SOURCE: "Petronius," in The Greek and Roman Critics, University of Toronto Press, 1965, pp. 262-8.

[In the following excerpt, Grube outlines Petronius's thoughts on poetry, particularly his attack on declamations and his assessment that the arts had reached a degenerated state in Rome.]

… [Petronius] is always superbly alive.¹ In that amazing medley of riotous and indecent adventures which make up the Satyricon we find several passages bearing on literature. The book as we have it begins with a violent tirade against the practice of declamations which Encolpius addresses to a teacher of rhetoric called Agamemnon. It may be quoted here as a typical denunciation, making, in a more lively manner, most of the criticisms which recur throughout the century:

Are declaimers pursued by another kind of Furies when they shout: 'These wounds were received on behalf of our public freedom', 'this eye was lost for your sake', 'give me a guide to lead me to my children for these hamstrung knees cannot support my body'? Even these things could be endured if they opened the way for future orators. As it is, these inflated subjects and empty-sounding phrases advance them so little that when they get to court they think themselves transported to another world. I think our adolescents become so very stupid at school because they don't hear or see anything related to actual life, but pirates standing ready with chains² on the shore, despots issuing edicts ordering sons to cut off their fathers' heads, oracular responses in times of pestilence demanding the sacrifice of three or more virgins, honeyed word-dumplings; every word and deed dipped in syrup and oil. Young people brought up on such a diet no more acquire wisdom than kitchen servants acquire a pleasant perfume. If you'll allow me to say so, you teachers have been the first to destroy eloquence. The stimulation of smooth, empty, ridiculous sound effects has enfeebled and destroyed the body of your speeches. Young men were not confined to declamations when Sophocles and Euripides discovered the words of proper speech, when Pindar and the nine lyrists scrupled to use lines from Homer. Not to go to the poets as my witnesses, certainly neither Plato nor Demosthenes indulged in this sort of exercise. Great and, if I may so put it, modest speech is neither mottled nor turgid, but rises in natural beauty. This windy and enormous verbosity recently invaded Athens from Asia and it blew upon young minds as they rose to great things like an effluvium from a pestilential constellation, while eloquence, its rules corrupted, stood by in silence. Who, since Thucydides and Hypereides, has equalled their fame? Even poetry did not shine with a healthy hue, but all the arts of speech were fed on the same diet and produced nothing capable of lasting to old age. Painting too has come to the same end after the audacity of the Egyptians discovered a short cut to so great an art.

Agamemnon makes no real reply; in fact he agrees in principle. He blames it all on the parents. If you teach the young properly you will be left without pupils, for parents will send them where they get quicker results. It's no good teaching them the right things; they no longer have the patience. The result is that nowadays the young just waste their time at school and learn nothing worthwhile.

Later (83) Encolpius visits a gallery of paintings which contains works of Apelles and other classical painters. He there meets a shabby old man, a poet (which explains his shabbiness, for 'the love of talent never made a man rich') and they discuss the degeneration of taste, all due to the love of money, which has corrupted all the arts, and philosophy as well. It should be added; that the poet, before discoursing upon the corruption of the age, tells a story of his relation to a boy-pupil which is certainly not to his credit!

Petronius' work is a satura, he passes from prose to verse with the greatest of ease, and it is hard to be sure where he is serious, especially in his poetry. Probably nowhere entirely. No passage is more puzzling, however, than where he has been understood to criticize Lucan, especially for doing away with the divine apparatus in his epic of the civil war. It begins, in prose, as follows (118):

Poetry has led many astray. For as soon as one has constructed feet into verses and clothed a rather tender meaning in a periodic structure of words, he thinks at once that he has scaled Helicon. Thus those who are trained in the service of the courts have often taken refuge in the quiet pursuit of poetry as in a happier haven; they think that it is easier to construct a poem than a controversia embroidered with sparkling little maxims (sententiolis vibrantibus pictam). But a more genuine spirit has no liking for such uninspired work³; it cannot conceive anything or bring it to birth unless it is steeped in a vast stream of literature. One must avoid, so to speak, all slovenly diction, use expressions far removed from the common people, with the result (as expressed by Horace)⁴ 'I hate the vulgar crowd and I avoid it.' Besides this, one should be careful that one's pithy phrases (sententiae) do not stand out from the body of one's discourse, but shine as a colouring worked into the cloth itself. Homer is a proof of this, so are the lyric poets, our Roman Virgil and Horace's diligent felicity (curiosa felicitas). The others have either not seen the path which leads to poetry, or, if they saw it, have been afraid to take it. Anyone who undertakes a great work on the Civil War will collapse under the burden, unless he is full of literature. It is not a question of describing events in verse, historians do this much better; but the spirit must freely range over byways, interventions by the gods, and swoop over mythical content, so that the poem appears to be the prophesying of a frenzied mind rather than a scrupulously reliable statement of facts before witnesses—as in the following effusion, if it please you, though it still needs final polishing: …

The 'effusion' which follows is a poem of two hundred and ninety-six hexameters, which read like the beginning of an epic on Caesar's invasion of Italy. That there is meant to be a reference to Lucan when Petronius refers to epics on the civil wars seems obvious, especially as Lucan was the only Roman epic poet not to make use of the usual divine apparatus. There are also many echoes of the Pharsalia in the poem. But what else refers to him, and what is the purpose of the poem itself?⁵

The general discussion of poetry in the first part of the passage, quoted above, is not particularly original: too many people write poetry; anyone who can put a few verses together thinks himself a poet; poetry is not merely a pleasant relaxation for tired orators; it requires inspiration and a deep knowledge of great literature; poetic diction is very different from ordinary speech. Most of these ideas can be paralleled in Horace, Cicero and elsewhere.⁶ One imagines that the sophisticated courtier of Nero shared Horace's contempt for the mob, even though he could make individual members of it come wonderfully to life in his own work and speak their own language. Brilliant phrases that stand out from the body of a work are certainly a weakness of Lucan's, but so they were of all contemporary work, whether in verse or prose, not excluding Petronius himself, or the poem which follows, and one doubts that he would here have Lucan specifically in mind.⁷ We have already seen that Petronius was an adherent of the 'classical' school and are not surprised that he chooses Homer and the Greek lyrists as models, but it is interesting to find Virgil and Horace now recognized as the Roman classics, and the phrase which he coins to describe the poetry of Horace—curiosa felicitas, where the adjective implies care or diligence while the noun implies luck or a gift from the gods, i.e. natural talent, is a deservedly famous critical phrase, frequently quoted.

It is with the mention of epics on the civil war that Lucan inevitably comes to our minds. He must have been in Petronius' mind also, for the Pharsalia was, as far as we know, the only contemporary poem of the kind.⁸ But when he repeats his general requirement, namely that such a poet must be steeped in great literature, he need not imply that Lucan was not so steeped, which he obviously was. Petronius goes on to make three further points, and they are made in one sentence, i.e. they go together. The epic poet should not be primarily concerned to give the facts, which is the historian's job, but he must be prepared to range over by-ways⁹ which are no part of a historical account, he must bring in the gods, and he must be inspired. All this, Petronius repeats, is where he differs from the historian. A poem is a poem, not a history. This is probably intended as a not unfriendly criticism of Lucan but even here, except for the gods, Petronius need not be thinking of him exclusively.

What he seems to imply is that to write an epic on recent or contemporary history is a very difficult task indeed, perhaps that the subject is more suitable for a historian. He does not say that without the usual divine apparatus it will fail, but he expresses the opinion that one should stick to the laws of the genre, including the gods. That, and the other characteristics, the inclusion of ambages, for example—i.e. the less direct pressing on with the story but amplification of episodes (one thinks of Dido and the visit to Hades in the Aeneid)—and the poetic frenzy generally, remain essential to any epic, whatever its subject.

As for Petronius' poem as a whole, its intention cannot be judged in isolation. Poems of varying length are scattered throughout the work; they are usually short, often echo other poets, and are frequently humorous in intent, just as he often uses a dignified and epic diction at the most undignified moments. Sometimes the poems seem to have no other purpose than the author's own amusement, and there does not seem ever to be any intended parody or serious criticism of the authors from whom phrases are borrowed. The nearest parallel to the Bellum Civile is a poem of sixty-five senarii on the fall of Troy which the same Eumolpus improvises as Encolpius is intently looking at a picture on the subject in a picture gallery (89). This bears much the same relation to the second book of the Aeneid as the poem on the civil war bears to the Pharsalia. There, certainly, no criticism of Virgil is intended. At the end of it, passers-by throw stones at Eumolpus but he is used to that sort of reception. Yet the poem is not deliberately bad; indeed it is not without merit considered in itself as an exercise in rhetorical poetry, and it seems to have no other purpose.

The Bellum Civile itself is much longer. It consists of five panels.¹⁰ The first depicts the Romans, having conquered the world, exploiting all its resources to feed their luxury and corruption—a powerful indictment (1-60). Then we have a scene where Pluto rises from the nether world and addresses Fortuna; they contemplate the Roman world and decide to stir up civil war; dread omens follow (67-140). We then see Caesar high up in the Alps addressing his troops and marching forward, overcoming all difficulties (141-208). Then the scene shifts to Rome where all is fear and confusion, and even the great Pompey, in spite of his past glories, takes to flight (209-44). Peace, Faith, Justice and Concord leave the earth while evil spirits, Fury, Treason, Madness among them, rise up from the world below. The gods take sides. Discord rises and calls the peoples and the Roman nobles to war (245-95). There the poem abruptly ends.

Clearly, it conforms to the requirements just enunciated by Petronius himself. No specific historical event is mentioned except that Caesar crossed the Alps. There are plenty of digressions or byways (ambages) such as. the whole first panel on the luxury of Rome, and the scenes where the gods intervene. In fact little that is found here would find a place in a reliable historical account. The gods fill more than a third of the poem. Moreover, the many echoes, not only of Lucan, but of Virgil, Livy and others,¹¹ show that the author is 'full of literature'. We may not think that such echoes and reworking of others' phrases and ideas is the best way of showing one's acquaintance with literature, but it was certainly the fashion of the day and a practice taught in the schools where our author was trained, however much he may have disliked them. The diction is poetic, and though there are powerful lines and sententiae, they do not quite stand out as they do in other writers of the time, including Lucan. As for poetic genius, it is a competent, in places a striking poem, and Petronius does not claim to be a great poet.

The implied criticism of Lucan remains on this general level. Attempts to find parody, or criticism in detail have not been successful; the whole poem is no more a parody of Luc an than the other poem on the fall of Troy is a parody of Virgil. One imagines Petronius saying: 'My dear Lucan, to write an epic on recent history is almost impossible, and you are not succeeding any better by breaking the rules of the genre. You should keep the divine apparatus and worry a great deal less about what actually happened. Now if I were to attempt so difficult a task, this is how I'd do it.…' As far as it goes, the poem is serious; it is also highly competent; but Petronius cannot be serious for very long, and after less than three hundred lines he gives up. No other hidden meanings, abstruse criticisms or parodies are probably intended. It is just a rather lengthy illustration of what he has just said, no more and no less.

The passages we have discussed are, unfortunately, the only relevant passages on poetry and literature to be found in Petronius as we have him: the attack on declamations, the degenerate state of all the arts, and the reflections on poetry in general which we have just discussed. One wishes there were more, for the author of the Satyricon obviously was fully qualified to give us more, had he chosen; indeed he may have done so, since we only have fragments of his fifteenth and sixteenth books. If so, the loss is much to be regretted, for he had a far more mature mind than Persius and a far deeper appreciation of poetry and literature generally than the younger Seneca ever had.

Notes

¹ I am taking for granted that the Petronius mentioned by Tacitus in Annals XVI, 18-19 is the author of the Satyricon. This is now generally accepted. See Gilbert Bagnani, Arbiter of Elegance, Toronto, 1957, and references there.

²cum catenis: 'Pirates on the shore waving handcuffs', i.e. waiting for the shipwrecked, as G. Bagnani translates it in Studies in honour of B. L. Ullman p. 230, instead of the usual translation 'pirates in chains'. Professor Bagnani also draws my attention to the curiously archaic nature of the passage: not only are all the examples of the good old days Greek classical writers, but the Asiatic style is said to have recently (nuper) invaded Athens! Since we are dealing with Petronius, this is obviously deliberate, but the intent is obscure. He is probably satirizing the Graccomania of contemporary professors of rhetoric.

³ Reading, with most MSS., sanitatem instead of vanitatem. The word is here used in contrast to the inspiration of the true poet, it is the [Sophrosyne] of Plato in the Phaedrus (above, p. 57).

⁴Odes III, I, 1.

⁵ For a full discussion of all the problems raised by this famous passage of Petronius see A. Collignon, Etude Sur Petrone 101-226. See also Florence Th. Baldwin, The Bellum Civile.

⁶ See Collignon 101-5.

⁷ Excessive use of striking and epigrammatic sententiae is a vice which developed with the abuse of declamations, and it is not, as such, dealt with by Horace or Cicero, though one thinks of Horace's advice that no part should be elaborated at the expense of the whole (A.P. 32-37). Collignon (p. 102) quotes Cicero, De Orat. III, 25 (96) that a definite tone should pervade the whole speech, but the following sentence goes on to say that certain ornaments—quasi verborum et sententiarum flores—should not be scattered throughout the speech. Cicero is of course not referring to sententiae in the later technical sense; he means ideas or content as opposed to verba, i.e. figures of thought and figures of speech. Parallels for sententiae that stand out too much are rarer with later authors. Collignon (p. 105) cites Tacitus, Dialogus 21, and one might add Quintilian 8, 5, 25-34.

⁸ Under Augustus L. Varius Rufus, Cornelius Severus, and Rabirius wrote epics on contemporary history, and we know that the emperor wanted Horace to do so, but we do not know of any epic on recent or contemporary history between their day and Lucan's.

⁹Ambages means a detour or digression, and here seems to mean such digressions or side issues as would have no place in a historical account.

¹⁰ Such a division covers the whole poem, except five lines (61-65) immediately after the first section. These tell how Fortune had raised three generals—Crassus killed in Parthia, Pompey killed by the shores of Egypt and Caesar in Rome—as if the burden of their ashes were too great and the earth had widely separated their deaths. This is no doubt intended as an introductory reference to the triumviate, but the rhetorical exaggeration is one of the least successful in the whole poem.

¹¹ All these are carefully studied by Collingnon pp. 150-62 and 165-76.

Abbreviations used in the Notes and Bibliography

AJP

American Journal of Philology

CP

Classical Philology

CQ

Classical Quarterly

CR

Classical Review

HSCP

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

LSJ

Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, revised by Stuart Jones and Roderick Mackenzie

RE

Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklopadie der klassischen Altertumwissenschaft

REG

Revue des etudes grecques

REL

Revue des etudes latines

Rh.M.

Rheiniches Museum

TAPA

Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association