Petronius

by Gaius Petronius Arbiter

Start Free Trial

Petronius Short Fiction Analysis

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

The Satyricon, Petronius’s only extant work aside from a few poems, survives as a group of fragments which may represent as little as one tenth of the entire original. The nature of the work is difficult to characterize, not only because the story is impossible to reconstruct in full but also because The Satyricon is unlike anything else that comes to modern readers from antiquity. The only comparable book is The Golden Ass (c. 150) of Lucius Apuleius, written a century later. The book was written for Nero and his court and was probably intended for recitation. Fragments of the text were known during the Middle Ages, but it was the rediscovery in 1650 of a codex containing the most significant and coherent section of the work, the famous Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner at Trimalchio’s) that justified renewed interest in Petronius.

The Satyricon

Sometimes considered the first realistic novel, The Satyricon describes the picaresque adventures of the narrator Encolpius and his sometime lover, the boy Giton, through the largely Greek cities of southern Italy. As usually reconstructed, the story begins with Encolpius engaged in a discussion of rhetoric with the teacher Agamemnon. He breaks away to pursue Ascyltos, his companion and rival for the affections of Giton. After various adventures during the day, the three spend a farcical night, interrupted by the priestess of Priapus, Quartilla, and her retinue. After a break in the surviving text, the three are brought to Trimalchio’s banquet by Agamemnon. This is the Cena Trimalchionis, which is followed after another gap by a scene in which Encolpius meets the poet Eumolpus at a picture gallery. This provides an opportunity for poetic parodies and some roughshod art criticism. The two then dine together with Giton, and another rivalry develops over the boy. Encolpius and Giton pretend to attempt suicide, and at the height of the hubbub that follows, Ascyltos appears with an official, looking for Giton. The boy, however, hides himself by clinging to the underside of a mattress, similar to Odysseus under the ram of Polyphemos. Ascyltos leaves empty-handed, and Eumolpus and Encolpius are reconciled. After another gap, the reader finds Encolpius, Eumolpus, and Giton on shipboard, apparently fugitives. As it happens, the captain of the ship, Lichas, is an old enemy of Encolpius, while one of the passengers is Tryphaena, a woman with some claim on Giton (presumably both of these characters have appeared in parts of the story subsequently lost). A voyage full of intrigue, suspense, and violence climaxes in shipwreck, but the three companions survive and make for Croton, a city reportedly full of legacy hunters. Beyond this point, the story becomes increasingly fragmentary, but several episodes are concerned with Encolpius’s impotence and with other mishaps that befall him amid witches, priestesses, and thieves.

Fragmentary as it is, The Satyricon is one of the few surviving examples of several classical genres. Along with the Apocolocyntosis (c. 55), attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, it is the only extant example of Menippean satire, a form that mixed prose, verse, and satirical observation in an episodic narrative. The result is a kind of intellectual comedy of which the closest modern relatives might be Candide (1759) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Within the Menippean framework of the book there are traces of two other all but vanished genres: Roman mime and the Milesian tale. Mime, a kind of obscene farce in colloquial language, generated out of stock characters, seems to have influenced several episodes, such as those among the legacy hunters of Croton. The language of mime is explicitly parodied at least once,...

(This entire section contains 2701 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

and the naturalism of the book may owe something to this and other theatrical models. Milesian tales, marked by raciness and an inclination to satire, are forerunners of the novella tradition that reached maturity in Giovanni Boccaccio’sThe Decameron (1353). Two of the best-known tales in The Satyricon are of this type: “The Boy of Pergamum” and “The Widow of Ephesus.”

“The Boy of Pergamum”

In “The Boy of Pergamum” (chapters 85-87), Eumolpus tells how, while a guest in Pergamum, he schemes to seduce the son of his host by presenting himself as an ascetic philosopher. With the parents’ approval, he accompanies the boy constantly to protect him from seducers. One night, noticing that the boy is awake, Eumolpus whispers a prayer to Venus: “If I can kiss this boy without his knowing it, tomorrow I will give him a pair of doves.” Hearing this, the boy at once begins to snore loudly. Eumolpus takes his kisses and next morning produces two doves. The whispers become louder, the desires more extensive, the gifts more valuable, the boy’s sleep more improbable, until on the third night Eumolpus promises a thoroughbred in return for consummation. He gets his wish, but since thoroughbreds are harder to come by than doves, the boy’s impatience next morning breaks the spell: “Please sir, where’s my horse?”

Later, Eumolpus attempts a reconciliation, but the boy, still piqued, warns him, “Go to sleep or I’ll tell my father at once.” Passion drives Eumolpus to force himself on his ward. No longer resisting, the boy even offers to do it again, to prove he is not so stingy as Eumolpus (the thoroughbred has not materialized). After being awakened three times by the boy, however, who asks, “Don’t you want anything?,” it is Eumolpus’s turn to say, “Go to sleep or I’ll tell your father at once.”

This tale, really two linked tales, is like a primitive novella. The ribaldry of the anecdotes creates an impression of realism, but there is nothing real about the characters; they are interchangeable blanks. The boy, for example, can be, and has been, replaced by a girl without difficulty. These tales are above all formal inventions. Such familiar structures as the neat turnabout at the end, or the repetitions in threes, are formulas from which all kinds of stories can be generated. This is fiction aspiring to the efficiency of the joke.

“The Widow of Ephesus”

“The Widow of Ephesus,” also told by Eumolpus, is much more impressive. A woman renowned for her virtue is widowed. Not content with ceremonial grief, she keeps vigil with the corpse in its vault, accompanied only by a devoted maid to share her grief and keep the lamp lit. Unable to dissuade her, relatives and friends leave her to her fate, praising her as a paragon of faithful love. Some robbers, however, are crucified nearby, and the soldier on guard, curious about the light he sees among the tombs, comes upon the beautiful widow. He invites her to share his supper. She refuses, but eventually the maid accepts food and urges the widow to do the same, saying, “Your dead husband’s body itself ought to persuade you to keep alive.” Exhausted by hunger and grief, the woman gives in. Then, however, “the inducements the soldier has used to persuade the lady to go on living became part of his assault on her virtue.” The widow consents to this too, and the couple spend three happy nights shut up together in the tomb while the parents of one of the crucified, finding no one on watch, take the body away for burial. Finding the cross empty the next day, the soldier resolves to fall on his sword rather than await punishment, but now it is the widow’s turn to dissuade: “I would rather make use of the dead than kill the living.” So the husband’s body is taken from the tomb and fastened on the empty cross.

These are still stock characters, but not the narrative ciphers of “The Boy of Pergamum”; the story develops as it does because the woman is a widow, and because the man is a soldier. Milesian structural formulas are apparent here, too, in the recognition of the three nights of love and the turnabout at the end. In this tale, however, genuine human issues are raised. The nature and limits of fidelity are explored not only in the widow, once exemplary, and perhaps still so, but also in the devoted (fidissima) servant. The widow’s love for her husband, even dead, is strikingly reflected in the parents of the robber who dare to retrieve his corpse, while the soldier’s perhaps frivolous passion for her must be weighed against the honesty of her devotion to him. The story also meditates on persuasion, resistance, and acquiescence: The widow is seen, under the pressure of events, custom, and even the other characters, eventually to take command of her own story.

Eumolpus tells this as a story from his own time, but there is an earlier version in the Aesopian Fables of Phaedrus, and although the story is the most influential single element in The Satyricon, Petronius’s version became authoritative only after the discovery of the Cena Trimalchionis revived interest in its author. “The Widow of Ephesus” was then retold by Jean de La Fontaine, and its dramatic possibilities inspired a series of stage versions, beginning with George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1612) and continuing through Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946) and Federico Fellini’s film Satyricon (1969).

Like Phaedrus, Eumolpus tells this as a fable about the fickleness of women, and so it is received by the auditors in The Satyricon—one even thinks the woman should be crucified for distracting the soldier from his duty. In medieval versions the treatment is the same, but modern versions, without changing the narrative appreciably, have reversed the theme, presenting the widow as sympathetic and even heroic. Fellini, for example, transforms the tale into a fable about the triumph of life and love over death; to enhance that reading, he also shifts the context, so that the story is told at the tomb of Trimalchio during his mock funeral. As the variety of versions testifies, “The Widow of Ephesus” is a triumph of economy, richer than any of the morals that can be, or have been, attached to it.

Cena Trimalchionis

The Satyricon also bears traces of more familiar genres. Indications that Encolpius has somehow offended the god Priapus and as a result is afflicted with impotence suggest that the author may have intended a broad parody of epic, with the “wrath of Priapus” as the thread connecting many episodes that seem unrelated, just as the “wrath of Poseidon” unifies the incidents of the Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.). The present state of the text, however, makes this impossible to verify. The Cena Trimalchionis is also to some extent imitative, a parody of Plato’s Symposium by way of the Satires (35, 30 b.c.e.) of Horace. What strikes any reader, however, is not the sources of the episode, but its impressive originality. Although it hardly has a plot, the Cena Trimalchionis is a milestone in the craft of narration. In its cinematic wealth of detail, its control of shifting pace and perspective, it is Petronius’s most sustained achievement as a writer.

The story is simple. When Encolpius, Giton, and Eumolpus arrive for dinner, the introduction to Trimalchio is by way of his appurtenances: a house cluttered with souvenirs, trophies, gaudy art, and the amulets of every superstition. Like Donald Barthelme, Petronius is master of his society’s dreck; he knows how to make even the description of objects and settings eventful. The host finally appears after the first course, and the dinner begins in earnest. The sequence of outlandish trompe l’il dishes is seasoned with monologues from Trimalchio, the conversations of his guests, and the constant traffic of innumerable servants, many of them singing while they work. After several speeches full of ignorance, pretension, and platitudes, Trimalchio excuses himself, and in his absence the guests gossip freely about him, one another, and their social world. Trimalchio returns with a little speech about constipation, and dinner continues, punctuated by the arrival of the drunken Habinnas (anepisode obviously modeled on the entry of Alcibiades in the Symposium). Trimalchio, growing boozy, reads his will aloud; the former slave wants his own slaves to love him now “as much as they would if I were dead.” This leads to a discussion of plans for his tomb, to a recital of his own career that begins to sound like a eulogy, and finally to a mock funeral, at the height of which the general uproar brings the fire brigade and the narrator slips away with his companions.

As even this summary can suggest, what controls the Cena Trimalchionis is not a plot or some authorial moral stance but the dominant figure of Trimalchio, the arriviste at home among his kind. The insecurity of the former slave turned millionaire is reflected in the illusionism and impostures of his ambience, from the painted watchdog at his door to the deceptive dishes of his banquet: Pea hen eggs are served nestling under a wooden hen, but the eggs are actually pastries stuffed with whole birds. A roast boar is stuffed with live thrushes that fly around the room when the carving begins. An apparent roast goose turns out to be contrived entirely of pork by a cook appropriately named Daedalus. Trimalchio’s aspirations to taste are sabotaged by his native vulgarity. There is a Homeric recitation, but by way of illustrating it a slave dressed as Ajax rushes in, attacks a cooked calf dressed in a helmet, and serves up the resulting slices to the applause of the guests. Trimalchio boasts of his jewelry and then has it weighed at the table to prove he is not lying. Above all, Trimalchio is preoccupied with death; the first thing readers learn about him is that he has a clock and a trumpeter in his dining room “so he’ll know how much of his life has passed.” At the last glimpse, he is saying to other trumpeters, “Pretend I’m dead. Play something nice.” The self-made man knows that Fortune takes as readily as she gives, so in his house, in his world, nothing is stable, nothing is what it seems. The Cena Trimalchionis depicts a vivid circus of ill-assorted people moving among a chaos of possessions. Its lack of plot is purposeful, expressing the aimlessness of the world over which presides the monumentally vulgar, oddly sympathetic Trimalchio.

Although The Satyricon moves often toward satire, it is a special sort of satire: tolerant, generous, Horatian. Petronius’s observations are penetrating but rarely condescending and in a way almost impartial. He makes way for his objects to reveal themselves. Critics who wish to see him primarily as a satirist of imperial decadence find themselves complaining about a lack of moral focus, of “seriousness.” One of the most obvious features of the book, however, its frank impartiality in sexual matters, should be a clue to the author’s underlying attitude. His primary goal is realism rather than satire; his book is preoccupied with the surfaces of society, its texture, rather than its structure. Thus for example, while the narrator regularly makes judgments about what he sees, the author makes it clear that these are self-interested and unreliable. Even the judgments are part of the milieu being depicted. As objects of satire, the characters in The Satyricon are extremely traditional: bad poets, nouveaux riches, parasites, licentious women; but at the heart of Petronius’s originality is a willingness to present these types on their own terms, to let them speak for themselves and about each other. The reader sees the insecurities of the loose women, the embattled pride of the self-made man. Petronius’s command of several colloquial styles enables him to provide a distinguishable idiom for each of them. As a result, The Satyricon’s audience comes to know ostensibly stock characters from within.

This genial realism, along with the techniques of observation and language that make it possible, is Petronius’s most significant contribution to the art of short fiction. If there is any statement of artistic intention in his work, it is these lines from a poem recited by Encolpius “A kindness far from sad laughs in my pure speech;/ whatever the people do, my frank tongue reports.” That candor is the hallmark of The Satyricon.

Next

Petronius World Literature Analysis