Ancient Classics: Petronius

A degree of irresolvable uncertainty surrounds the question of whether or not the author of what is now generally called the Satyricon is the same courtier who was compelled to commit suicide at the imperial Roman court under the emperor Nero. If so, the Roman historian Tacitus gives an account of him that describes him as a person who “idled into fame,” asleep during the day and wakeful through the night as he arranged and directed the extravagant and sensuous entertainments that occupied the emperor's nights. Petronius's popularity with Nero seemingly aroused the jealousy of the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Ofonius Tigellinus. The upstaged Tigellinus vented his fury by contriving Petronius's downfall. Influenced by Tigellinus, Nero condemned Petronius to suicide. He sneeringly anticipated the emperor's order, but took his time and lengthened the process of dying by having his veins opened, then bound, then reopened. As he died, he engaged in the sorts of pleasures that he most enjoyed, and in his will he wrote a scathing exposé of the emperor's debauchery—debauchery that he had a hand in arranging but in which he probably did not participate himself...

Three interconnected factors have dominated the transmission and reception of Petronius' Satyricon (as it was, and is, predominantly known): the fragmentary nature of the text, its linguistic and generic characteristics, and the sexually explicit episodes in the story. The identity of the author (see Tacitus, Annals 16, 17-20) and the extent to which his characters and plot relate to the society in which he lived have proved a further puzzle. The text was lacerated early on: homoerotic scenes had been eliminated by Carolingian times. Late Latin and medieval authors preserve fragments or poems attributed to Petronius that are not found elsewhere. The most extensive fragment, the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio's Feast), was known to the 15th-century Humanist Poggio Bracciolini but not rediscovered until the mid-17th century. Meanwhile, other passages (the intercalated tale of the Widow of Ephesus and the poem on the civil war) sparked traditions of their own. Almost 400 years after the editio princeps (Milan ca. 1482), the first reliable edition of Petronius was established by Franz Bücheler in 1862. The maze of the text's transmission and its interpolation, however, has not yielded all its secrets yet...

Nowhere else in the annals of literature does anything quite like Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon exist. With exquisite literary taste and good humor, its fragmentary remnants mock the pretensions of rhetorical flourish that characterized Roman and Greek oratory under the continuing influence of the Greco-Sicilian rhetorician Gorgias of Leontium. Satyricon also mocks most other pretensions, behavioral as well as literary, while it treats scandalously salacious material with unpretentious aplomb...