smaller fragments and excerpts, transmitted in various manuscripts and assembled into one text by humanist scholars between 1482 and 1669. There are also 25 smaller fragments from authors between the sixth and thirteenth centuries with quotations from the Satyrica that are not attested in our manuscripts, and another 26 poems in several ninth-century manuscripts that have been ascribed to Petronius either in the manuscripts or by the French scholars Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) and Claude Binet (c. 1533–1600).
There was, however, once a complete manuscript of the Satyrica, written between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, that survived the so-called Dark Ages and was kept in the ninth century in a monastery in the Loire Valley, as we know from several quotations by Heiric (†876), monk in Saint-Germain-d’Auxerre, from which later scribes made the extracts in our extant manuscripts. This manuscript tradition consists of four classes:1
Thus, it took a long time from 1482 to 1664 until the disiecta membra of the Satyrica were published in printed editions. The first complete edition that united the texts of all four classes as we have them in our modern editions was published by a certain Michael Hadrianides in Amsterdam in 1669, and the division into 141 chapters goes back to Pieter Burman (Utrecht 1709).
The name of the author of the Satyrica is given in the manuscripts as “Petronius,” “Petronius Arbiter,” “Petronius Arbiter Affranius,” “Petronius Arbiter Satiricus,” or “Satyrus.” This means that the only secure name of the author is “Petronius” because “Satiricus,” etc., is wrongly derived from the title of his work, and “Arbiter” is taken over from a famous chapter in Tacitus’ Annals; Tacitus mentions four men, among whom is a certain Petronius, who in AD 66 had committed suicide (Ann. 16.17.1); then he sketches a vivid portrait of this courtier of Nero who was proconsul in Bithynia and later consul and who was notorious for his extravagant and voluptuous life style: “He spent his days sleeping and his nights working or enjoying himself,” Tacitus writes, “and had made luxury a fine art” (16.18f.). After his consulate, “he returned to his old vices or pretended at least to do so, and was admitted to the small circle of Nero’s intimates as tutor in refinement” (arbiter elegantiae, i.e. referee in matters of elegance and taste). Later, he fell in disgrace with Nero and celebrated his suicide by opening his veins, binding them up, and re-opening them again, just as the fancy took him, talking with his friends and listening to their frivolous songs and light verse, having a good meal and sleeping for a while so that his death, though forced on him, should appear natural. In his testament, he refused to flatter Nero or any of the courtiers: “Instead he wrote out a full description of the Emperor’s vicious activities, prefaced with the names of his male and female partners, and specifying the novel form his lust had taken,” and had this document sent under seal to Nero (trans. Sullivan 1968a, 29f.).
It is obvious that the scribes of the manuscripts identified the author of the Satyrica with a consul and courtier of Nero. The same person is mentioned in similar light by Pliny the Elder, who says that “T. Petronius, a former consul, when he was going to die through Nero’s jealousy and envy, broke his fluorspar wine-dipper, which had cost 3,000,000 sesterces, so that the Emperor’s table would not inherit it” (HN 37.20), and by Plutarch, who criticizes the unscrupulous practice of accusing silly people “of tendencies and weaknesses the very opposite of their real failings,” which “may take the form of sneering at reckless and extravagant spenders for their petty-minded and sordid ways, as Titus Petronius did this with Nero” (Mor. 60 d–e, trans. Sullivan 1968a, 27–30). There is no doubt that Tacitus, Pliny, and Plutarch are speaking of one and the same person though Pliny and Plutarch give “Titus” as his first name, whereas the only manuscript of Tacitus (Laur. 68.2, s. XI) in chapter 17.1 has no praenomen but in chapter 18.1 the praenomen “C.” (Caius). However, is this person the author of the Satyrica?
The problem is complicated because nowhere in the ancient tradition is it said that this T. or C. Petronius has written the Satyrica and because, on inscriptions and papyri, several Petronii have come to light with different first names and cognomina and with a record of various offices held; none, however, can with certainty be identified with Nero’s courtier. The hottest candidate was P. Petronius Niger, cos. suff. AD 62, who is now usually identified with Nero’s courtier and the author, but there is no evidence that he ever was proconsul in Bithynia (Völker and Rohmann 2011). Nevertheless, scholars have tried to find analogies between Tacitus’ description of C. Petronius and the characters of the novel, to discover words and phrases from Tacitus’ chapter in the text of the novel, to see Petronius as a figure within the literary and artistic activities at Nero’s court, and to place the action of the novel, the characters, the events, geographic and personal names, the daily life, the society and its members (slaves, freedmen, citizens), and the legal background of some scenes against the historical and cultural evidence of the Neronian age, and thus anchor both author and novel around AD 60 (Rose 1971; Sullivan 1968a, 1985).
Other scholars look at relations between the novel and contemporary literature and interpret Trimalchio as a caricature either of Nero or the philosopher Seneca, or the poet Eumolpus as that of Seneca, with special reference to the phonetic assonance of senem calvum, said of Trimalchio (27.1), and senex canus, said of Eumolpus (83.7) and find numerous allusions to Lucan’s Pharsalia in the poem on the Civil War (chapters 119–124), although the interdependence of both poems has repeatedly been doubted (Baldwin 1981; George 1974; Smith 1975, 214ff.; Sullivan 1968b; 1985, 1675ff.; Völker and Rohmann 2011, 670ff.). However, none of the arguments is convincing or supported by evidence outside the text and Seneca’s and Lucan’s writings, so that the identification of Tacitus’ Petronius with the author of the novel was further questioned and the Satyrica given a date by some at the end of the first century, or in the first half of the second century (Daviault 2001; Flobert 2003, 2006; Henderson 2010; Martin 1975, 2000; Marmorale 1948, put the date at the end of the second or beginning of the third century AD, and Ratti 1978 between the second and the fourth century AD; see Vannini 2007, 85ff.). One should bear in mind that Tacitus’ report of the career, manners, and lifestyle of C. Petronius “Arbiter” is not in the least proof for his being the author of the Satyrica—on the contrary, it suggests that this person, for whom not a single line or work is attested, could not have written such a long, complicated, multi-leveled ingenious work of fiction. The author of the Satyrica was highly talented and extremely well read in both Greek and Latin literature and must have known some of the Greek romances and comic–realistic novels such as the Iolaus, the Tinouphis, or the Phoenikika. The setting in Neronian time or a bit later does not require contemporary composition, especially since many Greek novels are also set in a distant historical past. A date of composition in the first half of the second century by an otherwise unknown Petronius (later erroneously identified with the “Arbiter” in the Annals), or an author taking the name of Nero’s courtier as nom de plume, would suit better the history of the genre and the type of author demanded by such a work.
The title given by the manuscripts (Satyricon, Satiricon, satirarum liber) leads to the Greek neuter plural Σατυρικά, “Stories of satyr-like things,” i.e. “Randy Stories,” because the satyrs in Greek mythology were randy and prone to sex. The form Satyricon is to be understood as Greek genitive plural (Σατυρικω̑v), governed by libri, “Books,” not as neuter singular (Σατυρικόv): the whole title can be rendered as “Books of Randy Stories.”
How many books did those Randy Stories comprise? This is difficult to say because the “book(s)” from which extracts stem contradict each other in the manuscripts and elsewhere. According to evidence, the Satyrica consisted of at least 16 books, and what remains comes from Books XIV–XVI. Müller concluded that the Quartilla episode before the Cena stood in Book XIV and that Poggio found the indication “Book XV” at the beginning of the manuscript of the Cena from Cologne, but that the Cena is too long for one book and must have covered two books, i.e. XV and XVI (Müller and Ehlers 1983, 408ff.; cf. Müller 1995, xxiff.). On the other hand, van Thiel (1971, 21ff.) observed against the excessive calculations of Sullivan (1968a, 34ff.) that the average book length of the ancient Greek novels and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is 20–25 Teubner pages, so that he calculated three or even more books for the Cena; this would considerably reduce the total length of the novel to 400–600 pages, of which some 150 are preserved (Harrison 1998a).
The text is a first-person narrative told by a certain Encolpius, who was a young man at the time of the story, but seems considerably older at the moment of narration. He is accompanied by his boy-love, the young Giton, and a third youth called Ascyltus, who also has designs on Giton and tries, with varying success, to pinch him from Encolpius. This love triangle lives on the fringes of society, makes its living with little thefts, flatters the rich, cheats the gullible, and is always in search of a free meal and sex. Thus, they move from place to place, have various encounters with all kinds of people, and have all sorts of adventures that form the bulk of Encolpius’ recollections. When our text begins, they are in a Greek city (81.3), a small town at the bay of Naples, a fictitious place reminding one of seaside resorts such as Puteoli or Baiae, though Jensson (2004, 122ff.) adduces good arguments for Naples itself.
1–11: Encolpius discusses with Agamemnon, the rhetor who runs a nearby school, about the decline of rhetoric and education. When Ascyltus leaves the group, Encolpius looks for him, but gets lost in the city. An old woman leads him into a brothel where he meets Ascyltus. Both succeed in fleeing the place and finding their lodgings, where they meet Giton, who complains that Ascyltus was going to force him to have sex. Ascyltus, after quarreling with Encolpius for a while, decides to leave the two the next morning.
12–15: That same evening, Encolpius and Ascyltus try to sell at the market a stolen cloak to a farmer who by chance wears the old tunic that the friends had lost earlier. They make sure that the gold coins sewed into the tunic are still there, and after a debate with the police the two parties eventually take possession of their respective clothes.
16–26.6: Sitting at dinner in their lodgings, they are interrupted by Quartilla, priestess of Priapus, and her two servant maids Psyche and Pannychis; Quartilla complains that the youths had disrupted the rites of Priapus that she had been celebrating: she fears a “3-day fever” (an attack of malaria), for which she seeks remedy from the sacrilegious youths. After they promise their silence forever and offer to help her overcome the fever, Quartilla explains that sex is the required remedy. She and Psyche make approaches to the young men, but in spite of intensive care(ssing) and a whole bottle of aphrodisiac emptied by Encolpius, he remains impotent, though apparently successful with Quartilla a while before (24.7). After some disturbance caused by burglars and the unsavory kisses of a disgusting cinaedus (“Queen”), Quartilla proposes that Giton deflower the 7-year-old Pannychis. While Giton and Pannychis are locked up in a room, Quartilla and Encolpius watch them through a peephole in the door.
26.7–78: Cena Trimalchionis: Two days later, one of Agamemnon’s servants calls the trio to a banquet hosted by the immensely rich freedman Trimalchio. Encolpius carefully describes the various dishes and circumstances under which they are served; the superstitious, stupid, and boastful character of the host who makes a fool of himself through his lack of education and ordinary behavior; the talks of other freedmen at the table; and finally Trimalchio’s wish to witness how he will be mourned and praised after his death. However, the funeral trumpets are taken for fire signals. As the fire brigade rushes in, the trio escapes with Agamemnon, who exits from the story.
79–82: Old jealousies flare up again, and when Giton declares Ascyltus his lover, Encolpius locks himself up for 3 days and then attempts to kill Ascyltus, but to his own relief he is disarmed by a soldier.
83–99: Encolpius enters an art gallery where he meets the seedy poet Eumolpus and strikes up a conversation: Eumolpus speaks about his love affair with a boy in Pergamon and declaims against the decline of the art of painting, and when Encolpius admires a painting of the fall of Troy, Eumolpus extemporizes 65 verses on that topic until he is chased away by people throwing stones. He and Encolpius arrange to meet for dinner, provided that Eumolpus refrains from reciting his poems. In the bath, Encolpius discovers Giton, who complains about Ascyltus’ bad treatment and begs Encolpius to take him home, where they enjoy their reunion. During dinner, Eumolpus makes advances on Giton and again recites verses, which prompts Encolpius to try to throw him out. Giton and Eumolpus imprison Encolpius in the room, who plans to hang himself in despair when both return. Giton pretends to commit suicide with a razor, which is just a stage prop that barber apprentices use to learn their craft. After this love comedy, Eumolpus and the innkeeper argue and come to blows; Encolpius locks himself with Giton and watches the fighting through a peephole in the door. Suddenly, Ascyltus, who had Giton searched for by the police and was looking for him all over the inn, breaks into the room but does not find him because Giton has hidden under the bed. After some quarreling between Ascyltus, Encolpius, and Eumolpus, the boy betrays himself by sneezing, but eventually Encolpius, Eumolpus, and Giton are reconciled, whereas Ascyltus here exits the story. The new trio (Encolpius, Eumolpus, and Giton) leaves the inn and follows a seaman on board a ship.
100–115: On the ship, Encolpius overhears menacing words of indignation obviously uttered in a dream by a man whose voice sounds familiar, and a woman who mentions the name “Giton.” Eumolpus says that a certain Lichas is the owner of the ship and is bringing a lady called Tryphaena from exile to Tarent. This news almost kills Encolpius because—in a section of the novel now lost—he obviously had had intimate dealings with Lichas and his wife Hedyle, and had stolen a sacred rattle and robe of Isis, tutelary deity of Lichas’ ship. There also must have been a relation with Tryphaena, who gave up Encolpius as lover for Giton and whom Encolpius later probably pinched.3 After sketching various schemes of escape from that dangerous ship on which they are locked as Ulysses in the cave of the Cyclops, Encolpius and Giton are disguised and branded by Eumolpus as runaway slaves with shaven heads. However, a passenger reveals their disguise to Lichas and Tryphaena, prompting an anagnorisis, a scene of recognition: Tryphaena recognizes Giton from his voice, Lichas recognizes Encolpius by fingering his genitals. A kind of trial begins with a harsh accusation by Lichas, framed by two perfectly delivered pleas by Eumolpus. Soon the conflict turns violent and, as in an epic poem, after fighting and signing a truce contract, the parties are reconciled. Eumolpus tries to liven up the party with a fatuous poem on hair, various jokes about the unreliability of women, and the novella of the Widow of Ephesus, which is received by the seamen with much laughter but by Tryphaena with a heavy blush and by Lichas with an angry outburst. Suddenly, a storm comes up: Lichas is swept overboard and drowns. Tryphaena with her slaves gets in a lifeboat and disappears from the story, while Encolpius and Giton await their death in the waves. Fishermen who enter the wrecked ship in search of prey rescue the lovers and also discover Eumolpus murmuring verses down in the captain’s cabin, who is most displeased at being interrupted in his poetic furor. The fishermen bring them to their huts, where the next morning Lichas’ corpse is washed ashore. This leads Encolpius to long reflections about human fate. They cremate the body, and Eumolpus composes a funerary epigram.
116–141: The three continue to a town that they see from the top of a hill and learn from a farm manager that it is the once-famous town of Croton, which is full of legacy hunters. Eumolpus schemes to trick the legacy hunters and have a good time for a while: he will pretend to be a very rich but childless landowner from Africa, while Encolpius and Giton pose as his slaves and spread the news that he has lost a huge amount of money in a shipwreck nearby, though he was little concerned because he had copious loans and properties in Africa and daily awaited transfers of money. Encolpius advises Eumolpus to feign bad health by coughing and suffering from constipation and diarrhea, to make up daily his balances, and to revise regularly his last will. Having rehearsed this mime to everybody’s satisfaction and amusement, they set off for Croton, and to make the journey more enjoyable, Eumolpus recites his epic poem on the Civil War (119–124). In Croton, the news of the rich but heirless landowner from Africa spreads quickly, and the legacy hunters greet them with all sorts of invitations, banquets, and gifts. Philomela, a most honest mother, even offers her boy and girl for sex. A rich lady of easy virtue called Circe with a passion for lower-class men falls in love with Encolpius, who, playing the role of the rich man’s slave, had assumed the name Polyaenus (an epithet for Ulysses in Homer), and sends her maid Chrysis to invite him for a rendezvous. However, eventually she is left deeply frustrated because “Polyaenus” suffers from impotence. After an exchange of letters with Circe, to whom Encolpius pledges his love, she orders the witch Proselenus to try a magic charm on him, but he disappoints her again and is chased away. Realizing that he is impotent also in the presence of Giton, he returns to Proselenus, who hands him over to the treatment of Oenothea, priestess of Priapus. However, when, after many magic rites, she tries to cure him finally with a leather phallus and wipes his genitals with a bunch of nettles, he escapes the treatment. At home again, he complains that he has become the victim of the wrath of Priapus, but Chrysis enters the room and declares that she is madly in love with him. Eventually, Encolpius’ potency seems to be restored (140.12f.). In the meantime, the situation for Eumolpus has become difficult because no ship with money has arrived from Africa; the legacy hunters grow skeptical and indignant. To prevent the disclosure of the fraud, Eumolpus dictates his will in which he bequeaths his fortune to those willing to cut his corpse to pieces and eat it in public after his death. A certain Gorgias declares to be so prepared, and the last section is a speech by Eumolpus or, rather, one of the legacy hunters, in which he tries to dispel scruples with recommendations for the cooking and seasoning of human meat and some historical examples for cannibalism.
The question remains: what happened before our text begins and how does the story continue? For an hypothetical reconstruction of the whole novel, one can draw from four sources of information: (1) the fragments in ancient literature that are quoted as coming from Petronius or were attributed to him by modern scholars (51 according to Müller 1995); (2) the information given by Encolpius—the narrator—and persons in the narrative in retrospective soliloquies and dialogues about events that had happened earlier or will happen later but that do not occur in our extant text; (3) the conventions of ancient, especially Greek, erotic fiction; and (4) some assumptions about what must or may have happened in the lacunae between the excerpted passages.
Most scholars adopted and developed ideas first put forward by Bücheler (1862) and Klebs (1889) that, at the beginning of the story in Massilia,4 Encolpius had committed some offences against Priapus, the ithyphallic god of fertility, whose wooden statues with an enormous erected red phallus served as scare-crows in Roman gardens. Therefore, he was stricken by Priapus with impotence, and this wrath of Priapus followed him throughout the story until he was finally healed from his defect by the god himself in his sanctuary in Lampsacus at the Hellespont. In a short poem (139.2), Encolpius compares his sufferings from the gravis ira Priapi with the fates of mythical heroes like Hercules, Laomedon, and Pelias who were persecuted by other deities, but mainly with that of Ulysses who had blinded Polyphemus, the son of Neptune, and had to suffer the wrath of Neptune until, after a period of long wanderings, he could return to Ithaca. Since there are more allusions to the Odyssey in Encolpius’ narrative, scholars thought that the wrath of Priapus was the overarching theme of the novel and calculated a 24-book structure analogous to that of the Odyssey (Schmeling 2011, xxiiff.; Sullivan 1968a, 34ff.; van Thiel 1971).
Other scholars doubted this reconstruction, the 24 books, the wrath of Priapus as leitmotiv of the Satyrica, and the final redemption of the hero in the shrine of Priapus in Lampsacus (Baldwin 1973; Slater 1990, 40f.). In his new and stimulating reconstruction, Jensson (2002, 2004) interprets the two crucial fragments I and IV to the effect that Encolpius, a Greek in Massilia and a poor man, was a worshipper of the wooden effigies of Priapus found throughout the gardens of that town because he himself was on par with him, i.e. his penis was of similar dimensions. During a pestilence in Massilia, he had offered himself to be publicly fed for a whole year and was then, dressed as a scapegoat (he is called latro “thief” and pharmace “scapegoat” by Lichas, 107.15), led around the city with curses and finally banned from it. Perhaps already in Massilia he had affairs with Tryphaena, Hedyle,5 a certain Doris (126.18), and the boy Giton, and when he, as an exul (81.3), came on board the ship of Lichas he again met Hedyle, Tryphaena, and Giton, two other exules, from whose various (sexual) relations the later conflicts on Lichas’ ship arose. This first voyage took the party, probably via Rome where Encolpius had been during the Saturnalia in the middle of December (69.9), to the Bay of Naples where in a big harbor city Encolpius together with Giton (and Hedyle?) escaped from the ship after he had stolen the robe and sistrum of Isis (114.5). While they were fleeing Lichas and Tryphaena (what happened to Hedyle is unclear), Encolpius and Giton made a living on petty crimes as we learn from Encolpius’ retrospective monologue (81.3–5),6 from his letter to Circe (130.1–6), and the episode of the stolen tunic and the gold coins sewed into the cloak (12–15). At that time, Ascyltus seems to have joined Encolpius and Giton, before the first chapter of our text begins.
The crime Encolpius committed against Priapus, therefore, did not happen in Massilia but was the inexpiabile scelus (17.6) at the shrine of Priapus of which Quartilla accuses him and which consisted of impersonating Priapus himself with the help of his oversized phallus. Encolpius seems to allude to this scene in his prayer to Priapus (133.3) when he says that he did not lay hands on temples as a sacrilegious enemy but that he was poor and worn by strained circumstances and thus had committed a crime not with his whole body—“but only with my penis”, one has to complete the sentence. Moreover, the wrath of Priapus is not always effective since Encolpius is sometimes perfectly able to enjoy sex; he is only rather surprised to find that the god’s punishment should hit him again in Croton, so far away from that Greek city and so long after that hybrid performance during Quartilla’s priapic rituals.
What happened after the Croton episode? It is certain, based on comparison with the Greek novels, that the episodic structure continued, and the story of Eumolpus’ African estates may hint to a continuation on the other side of the Mediterranean. From there, a journey to Egypt, the fabulous wonderland of ancient fiction, is possible, but remains a speculation. A second factor could be Encolpius’ jealousy for rivals of Giton, who permeate the action from the beginning and form the changing constellations within the triangle Encolpius–Giton–rival: Tryphaena, Hedyle (?), Lycurgus (?), Ascyltus, Eumolpus, Tryphaena; perhaps Eumolpus is replaced by one or more persons in the final sections of the novel. In any case, the two voyages on the ship of Lichas before chapter 1 of the extant text and in chapters 100–115 are structural axes and organizing elements of the plot, such that one may expect similar voyages before the end of the story. Whether Encolpius finally would return to his hometown, as the lovers in the Greek novels or Loukios in the (ps.-) Lucianic Onos do, or stay in another city in the Roman Empire as Lucius in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, remains unclear as well. See Jensson (2004, 103ff., 171ff.); Schmeling (2011, xxiiif., 549); Sullivan (1968a, 76ff.); van Thiel (1971, 50f., 61f.); and Walsh (1970, 76).
The central and most coherent episodes are chapters 26.7–78.8, where Encolpius narrates the dinner in the house of the rich freedman Trimalchio that he Giton, Ascyltus, and Agamemnon attended. It offers a kaleidoscope of scenes in which other freedmen, neighbors and friends of Trimalchio, discuss problems of their daily lives—family matters, economics, moral decay—tell stories, have words with Encolpius and his friends, whose rhetorical education and intellectual superiority they consider arrogance, and enjoy a variety of dishes, entertainment, and surprises their host provides. Trimalchio, however, does not realize that he often annoys his guests with incoherent table conversation: he tries to show off his learning and constantly gets things wrong, so that our friends often cannot keep a straight face and burst out with laughter. The speeches of Trimalchio and his fellow freedmen in Encolpius’ ironical rendering are an important source for the spoken “vulgar” Latin that differs considerably from the “urban prose” of the other parts of the Satyrica (Boyce 1991; Petersmann 1977).
The Cena belongs to a literary tradition that goes back to Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposium in the fourth century BC and extends to the Cena Cypriani and Macrobius’ Saturnalia in late antiquity. Its main literary models are Plato’s Symposium and Satire 2.8 of Horace, in which the comic poet Fundanius tells a friend of the banquet given by Nasidienus (Bodel 1999, 39f.). Both Nasidienus and Trimalchio are social climbers who impress their guests with extravagant and surprise dishes and old wines, dominate the conversation with banal stories and silly remarks, leave their guests for a while (Nasidienus to give orders in the kitchen, Trimalchio to go to the toilet, freeing up their guests to talk frankly), are occasionally carried away by their emotions and dissolve into tears, and suffer a small incident: at Nasidienus’, a baldachin collapses and covers guests and dishes with lots of dust; at Trimalchio’s, a young acrobat falls on his arm but without hurting him seriously; finally, at both banquets, the guests, being no longer able to stand their hosts’ excesses, lose their appetites and eventually flee. There are also parallels between the guests: Maecenas at Nasidienius’ has his counterpart in the rhetor Agamemnon; Nomentanus, the crawler in Horace, in the freedman Hermeros; and the uninvited “shadows” (umbrae) of Maecenas, Vibidius, and Servilius Baltro correspond, respectively, to Encolpius, Giton, and Ascyltus brought along by Agamemnon.
As to the Symposium, the intertextual relations lie in some structural features and in the speeches that form the backbone of Plato’s dialogue and those of the freedmen: the pleader Phileros is, as the sophist Pausanias, “a cynical advocate of moral indifference,” whereas poor Ganymedes defends, like Phaedrus, the old moral values and religious traditions; Seleucus, lamenting his dead friend Chrysanthus, is the same “pedantic purveyor of pseudo-scientific medical wisdom” as the physician Eryximachus; Niceros and Aristophanes are both first reluctant to speak because they are afraid to be ridiculous, and then both tell a story about the duality of man: Niceros about the double nature of a soldier who turned out to be a werewolf, Aristophanes about the original dual nature of man as a globular being with double limbs and organs; the mason Habinnas who, coming with a great entourage from another party, arrives late and already drunken, as does Alcibiades at Agathon’s (whose role as host is played by Trimalchio), both “introducing and prompting the final revelation of the main character” (quotations from Bodel 1999, 40), i.e. Trimalchio and Socrates; finally, both dinner parties come to a sudden end with intruders from outside: a band of revelers in Plato, the fire brigade in Petronius.
Grossardt (2009) sees a string of intertextual relations with the Iliad: the mural painting with scenes from Iliad and Odyssey in Trimalchio’s villa (29.9); the interlude of the homeristae performing scenes from the Homeric poems (59.3); the kitchen slave playing the role of mad Aias when he carves the cooked calf (59.7); the Mauerschau (Il. 3.161ff.) parodied in Hermeros describing to Encolpius the participants of the banquet (37f.); the pleading of warriors for leniency reflected in the pleadings of the cook who allegedly had forgotten to disembowel a pig (49), of the slave who had broken a cup (52.4ff.), and of the acrobat who had fallen on Trimalchio (54). However, despite these and other observations, one should ask whether this really proves the existence of a Homeric subtext or is rather meant to caricature Trimalchio’s boastful habits and his and the freedmen’s lack of education.
The idea of death so permeates the Cena that some interpret it as a Dinner of the Dead, Trimalchio’s villa as underworld, and the whole narrative as a labyrinth with a carefully balanced structure (Bodel 1994, 1999; Döpp 1991; Herzog 1989; Hope 2009): Encolpius learns that Trimalchio has a clock and trumpeter to remind him every hour how much of his lifetime has already passed (26.9); then Encolpius reads an inscription (28.7) that any slave leaving the house without the master’s permission will receive 100 strokes (i.e. it is impossible to leave the underworld) and is greeted by a magpie (28.9), a bird connected with death and underworld. Just about to enter (29.1f.), he is frightened by a huge dog watching the entrance (Cerberus) until he realizes that it is painted on the wall; later (72.7ff.), this dog comes alive and prevents the friends from leaving Trimalchio’s villa/underworld and causes Ascyltus and Encolpius to fall into a fishpond (Styx) until rescued by a butler; Giton feeds the dog with scraps from the dinner (the Sibyl calming down Cerberus with a drugged scrap in Aen. 6.417ff.), while the butler warns them that the guests must leave by a different route from which they arrived (cf. the Sibyl’s description of the downward slope Aen. 6.126ff., and Aeneas leaves the underworld through the Gates of Sleep Aen. 6.893ff.). They try in vain to find the exit and feel trapped in a new kind of labyrinth (73.1, a reference to Aeneas admiring Daedalus’ labyrinth on the temple doors at Cumae in Aen. 6.23ff.) and are forced to return to the feast (underworld) by entering the baths as they did first in 28.1, so that the whole feast starts over again and seems to be perpetuated ad infinitum until they use the confusion of the fire brigade to escape this world of the dead for good.
Other references to the realm of death and underworld are the wall paintings with scenes from Trimalchio’s life until his apotheosis (29.2ff.), which are typical for sarcophagi and monuments that designate the house as a burial chamber and the dinner as a feast among the dead (cf. Trimalchio’s remark that wine lives longer than wretched man, and the silver skeleton thrown by a slave on the table, 34.7ff.). Later, two freedmen Seleucus (42) and Habinnas (65) tell of the funerals they attended before the dinner, Seleucus lamenting the frailty of human nature. Eventually, the whole Cena culminates in the staging of Trimalchio’s own funeral, a rehearsing of his death: the reading of his will; the lament and tokens of gratitude of the servants; the instruction for Habinnas as to his statue, tomb, and epitaph; the ominous sign of the crowing cock; Trimalchio’s sketch of his life, a kind of self-obituary and laudatio funebris that balances the wall paintings in 29.2ff.; his embalming and being covered with burial garments; and the funeral music of the trumpets that causes the fire brigade to burst in and end the feast.
It is a typical feature of ancient Greek and Latin novels that the characters whose adventures are told by the narrator adopt for themselves incidentally the role of narrators and tell stories either about themselves (e.g. Xenophon’s Hippothous and Aigialeus, 3.2; 5.1.4–11; Heliodorus’ Cnemon and Calasiris, 1.9–17; 2.24.5–5.33.3), or about events they witnessed or heard from others. Most remarkable are stories told by Lucius and others in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: Aristomenes (1.5–19), Thelyphron (2.21–32), the slave of Charite’s household (8.1–14), or Lucius himself (9.5–7; 9.16–29); the most famous is that of Cupid and Psyche which an old woman tells to Charite, who is held captive by robbers (4.28–6.24).
Given its fragmentary state, the Satyrica contains only four lengthy inserted narratives: the two ghost stories of Niceros and Trimalchio and the two novellas of Eumolpus. Niceros tells the story of the transformation of a soldier into a werewolf (61f.), assuring his audience that he witnessed everything himself: he, accompanied by a soldier, departed at night to his mistress. The soldier, in a cemetery at midnight, took off his clothes and urinated a circle around them, whereupon he changed into a wolf and disappeared howling in the woods. Niceros checked those clothes and found them petrified and, deadly frightened, fought shades with his sword until, completely exhausted, he reached his mistress’ house, where he learned that a wolf had just killed all the cattle and that a servant had run a spear through his neck. Niceros immediately returned home and saw only blood, not the soldier’s clothes in the cemetery; at home, he found the soldier lying in bed, his neck being treated by a physician (Pàroli 1986; Blänsdorf 1990; Boyce 1991, 85ff.). Trimalchio takes up the topic (63) and tells a similar story about witches who had stolen the corpse of his former master’s favorite boy and exchanged it for a straw puppet. A huge and strong Cappadocian slave fought with the witches outside and ran one through with his sword, making her groan, though they all remained invisible; when the slave went back inside, he was bruised all over his body and never looked the same again: he suffered delirium and died some days later.
Ghost stories and apparitions were a favorite topic in ancient literature; in tragedy (Atossa in Aeschylus’ Persae, Laius in Seneca’s Oedipus), comedy (Menander’s Phasma, Plautus’ Mostellaria), epic (the shades of the dead in Odyssey 11, Hector and Polydorus in Aeneid 2 and 3, Erictho’s necromancy in Lucan’s Pharsalia 6), and many prose genres including the novel, as seen in the stories of Aristomenes and Thelyphron in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (1.5–19; 2.21–30) (Stramaglia 1998, 1999). Encolpius does not believe Niceros or Trimalchio, but joins the apotropaic ritual to ward off nocturnal ghosts. A belief in ghosts, werewolves, witches, and magic was not limited to the lower classes: the educated elite also believed in them, and they played a prominent role in religious and philosophical discussions until late antiquity, even in Christian authors from Tertullian to St. Augustine.
Eumolpus tells the other two stories, which belong to the genre Milesian Tales. Milesian Tales are ascribed to “Aristides of Miletus” (second/first century BC) and circulated in a Latin translation by a certain Sisenna. Only one word of the Greek and 10 short fragments of the Latin version are preserved, but a recently published papyrus might also apply. These stories were notoriously pornographic and had thus a bad reputation. Their literary form seems to have been a continuous narrative with inserted poems and a first-person Rahmenerzählung in which Aristides—presumably the innertextual narrator confused with the author—reports the stories he heard from others, perhaps at a banquet or similar occasions. In this function, they occur in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses where at the beginning the narrator promises his readers various stories “in that well-known Milesian style” and in the course of his narrative inserts numerous tales of sexually explicit and salacious content.7
In the first story, Eumolpus speaks of how he succeeded in seducing a handsome boy in Pergamon, with whose parents he had been quartered. Posing as a man of high moral principles, he was considered as one of the “philosophers” but (mis)used his position as pedagogue so that eventually his lust and, as it were, that of the boy were gratified: first, he was allowed a kiss for a pair of doves, then he was allowed to touch the boy all over for a pair of cocks, and finally full intercourse for a horse. However, when Eumolpus fails to bring the horse, the boy gets evasive; a couple of days later, Eumolpus approaches him again but the boy threatens to tell his father. Eventually, he yields to his teacher and asks twice for an encore; Eumolpus at the fourth time fails to keep up and now he threatens the boy to tell his father.
One noticed long ago (Cameron 1969; Dimundo 1986; McGlathery 1998) that this story is a reversal of another scene from Plato’s Symposium (217a2ff.), namely, Alcibiades’ narrative of how he tried to seduce his teacher Socrates who, however, refused all his overtures. It enriches the reader’s picture of Eumolpus, who, when Encolpius first encounters him in an art gallery, is described as a gray-haired, slightly shabby old man with furrows on his brow (83.7). Eumolpus introduces himself as a poet “of not completely unimportant talent,” but soon is seen “as a fit companion for Encolpius and his runaways, and as a threat to the anti-hero’s relationship with the young Giton” (Anderson 1999, 58), for whom he develops a considerable attraction.
Eumolpus also narrates the novella of the Widow of Ephesus (commentaries by Pecere 1975 and Vannini 2010, 234–263) during a cena on Lichas’ ship in order to pass the time: Tryphaena’s flirtation with Giton leads him to attack the fickle character of women, and he tells a story about the matron who was widely renowned for her pudicitia, i.e. her faithfulness and marital virtues. When her husband died, she moved with her maidservant into the tomb, refusing food and drink and firmly resolved to die. A soldier guarding some crucified robbers nearby noticed the light inside the chamber, and when he saw the corpse and the sad widow, he soon figured out the cause of her lament and how to heal it. First, he offered her his own modest meal and tried to comfort her with all the rhetorical arguments of consolation literature at his disposal. While the matron remained in her relentless grief, he found success with her maid, who accepted his wine and food and tried on her part to induce her mistress to give up her mourning. Eventually, the lady was persuaded to eat and drink, and having satisfied these basic needs she realized that the soldier was quite a good-looking man. It did not take much for him to win over the chaste lady entirely, and their first wedding night was followed by two more. During the third night, however, the parents of one of the robbers removed their son’s body from the cross for a proper burial. The soldier, terrified and fearing capital punishment for the desertion of his post, wanted to commit suicide, but the lady declared that she “would rather make a dead man useful than send a live man to death,” and ordered the soldier to fix her husband’s corpse up on the empty cross so that, as Eumolpus ironically concludes, “the people wondered next day by what means the dead man had ascended the cross.”
This novella seems to have been well known and widespread before Petronius as an example of satiric invectives against women. Its main point, however, lies in Eumolpus’ way of narration and the ironic undertones and comments he weaves in, especially the exaggerated praise of the matron’s singular chastity and virtue at the beginning and the break with these virtues at the end. When Eumolpus has the soldier realize that the woman found her desiderium for her dead husband unendurable, he means not only “regret” but implies also ardent and unfulfilled sexual desire. The soldier’s and the maidservant’s words of comfort and persuasion reveal that the poet Eumolpus is experienced in persuasion and art of consolation, as seen when he gives his audience to understand that they, of course, know the temptation that usually follows a full stomach, i.e. sex (112.1), and when he characterizes the widow as “not less pitiful than faithful” (112.7) and as a “most clever lady” (112.8).
Scholars have long noted (Fedeli 1986, 27ff.; Vannini 2010, 252f.) that the widow–maidservant–soldier triad corresponds to Dido, her sister Anna, and Aeneas in Aeneid 4, where Dido, a widow who has vowed to stay faithful to her dead husband, is persuaded by Anna to yield to her love for Aeneas. Aeneas is the foreign soldier who intrudes (metaphorically speaking) into Dido’s cave of grief and chastity; both eventually pass their wedding night in a cave where they sought shelter from a thunderstorm. Eumolpus contrives these allusions to the Aeneid, ironically undercutting his own narrative by having the maidservant twice quote a line in Latin from the Aeneid (34.38), though the story occurs in Greek-speaking Ephesus, and—given that the story stems from Aristides’ Milesian Tales—at a time when the Aeneid was not yet written at all!
The Widow of Ephesus, one of the most sophisticated and artistically elaborated narratives in the ancient novels, had an impressive Nachleben in Western literature from the late antique adaptation in the fable collection of the so-called “Romulus” through the Middles Ages (John of Salisbury Policraticus, Jacques de Vitry, Etienne de Bourbon, Gesta Romanorum, Historia septem sapientium) and the early modern period (George Chapman, Walter Charleton, Saint-Évremond, La Fontaine) up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (de Musset, Daudet, Hamsun, D’Annunzio, Christopher Fry) (Huber 1990; Vannini 2010, 23ff.).
Poems on the fall of Troy seem to have been popular at this time, cf. Nero’s recital of his Halosis Ilii while Rome was burning in AD 64 and Lucan’s Iliaca, both lost, for which Aeneid 2 was the main epic model. Eumolpus rearranges Vergil’s sequence of events and re-evaluates Laocoon’s role, with Sinon mentioned just in one line. At a closer look, however, the poem is not an ekphrasis of one or more paintings in the art gallery, but a report by a Trojan eyewitness (v.11 o patria, … credidimus, 35 respicimus) in chronological order, from the building of the wooden horse to Laocoon’s warning, the attack of the snakes, the death of Laocoon and his sons, up to the moment when the Greeks climb out of the horse and start to destroy the city. Thus, it shows the characteristics of a messenger’s speech, for example, as in Senecan tragedy. Language, style, and meter, however, render the Senecan model imperfectly, and the rhetorical bombast and clumsy syntax ridicule Eumolpus’ poetic shortcomings rather than Seneca’s art, ironically unmasking, as it were, his own pretensions of being a poet “of no mean imagination” (83.8). Other critics see in the Troiae Halosis a parody of the style of Senecan drama and other tragic versifications that were performed in those days at numerous public and private occasions, about which we know through the letters of the Younger Pliny and verses of Martial and Juvenal. Less probable, however, is a direct parody of Nero’s or Lucan’s lost poems or of Vergil himself, or a serious intention in the sense that Petronius wanted his readers to understand the poem as an artistic piece of a true Vergilian poet or an example of the literary taste prevalent in Neronian times (Walsh 1970, 47: “a deliberately mediocre poem inserted to ridicule the tragic declaimer”; cf. Habermehl 2006, 151ff. and Vannini 2007, 285ff.). The public that witnessed this declamation throws stones at the poetaster so that Eumolpus, sarcastically “recognizing this tribute to his genius” (90.1), flees the gallery. It is left to the reader to decide whether those people have adequately judged Eumolpus’ poetic gifts and whether the author of the novel shares this judgment.
The poem on the Civil War (119–124.1) also raises debate regarding its purpose, poetic qualities, and function. In six sections, it exposes the outbreak of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey early in January 49 BC: historical narratives are found in sections III (prodigies, vv. 122–143), IV (Caesar’s army crossing the Alps and the Rubicon in winter, vv. 144–208), and V (panic in Rome, senators and Pompey flee, vv. 209–244), whereas in sections II and VI the intervention of supernatural forces is described, and in section I the moral decay as a consequence of Rome’s world domination is declared the main cause of the war (vv. 1–66) (Walsh 1970, 50: “the chief purpose is derisive parody of the poetic styles of Seneca and Lucan”; cf. Connors 1998, 100ff.; Häussler 1978, 106ff.; Vannini 2007, 288ff.).
Traditional moralizing and supernatural or divine actions restrain the historical narrative and set Eumolpus’ poem in strong opposition to Lucan’s epic. Nevertheless, scholars list many allusions to the Pharsalia: to Books 1–3 published during Lucan’s lifetime (he participated in the Pisonian Conspiracy and committed suicide on 30 April 65 AD) and to the remaining seven books that came into circulation after Nero’s death (9 June 68 AD).9 On the other hand, scholars have also detected numerous references to the Aeneid and advance the theory that Petronius had Eumolpus plunder Vergil rather than Lucan and, to a lesser degree, Ovid, Seneca, and Livy (21.32.7ff.) on Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps (George 1974; Häussler 1978, 107ff.). Eventually, those scholars who reject that the author of the Satyrica was Nero’s courtier and date the novel in the first half of the second century AD demonstrate that Eumolpus’ poem draws heavily on the Punica of Silius Italicus (†AD 101/2). Grimal’s view (1977) that the Satyrica precedes Lucan’s Pharsalia, and that Lucan was borrowing from Petronius, has not met with great approval.
Is the Bellum Civile with its traditional divine machinery a serious alternative to / parody of Lucan, or just another ridiculous example of Eumolpus’ high aspirations? Connected to this question are the poetic theories that Eumolpus discusses in the preceding chapter 118, where he announces, as an illustration of his convictions, the poem on which he had been working on board the ship of Lichas during the storm, though it is lacking the final touch (his shipwreck a symbol for the shipwreck of his poetry?):
Anyone who attempts the vast theme of the civil war will falter under the burden unless he is full of literature; for history should not be recorded in verses: historians can do that far better. Instead, the free spirit of genius must plunge headlong into poetic and obscure utterances and divine interpositions and stories coloured by mythology, so that what results seems rather the prophetic utterances of an inspired mind rather than a sworn testimony made before witnesses. (trans. Rouse and Connors)
The poem embarrassingly unmasks Eumolpus as a mediocre poet; his misapplied theories, his blustering about the decline in the arts, and his self-presentation as a moralist and connoisseur on painting (88) reveal him to be a man of pretense; as a story-teller, however, he receives the full attention and applause of his listeners. The poetic theories expounded in chapter 118 and the sample of his epic on the Civil War are certainly not a judgment by Petronius on Lucan,10 but rather a satiric demonstration of the inability of contemporary poets—those of the first half of the second century AD, I would argue—to match in their own works the high demands of poetry. It is again the task of the reader to discover the discrepancy between the ideals in chapter 118 and their realization by Eumolpus in chapters 119–124.1, and he may be relieved, as Encolpius is, after Eumolpus “at least” has finished “pouring out his monstrous deluge of words” (124.2).
The Satyrica has always been seen as a conundrum within the genre of longer fictional narratives because of its (supposed) extraordinary length and its mixture of prose and verse. Further disturbing elements were the narrator’s (and, behind him, the historical author Petronius; Conte 1996) parodic and satiric view of the world, the lower-class setting and characters, and the many unabashed (homo)sexual passages that were in direct contrast to the “ideal” Greek love romance. Therefore, scholars have sought Greek models for the Satyrica analogous to the (lost) Greek Ass-Novel and its epitome, the Onos, which since long had been recognized as the model for Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.
Richard Heinze (1899) advanced the thesis that the Satyrica parodied the characteristic features and motifs of the Greek “ideal” love novel, starting with replacing the heterosexual couple of a distinguished family by the lower-class, homosexual lovers Encolpius and Giton. According to Heinze, Petronius combined the parody of the Greek “pathetic–erotic” novel and the Roman Menippean Satire to create a new, realistic “comic–erotic” novel. Although at that time the dating of Greek novels still relied on Erwin Rohde (1876), and no ideal or parodic Greek novels were known that predated the Satyrica, Heinze nevertheless claimed that their existence could convincingly be deduced from the existence of the Satyrica. More recently, however, a constant stream of papyri with fragments of 40 hitherto unknown Greek novels has come to light, including some comic–realistic types with strong resemblances to the Satyrica (see Stephens in this collection).
In addition to the Phoenikika by Lollianos and the prosimetric Iolaus and Tinouphis fragments, there is a fragment (POxy 4762: Obbink 2006) in third-person narrative about a sexual encounter between a woman and an ass that might come from the Milesian Tales (May 2010): it would prove that the Milesian Tales were prosimetric and contained an ass story, and thus corroborate Apuleius’ claim in the preface to the Metamorphoses (1.1) to present “different sorts of tales in that well-known Milesian style”.
Such a view, however, conflicts with current chronology of the Greek novels: 30 and 40 years ago, scholars believed Chariton wrote in the first century BC, but recent research dates Chariton, Xenophon, the Ninus Romance, and Metiochus and Parthenope to the middle of the first century AD, and places the comic–realistic novels between 75 and the first decades of the second century AD, which would mean Petronius could not yet have known any of those Greek comic–realistic novels (Bowie 2002; Tilg 2010). This, however, is only true if the author of the Satyrica was Nero’s courtier; if he dates to the time of Trajan (98–117 AD) or Hadrian (117–138 AD), Petronius could have known a number of Greek novels, both “ideal” and comic–realistic, on which to model his Satyrica.
Therefore, it is no longer necessary to see the Satyrica as a Menippean Satire (Relihan 1993) just because of its mixture of prose and verse (Dronke 1994). On the contrary, a link between Petronius and the Menippean Satire on generic terms has to be ruled out, as Astbury (1977) and Jensson (2002, 2004) have convincingly demonstrated. These observations lead to the conclusion that the Satyrica is a Roman adaptation of a Greek hypo-text in the style of the Milesian Tales with their specific narrative structure and their frivolous and salacious subject matter, with a blend of Greek and Roman elements in which “on top of the Greek base is added a Roman linguistic and cultural layer” (Jensson 2004, 287), and that its author Petronius was not Nero’s courtier but wrote it in the first half of the second century.
1 For the complicated history of the textual transmission, see Müller 1961, vii–lx; Müller and Ehlers 1983, 381–484; Müller 1995, iii–xlviii; van Thiel 1971, 1–24; and de la Mare 1976. - For full bibliographies see Schmeling and Stuckey 1977 (with complete list of manuscripts, printed editions and translations), Smith 1986, and Vannini 2007.
2 A real forgery were the supplements to Petronius by François Nodot, who in 1691 claimed to have received a manuscript with the complete text of the Satyrica found in a private library in Belgrade in 1688. The forgery was soon unmasked (Laes 1998; Stolz 1987). A witty attempt at rewriting (not forging!) the lost first part of the Satyrica is the supplement by Harry C. Schnur alias C. Arrius Nurus (1907–1979), edited by Sacré (1992); cf. Laes 2000.
3 For hypothetical reconstructions of these earlier events, see: Jensson 2004, 116ff. and 151ff.; Sullivan 1968a, 43f.; van Thiel 1971, 42ff.; also see these commentaries: Habermehl 2006, 337f.; Breitenstein 2009, xvif. 21ff.; Schmeling 2011, 397ff.; and Vannini 2010, 102ff.
4 That part of the story was set in Massilia, and Priapus there played a certain role we learn from the fourth-century commentary by Servius on Vergil (Aen. 3.57) and from the fifth-century writer Sidonius Apollinaris (Carmen. 23.155–7), now fr. I and IV Müller (1995).
5 She is presumably to be identified with Lichas’ wife (113.3), who was seduced by Encolpius in Herculis porticu (106.2), i.e. in the Colonnades of Hercules: but one should better follow Walsh 1970, 74 and read in Herculis portu, i.e. modern Monaco, so that this affair happened en route from Massilia to Campania.
6 Whether the other self-reproaches in 81.3 (effugi iudicium, harenae imposui, hospitem occidi) and 130.1f. are to be taken at face value is doubtful; cf. Habermehl 2006, 34ff.; Schmeling 2011, 342ff. and 495ff. For a literal understanding, see Jensson 2004, 145ff. and 162ff.
7 For more on Milesian Tales, see Harrison 1998b; Jensson 2004, 255ff.; in the Satyrica: Müller 1980; Fedeli 1986; Sega 1986; Lefèvre 1997. Rawson 1979, 331ff. is probably right in supposing that Sisenna, the translator of the Milesiae, is not identical with the politician and historiographer L. Cornelius Sisenna (ca. 118–ca. 66/5 BC).
8 See also Setaioli in this collection; further Setaioli 2011, Zeitlin 1971, and Sommariva 1996. Commentary on the shorter poems: Courtney 1991.
9 For parallels with Lucan: Stubbe 1933, 74 n. 1; Sullivan 1968a, 174ff.; Rose 1971, 65ff. and 87ff.; Häussler 1978, 106ff.; and Courtney 2001, 184 ff.; for a full commentary, Guido 1976. Rose 1971, 60ff. and Häussler 1978, 110ff. discuss whether Petronius could have known the as-yet-unpublished books of the Pharsalia between Lucan’s death and his own in AD 66 (if the author of the Satyrica is Nero’s courtier) by recitation or circulation of drafts.
10 Coffey 1976, 187: “No opinion expressed by any character in the Satyricon may be abstracted from its setting and attributed without reservation to the author”; and Beck 1979, 241: “The quality of Eumolpus’ poetic works ceases to be an unsatisfactory enigma and becomes instead a superb example of Petronius’ skill at characterization.”
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