SOURCE: "Some Comments on Petronius's Portrayal of Character," in Petronius the Artist: Essays on the Satyricon and its Author, Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, pp. 11-31.

[In the following essay, Rankin studies some of the major characters in the Satyricon as well as the dis.contented society in which they lived.]

Within the broken economy of the Satyricon's remains, Petronius' characters move convincingly. There are few characters in the work that are not drawn with their own special life. The Roman satiric tradition,¹ and the works of the Greek characterologists who were possibly in some rapport with the Athenian New Comedy,² provided a copious history and abundant material and models for his character-drawing. Nor must we omit to mention the influence upon him of older classical authors.³ Part of the standard rhetorical education was concerned with the bundles of qualities that represented recurrent personality types.⁴ Petronius took this material, which he thought was inadequate in itself and rather jaded,⁵ and added to it his own digested observations of life, forming a blend of unprecedented origiabundant and material nality in Roman letters. Life as well as literature produced his characterisation, and it is probably its contact with life which gives it its greatest measure of vigour.⁶

This aspect of Petronius' genius has produced some of the most fascinating human material in Roman literature. It is a pity that some of the ablest Petronian criticism of recent decades has emphasised so much the limitations placed upon his character-drawing power by the literary forms of his age.⁷ I hope to suggest that many of the reservations expressed in such criticisms, are unnecessarily restrictive. Apart from the most prominent personae, characters in general in the Satyricon appear and disappear rapidly, almost as if they were flashed on to a screen.⁸ They are presented with what seems to be great economy, though the cinematic impression is enhanced by the broken nature of our text. Little enough is said in narrative: they are allowed, for a considerable part, to reveal themselves by means of their own words,⁹ which need not be plentiful, but are usually pregnant. Even minor characters have a sufficient depth of dimension to suggest that they have lives to lead outside the boundaries of the text.¹⁰ In the case of the principal characters, of whom we have more particular information, we are aware that only a portion is visible above the surface. Conscious or unconscious motives are adumbrated, which may provide a basis for psychoanalytical interpretation.¹¹ However, the more apparently self-revealing are the words uttered by these characters, the more difficult it is to fathom their natures. They share this measure of opacity with their creator, Petronius.¹² It will be recalled also how difficult it is to estimate the personality and motives of Ovid, who, even when he is at his most apparently self-revealing, seems to keep back the essence of his personality.

Just as Petronius could penetrate other people's characters, we may infer from Tacitus' biography of him that he could analyse his own personality.¹³ His insight is clearly revealed even in those minor characters who have their brief say at Trimalchio's dinner-party.¹⁴ They are self-deceptive and yet strangely innocent boasters in their pretence that they are not merely parasites of one of their own kind who has had astonishing success. Their aggressiveness reveals a latent sense of their own lowly position,¹⁵ which is indicated also by the crudeness of their speech and style.¹⁶ This aggressiveness is an imitation of Trimalchio's superb arrogance which itself is a metamorph of his original lowness. Later in the work (112), Lichas, the shipowner, shows anger at the widow of Ephesus, whose story is told,¹⁷ because he compares her defections with those of his own wife—a snap identification that occurs in his irritated and irrational mind. These are examples of the angles from which Petronius chooses to view his participants in the human tragi-farce. Certain female figures, such as Quartilla, Tryphaena, and the widow of Croton, are sinister and sexually menacing, as well as being ridiculous. Oenothea and Proselenus are lower counterparts of Quartilla.¹⁸ The principal three characters, Encolpius, Ascyltos and Giton, are markedly unstable, and are, like the characters of mime,¹⁹ essentially "on the run,"²⁰ pursued by the intractability of the world and the inevitability of debasing misfortunes: they have no policy and in no respect are they in control of their actions. Trimalchio and his friends, however, are a circle of people who exhibit a credible, vivid, but also farcical social pattern consisting of satellites around a rich man who wishes to assume that everybody and everything orbits about him.

None of these are merely "types," though it would be possible to refer them in a general way to the human typology of the Satire, Mime, New Comedy, which was influenced by the "characterology" of Fourth Century philosophers such as Plato,²¹ Aristotle,²² Theophrastus.²³ Typology in a sense goes back to the sophists;²⁴ Plato produced his own array of human types in the Republic, which probably was influenced by Sicilian mime.²⁵ Aristotle's presentation of character is incidental to his philosophy, but Theophrastus presented specimens of the human personality with the meticulous care of an artist. Characterology thus stood with one foot in the philosopher's lecture hall, and the other in the kitchen of the Menippean satire. Its rhetorical and philosophical associations rigidified in the typical Greek novel, where characters are allowed to possess very few idiosyncrasies,²⁶ and move along almost entirely predictable lines. This sterility is probably parodied by Petronius, along with that of other literary genres; he stigmatises especially the contemporary rhetorical education, as rigid and inane. The base from which he mounts his attack is an appreciation and knowledge of the older classical authors. The epic in particular influences his approach to decadent contemporary practices. His satirical mimesis is directed against such writers as Publilius Syrus and Lucan.²⁷ Knowledge of the older classics provides Petronius with the necessary field of reference outside his own time and place, and he has in this antiquity a measure, mainly literary, but not exclusive of ethical implication,²⁸ which he can place against the debauchery and slackness, both moral and literary, of those with whom he has to live. He is not a laudator temporis acti of the same bitter stamp as Aristophanes, or even of the same kind as his own minor characters, one of whom (44) bemoans (a human touch) at once the decay of religion and the high price of bread.²⁹ He has sympathy, and he is more tolerant of the foibles of his contemporaries than he appears to be at first glance. Quite simply, he seems to have a range of awareness of literature that is very wide, surpassing all but a few of the intellectuals of his time.³⁰ This extends far beyond the common limits of an age of stale rhetoric and inferior popular song. As Menippus,³¹ and as Petronius' own predecessors in Roman satire³² attempted to improve and criticise standards of social custom, so Petronius attempted in the cultural sphere to suggest standards of taste, which were not merely classical, or archaic, but were intended to be reasonable.³³

Before we come to discuss the individual characters, we may consider an important submerged entity in the work. It is not the author's own personality; though this is of importance in the Satyricon, and is inevitably revealed in it and by it. It is the society itself of the First Century B.C. which is the most striking implicit "character" in the Satyricon. This age was the mother of Petronius and all his characters, and also of Nero and Seneca and Tigellinus. It was an age of great economic growth in the shadow of a principate which had struck root, and it produced patches of prosperity³⁴ from which a number of individuals benefited to a vast degree. Secure communications, the absence of serious civil war, a centralised administration composed of new men, equites, or freedmen—all were factors which contributed towards the increase in prosperity. Archaeological evidence from the remains of trading cities such as Ostia, is itself sufficient testimony to the movement of these times.³⁵ They wanted cultural anchorage, and to be admired as great patrons. They lacked judgment, but they were eager. Education was spread thinner to meet the new demand.³⁶ The arts adopted self-conscious and extreme forms in order to meet this demand which always sought to purchase something new and original.³⁷ Many of the restraints of ancient religio were dissolved, but the new men were more superstitious than the Republican oligarchy.³⁸ Philosophy was represented on as many levels of respectability as the worship of the gods. The so-called "Stoic Opposition" of those who opposed the principate in eager retrospect for the Republic's libertas were strongly influenced by philosophical ideas.³⁹ On lower levels of social and political endeavour, the philosophical basis for life was supplied by Cynic streetcorner preachers.⁴⁰

The advent of the new rich had broken the continuity with the past almost as effectively as the civil conflict had decimated the senatorial aristocracy, and ended the hope of the old Republic's restoration. Society held the possibility of an exciting and rewarding career even for the humblest person, though not for many of such. In this society, a poor boy, even if he were an ex-slave from an Eastern province of the empire, could possibly end as a millionaire and enjoy not only the power conferred by his wealth, but a new status.⁴¹ It was easy for Greek or Hellenised intellectuals to make a living from the nascent cultural tastes of such men.⁴² A society of wandering philosophers ranged the country like goliardic singers, or like Jack Kerouac's characters in On the Road. Society easily tolerated the light burden which they represented. But at the same time this was an age which was heartbreaking to its more refined spirits.⁴³ The intellectuals' attitude to such a soceity of the rich was often odi et amo, and in the case of some of the less fortunate, this was speedily reduced to odi. The attitudes that emanated from affluence and the decreasingly less critical attitudes to materialist values depressed the intellectuals of First Century A.D. Italy, just as Plato was depressed by Syracuse.⁴⁴ The Satyricon reveals the dilemma of the intellectual who is torn between his desire to participate in an exciting prosperity, and his awareness of the thinness of the cultural superficies upon which his patrons oblige him to perform. Petronius expresses his difficulties in one mode; later on, Tacitus, who had clearly some sympathy for Petronius' predicament,⁴⁵ expresses his hatred of the frustrating times in another. Tacitus had the advantage of surviving to write in a period when the empire had its opportunity to draw breath after its first prolonged attack of horrors.⁴⁶ Tacitus was a man of archaic strictness and integrity.⁴⁷ Even more frustrated was Juvenal, expressing his common-sense Roman animus against a society which profited intellectual frauds and let men of worth subsist on pittances.⁴⁸

But Petronius had the deepest comprehension of the discontents of Imperial society. He could empathise the experiences of the depressed and disaffiliated. He was less stiffened by gravitas than Tacitus, and not so thwarted as Juvenal. He floated with the stream for a long time, though he was at last immersed. He was jocular rather than jaundiced in his writing, and the statement which his work in general enunciates, is a calm one, no matter how irrational or hysterical are some of its components.⁴⁹ Notwithstanding this, he is doomed, and he knows it. His characters from time to time express hysterical despair, and then are switched away from it. Is this his own despair? Did he cultivate a volatility which could turn it aside for a period? If we hypothesise a literary receptacle for such despair, perhaps we might suggest that Encolpius, who narrates the novel as we have it, plays the author's part. Possibly this Encolpius is Petronius, as Petronius might have been if he had been unsuccessful. The onus of proof, however, still lies with those who would go so far as Conrad Cichorius who suggests that there are indications of a connection between Petronius and the city of Massilia from which Encolpius may have fled as scapegoat.⁵⁰ Massiliote connections, even if they are established in the case both of the author and his creation, are not conclusive evidence for the author's life-history, but the fact that the story (at least in the surviving portion) is in Encolpius' hands, counts for something. He is the mouthpiece for the intellectual discontents of the age, and his sexual impotence itself might be taken as a symbol of the age's intellectual futility. The symbolism may or may not be there, but if it is, it may even have been unconsciously implanted by this most self-conscious author. The theme of impotence is appropriate. The intellectual, in spite of Seneca and others, was powerless. The First Century A.D. was not the age of Petronius, or even of Gaius and Nero; it was in an important sense, the age of Trimalchio.

Where, within the bounds of antiquity or modernity, could one find a time more appropriate to a disillusioned wanderer like Encolpius than the age of which he is a product? Encolpius is a displaced and anomic man. He is an Odysseus for whom there is no known destination, and no homecoming of which we are aware.⁵¹ Encolpius is carried off helpless by the tide of First Century society; he is certainly less able than Petronius to keep his footing against it. Nevertheless, Encolpius can, to some extent, discriminate the experience that flows over him. He has a high intelligence which has been sharpened by a good education. But he does not discriminate to any purpose. He allows his emotions to bear him off, and surrenders to their power in no romantic sense, but because he sees no sufficient reason to do anything else. He moves rapidly from the pole of hysterical misery and near suicide to that of extreme hilarity and unfounded optimism.⁵² He has rejected conventional civilisation apart from the margin that gives him subsistence, and even this he does not positively accept.⁵³ He is a casual predator and occasional parasite. Even in his suicidal moments,⁵⁴ he must live, and so he must remain in some relation with his environment. Somewhere or somehow, perhaps even from the beginning, he lost the centripetal forces of conscience or reflection, and he gives the impression of a personality which has no persistent inner core, but is composed of waves of anxiety.⁵⁵ He has moved back from the "guilt culture" to the "shame culture," and he is swiftly leaving the ambience of the "shame culture" also in his retrogressive journey.⁵⁶ His personality has something of the shape of that of a Homeric hero⁵⁷ debased and chronologically displaced. He is mutable, unreflectingly egoistic, and seems to be capable of unlimited variability of attitudes which are not linked by any common element other than his capacity to react swiftly towards immediate or short term pleasure stimuli.⁵⁸

Encolpius' "interior monologue" does not entail a Socratic observation of self so much as the egotistic objectivity of a Homeric hero describing what is happening within him, but with almost indulgent objectivity refraining from moral judgment on himself. Such a personality freely admits discreditable motives and calmly discusses their ineluctable influence upon his attitude and action. Homeric man is thought to be concerned with the circumstances of outward honour, and is not shameless. But no mark or public ridicule diverts Encolpius from his ways for more than a short time: Encolpius does not care.

To pursue the Homeric analogy a little further, we might argue that the difference between the Homeric and Petronian casts of personality was essentially this: the Homeric characters, if we follow (though at some distance) the Dodds/Snell view of their problem, were preconscientious, whereas the people we encounter in Petronius' narrative are postconscientious. The former belong to a time when conscientious self-control was not generally a condition of remaining a member of human society: the latter to a time when changing views about society and art allowed the long outmoded fluid, primitivistic shape of personality to be a possible object of artistic attention once more. This analogy is hardly affected, whether we regard "Homer" as more concerned with depicting a primitive age, or as treating a decadent one in a romantically primitivising style. On the other hand, Homeric influence in Petronius has been sufficiently striking to cause Klebs and many others to see a Homeric parody in his work. The Greek novel had Homeric associations, particularly with the Odyssey,⁵⁹ and Klebs' position was that Encolpius is a species of dishonourable Odysseus, pursued by the wrath of Priapus, as his illustrious predecessor was by the relentless anger of Poseidon.⁶⁰ There is a long tradition of parody connected with the Odyssey and the view that a novel which contains some specific Homeric parodies is itself a Homeric parody, remains attractive.⁶¹ If we equate Encolpius with Odysseus, however approximately, we are faced with a pathetic and absurd "Odysseus" which perhaps is reminiscent of that in the Cynic tradition.⁶² He is a wanderer with no home to go to, and no Penelope, faithful or otherwise, awaits his return.⁶³ How he ended in the full text of the novel, it is impossible to say. Perhaps, after all, a home was found for the wanderer—as happens to Lucius in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, but considering the nature of the Satyricon, it is hard to imagine a serious ending, unless perhaps, as itself a final joke on the part of the author. The Odyssean homecoming is, however, paralleled by the reunion of parted lovers in the Hellenistic novel's tradition, and it is possible that Petronius ended his work with some brutal jest along these lines, involving Giton and Encolpius. His brand of realism would hardly allow any end to the wanderings that was free either from tragedy or farce. We cannot exclude the Odyssean analogy, whether we think it comes direct or by means of the Hellenistic romances. Though the text of the Satyricon is much broken, the cause and effect of divine wrath is easily enough seen. The origin of his bad luck may occur in the part of the novel that is lost. We are not informed what his transgression was, but clearly it was grossly offensive to Priapus.⁶⁴ In fact, Encolpius consistently commits acts which offend the gods. He manages (somewhat unnecessarily) to slaughter a sacred goose of Priapus,⁶⁵ which depresses his credit even further with the deity - and this incident reminds us of Odysseus' men killing the oxen of the Sun. A striking effect of his sin is that he is plagued by impotence.⁶⁶ His would-be mistress, Chrysis, expresses the opinion that Encolpius' fixation on Giton is the cause of his impotence, but this naturalistic explanation need not detract from the general probability of the divine curse upon him.⁶⁷ At all events, until almost the end, incidents of apparent good fortune in sexual matters turn out badly for him.⁶⁸

Encolpius' name itself suggests sensuality and Hellenic origins.⁶⁹ Others also in the Satyricon have Greek names: Ascyltos for example and Giton, Encolpius' two principal companions, also Eumolpus. Agamemnon and Menelaus are minor characters, rhetoricians whose too Homeric names in themselves represent a satire upon their profession. These Greeks or Hellenised Italiotes, are probably of good education, but this is not necessarily true of Giton whose name is a a typical slave name and need not, Greek though it is, suggest an Hellenic origin. He is somewhat more vulgar than his two associates, certainly more than Encolpius, and of these two, Ascyltos seems to be rather more coarse and insensitive than Encolpius. Ascyltos' name in itself suggests something of a bravo.⁷⁰ His sexual prowess is as notable as his selfishness, and he has great physical strength. Encolpius is hardly his inferior in respect of selfishness, but he lacks the unthinking aggressiveness of his friend. Ascyltos' potency is in sharp contrast with the inhibitions that torment Encolpius. He is more violent than Encolpius, and has about him something of the aura of a gladiatorial tough and criminal bar-fly.⁷¹ His attitude to Encolpius alternates between predatory friendship and cool treachery. The bone of contention between them is again and again the boy Giton and his sexual attractions. In some respects Ascyltos can be seen as a coarser, hostile shadow of Encolpius. We get the impression, however, that Encolpius would wish to be as aggressive himself, if he had the courage and the opportunity.⁷² There is no real friendship, no amicitia between these two. Indeed, the tenor of the novel implies an attack upon the concept of friendship. In ch. 80 there is a bitter little poem about the fallibility and unreliability of friends, which is almost as pessimistic as any Shakespearean locus on the subject.⁷³

The boy Giton is the catalyst of trouble between these two characters, and he is the third point of the persistent triangle of relationships. He is a species of "femme fatale" and he sees himself as a source of quarrelling who separates the two friends and reunites them (for more trouble) according to his whim or convenience.⁷⁴ He applies moral blackmail, by threatening to kill himself or offering himself to be killed, when rows which he has engineered flare up more fiercely than is suitable to his purpose of playing off one of the friends against the other.⁷⁵ Like other suicide threats⁷⁶ and attempts in the Satyricon, Giton's promises of self-destruction are not to be taken seriously. This suggests as much as anything else, a general sense of the devaluation of life. These wanderers do not care for life sufficiently to succeed in killing themselves, or even to be serious in intending to do so. It requires a Stoic or Cynic conviction to do that. They are simply the victims of outbursts of anomic despair which soon pass, so that they can revert to their old habits once more. The physically weaker members of this triad, Encolpius and Giton, are more hysterical than the more elementary Ascyltos.⁷⁷ Later in the Satyricon, when Ascyltos has been replaced by Eumolpus, Giton's manoeuvres in playing off Eumolpus against Encolpius are conducted with much greater finesse, and with less violent results. Even though he is a fraud in everything but his bad habits and love of dubious poetry, Eumolpus is not a violent personality. Like any other professional rhetorician or poet in the context of the Satyricon, he lives off his capacity to dupe the public and is perfectly contented with his way of life. He cannot be prevented, in fact, from exhibiting his art.⁷⁸ This is true also of Agamemnon and his satellite Menelaus. However, to return to Giton: there is no doubt that he possesses a cynical self-centredness and bland insolence which might ensure his survival and perhaps even make his fortune. This was an age in which ex-slaves could become rich and powerful. Giton, it turns out, is a slave; though he is a runaway, he pretends, for purposes of social convenience, to be the slave of Encolpius⁷⁹ and Ascyltos. It is just possible that Giton might develop into a magnate of similar type to Trimalchio, but it may be that Giton does not show the same shrewdness as Trimalchio in the choice of those to whom he prostitutes himself,⁸⁰ and this, together with his irrationality, may prescribe limits to his future success. Nevertheless, if he should fall into the right hands, he could be imagined as prosperous and powerful.

Trimalchio is an excellently realised character: not simply because we have so much more continuous text about him than about other individuals. It is a question of character itself. Trimalchio and his friends have a more positive view of the world, are concerned in action, and lacking any kind of introspection, develop some amazing foibles which remind the reader quite strongly of Dickens' characters. Trimalchio is a contrast to Encolpius and Ascyltos, who are buffeted about by circumstances which they make no consistent attempt to resist. Trimalchio's thoughtless dynamism and pomposity are thrown into relief by the "beatnik" passivity of these two, and of the other intellectuals, such as Agamemnon. Some of the minor figures surrounding Trimalchio, in that they are obviously hangers-on and parasites, approach the irregularity of life of Encolpius and his friends, but Trimalchio himself sets a standard of a successful career that outshines anything else of the kind that there is in the book as we have it. Credit is surely due to a person who was a slave in his youth, was a foreigner in Italy,⁸¹ and suffered the serious reverses of his early business career. Against his ignorance and vulgarity, faults, by the way, which have been somewhat overstressed by critics,⁸² there is set his immense energy and psychological resilience. It was no small achievement, having been sold into slavery in a foreign country, to gain freedom and a fortune.⁸³ Like other young slaves, Trimalchio was used as a sexual object by his master and later by his mistress.⁸⁴ So far from being broken in spirit by this (or rendered touchy and unbalanced like Giton), Trimalchio set to work to maximise the advantages that could come to him from this situation. Eventually, he ceases to be the utensil, and becomes the user, for he so prevails upon the affections of his master that he obtains manumission and inherits money from him. This change from the slave situation is probably a more frequent version and a more plausible one of the Stoic paradox that only a slave is really a king.⁸⁵ Trimalchio went into a trading venture with his inheritance and when the ships laden with his merchandise came to grief, he found himself in a very difficult position. However, he liquified whatever property he had, and his wife sold her jewellery, so that he could remain solvent and try once more. This time the voyage in which he invested turned out to be a prosperous one, and he began to be rich. He then took to the more profitable and secure occupation of financing freedmen like himself.⁸⁶ No doubt the freedmen who are present at his dinner-party are in his debt.

The gloomy prognostications about the economic state of Italy that are uttered by some of the minor characters at the Cena may be true, for ancient prosperity was patchy, but they also indicate their own relative lack of success in the game which Trimalchio has played with genius(44). The period was a prosperous one, and social advances and social mobility were remarkable in it. Trimalchio's rise in status was phenomenal even for this time. In Ostia, a prosperous seaport that attracted people from all parts of the empire, there was a notable increase in people of freedman stock who were in high places in the community, though (unlike Trimalchio) their families only became established as a local ruling class after three generations.⁸⁷ On the other hand we know that principes ruled through freedmen,⁸⁸ who held high offices on the principial staff.

Much has been made of the view that Petronius despised and disliked people of Trimalchio's type. There is little evidence to support this. Petronius does not seem to have marked or consistent sympathy with any of his characters⁸⁹—even the Encolpius who is possibly identified with himself. He shows comprehension of many aspects of human behaviour, and it is fairer to say that he understood Trimalchio rather than that he despised him. The portrait is a satirical one, and thus it has in it an element of attack, but there is little to suggest active dislike. On the other hand, Trimalchio, like the society which produced him, and like the literature which speciously (in Petronius' opinion) malnourished that society, is a fair target for mockery. There is a certain directness in Trimalchio's personality that Petronius surely did not despise. Trimalchio was ignorant but not decadent, intolerable company but not without humanity, indecent but generous, and by the standards of his time, not cruel. Trimalchio had his own form of simplicitas,⁹⁰ and though we have no reason to believe that Petronius would necessarily have approved entirely of anybody's simplicitas, (including his own),⁹¹ he was surely, on the evidence of his literary skill as presented by the Satyricon, capable of making a connection between the ripe outspokenness of Trimalchio, and his own sophisticated outspokenness. Trimalchio is the reverse of Petronius' own coin—according to Tacitus' description of Petronius' character. Trimalchio is a person of heroic dimensions, whose only enemy is the inevitable death which he has tried to buy off with the splendid funeral that his wealth could procure, and to which he looks forward with a thoughtless enthusiasm as if it were a day of personal triumph. Like a heroic character of epos, he is volatile and rude,⁹² but his bark is worse than his bite. He threatens dire punishments to his slaves at various points in the Satyricon, but always allows the offenders to go free. His mercy earns him the appearance of magnanimity, and the occasions for its exercise may be supposed to have been contrived to that end, but nevertheless, his abstention from harsh punishment is real. Whether it is sincere or not makes little difference. The number of tricks and deceptions which he has arranged to startle the guests may suggest that the offences which he forgives are concocted. We have an example of the rigged offence in the case of the pig which the cook has apparently forgotten to gut, but which in fact is stuffed with sausages which look like entrails. The cook is on the verge of punishment, but is let off.⁹³ This is a very clear example of the theme of pretence that runs through the work. At all events, Trimalchio remembers the slave condition which he once endured. "Slaves are human beings," he says, and invites them to the table, where they succeed in crowding the guests off the couches.⁹⁴ It is characteristic of the usual attitude that the household slaves have the benefits of his forgiveness, but not the rustic ones. When the minutes of his estate administration are read out, we find that the country slaves are not so well treated as those who are in personal contract with their master in the house. (53) This agrees not only with the customary attitude of ancient slave-owners, but also with the rather limited scope of human sympathy that is observable in Trimalchio. Perhaps even more than other characters, his sympathy is engaged by what is before his eyes, or happens to be an immediate object of apprehension. This is illustrated by Trimalchio's flirtation with his boyfriend, Croesus, in the presence of Fortunata. (64) He is insensitive to everything but the matter that is before his attention. This type of personality could concentrate intensely upon individual transactions of business from which his prosperity grew. This is combined, as it easily can be, with the enduring love of property which has however, little in it of the narrow obsession of the miser. Trimalchio wishes to be like a prince, who can spend lavishly and not count the cost. He realises his desire for self-assertion by conspicuous expenditure from apparently inexhaustible wealth, rather than by the oppression of fellow creatures.⁹⁵ He admits slaves to the human family but he does not question the fact of slavery as an institution. His perceptions are short-term, immediately concentrated, and exclude peripheral distractions; his bursts of bad temper are connected with this trait; so also is his rudeness and his inability to appreciate the finality of death—though his attitude on this last point was common enough in all kinds of temperaments. For him, death means nothing but the glories of his funeral and monument, and he does not conceive of his ego being absent, or even attenuated at the occasion of his final public appearance. It is not final. There will always be Trimalchio. His rudeness is of a piece with the shortness of grain in his perceptive personality. The immediate is all-important, and the game of draughts must be finished before the guests are attended to. (33) So too, he says, the wine served is better tonight than it was when, a couple of nights back, he had much more important people to dinner. (34) Last century, and some part of this one, periods not distinguished for good manners, have shown remarkable sensitivity to Trimalchio's rudeness. A number of authors have criticised him for it. But his rudeness is simply shortness of grain and inability to comprehend more than one thing concentratedly at a time. There is also the rudeness of pure energy: we may be reminded of the rudeness of manner in the Elizabethan age, when people of high social standing freely behaved in the rough fashion of Mr. Walter Releigh towards his father: "Box about t'will come to my father anon"—without any great harm being intended by it.⁹⁶ Certainly Trimalchio is not nearly so complex or vulnerable a personality as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, with whom he has been compared.⁹⁷

Fortunata and Scintilla are the only female characters in Petronius who are not presented as menacing. They are pathetic and absurd (but not unsympathetic) exslaves or freedwomen whose husbands have become wealthy and powerful, and who are consequently a little insecure. Fortunata, Trimalchio's wife, is not necessarily (as has been supposed) of native Roman stock.⁹⁸ This suggestion, which was based upon her name, is not convincing, for her name ("Lucky") is precisely the kind of name that might be given to a slave girl. She has been a dancer, and is reproached by her husband in a quarrel, with this fact: 'fulcipedia," he calls her—"hoofer." Their quarrels are violent and bitter, but the marriage (in spite of Trimalchio's male concubines) seems to be a real one. In early years, we are told, Fortunata helped the common financial cause by selling off her jewels so that Trimalchio could use the money to make one more attempt to retrieve his imperiled fortunes—"at this point Fortunata did the decent thing,"⁹⁹ says her gracious spouse. In spite of her dubious past, or because of the perpetual insecurity¹⁰⁰ and social contempt which it represented, she has become the model of the careful housewife. Her personality is tenuous and without colour, and her tears and impotent rage do nothing but exasperate Trimalchio in their quarrels. He is also said to be sometimes rather in fear of her. (52, 11) Scintilla, Habinnas' wife, is more or less a duplicate of Fortunata. Her name is also of the kind of pet name, "Spark," that would be quite appropriate for a slave girl. She is dominated by her husband, but the relationship, as it is depicted in our text, does not give evidence of such extremes as that of Trimalchio and Fortunata. There is a certain comradeship between the two women in their situation of gilded adversity. They admire each other's jewels; they comfort each other against the drunken horseplay and infidelity of their husbands with their respective slaves.¹⁰¹

These respectable housewives are quite distinct from the other female characters in the book. The others are menacing and sexually dominating. They provide occasions for Encolpius to prove himself impotent; those who attempt to cure him with rituals, do so in a shameful and terrifying fashion. These women represent the opposite pole of femininity to the embourgeoised Fortunata and Scintilla. Quartilla, the priestess of Priapus, treats Encolpius and his friends with similar impropriety and sexual menace. She is contemptuous of their manhood, informed as she is by the inspiration of a fertility deity whose power transcends mere individual potency, and whose worship jestingly makes light of it. The element of menace is also to be seen in Tryphaena, Circe, and Chrysis. In a more intensified and absurd form the qualities of Quartilla appear in Oenothea and Proselenos, whose ritual for curing Encolpius of his impotence amounts to a painful, obscene assault, almost more terrifying to him than Quartilla's minatory amorousness.¹⁰²

The element of ritual and the influence of the malign god Priapus, to some extent explain the aggressiveness of the women who are so closely associated with his worship. But other women such as Tryphaena, Circe, Chrysis, and Philomela, are no less aggressive—not to speak of the treachery and unreliability of feminine nature which is implied by the folk-tale of the "Widow of Ephesus".¹⁰³ Encolpius, while consistently falling foul of female anger, is none the less attracted to women and wishes to be successful in his love affairs with them, but he meets nothing but humiliation. Also, he is impotent in his homosexual relationships (140) except in the case of Giton.

Something about Encolpius puts him in a position of impotence and contempt vis-à-vis the female characters—this something is whatever has made him impotent. The aggressiveness of the women is stimulated by Encolpius—it is not an inevitable or usual characteristic of womankind in the work's Weltanschauung. Others fare much better. We might say that Lichas fared marginally better than Encolpius if we had more information about him, but we gather that he has been badly worsted in a transaction involving his wife called Hedyle.¹⁰⁴ His attitude to Tryphaena is far from being even positive, much less dominating. He is thwarted and frantic, but after the fashion of an ordinary man and not one who is cursed with a notable disability like Encolpius. A more successful man in this sphere is Eumolpus. He presents a contrast to his fellow intellectuals. Encolpius is young, but Eumolpus is elderly; Encolpius does not create anything, but Eumolpus utters long tracts of rather boring verse, and even under threat of stoning, cannot be brought to desist.¹⁰⁵ Eumolpus is a wanderer, like the others; he is somewhat mad, but unlike them, his craziness seems to have some purpose,—even though the purpose itself lacks sanity, let alone honesty. He is buoyant, hopeful, full of schemes, where they are lassitudinous, and it is he who conceives the notion of passing himself off in Croton as a rich old man with no children who might well be a good quarry for legacy-hunters. He enjoys himself in a positive sense at the public's expense. He lives the life of an active and colourful rascal. His activity with Philomela's daughter, and with the boy whom he seduced while he was his tutor, testify to his potency.¹⁰⁶ He is not so much the victim of his own desires (as are Encolpius, Giton and Ascyltos) as the cunning manipulator of them to gain his own special ends. He resembles more than the others, a "popularizing" Epicurean type who regards the world as a place in which he must live, as comfortably as possible.¹⁰⁷ His only passion is for the recitation of his own bad poetry.

The power of Petronius' character portrayal, and the way in which it is wedded to the styles of speech which the characters respectively use, which is individual while it still remains Petronian, makes it the more regrettable that large tracts of the book are lost. There are, as it is, many minor characters who create their own atmospheres, such as the haughty steward who magnanimously forgives his fellow slave a whipping,¹⁰⁸ the greasy kitchen slave who impertinently challenges Trimalchio to a bet (they are supporters of rival racing teams).¹⁰⁹ The fact that they all speak the same language which is Petronius' own distinctive language, without any abatement in the individuality which they possess, may remind us of (say) Dickens, but would I think, remind Petronius' contemporaries of Homer. A writer of powerful communicative genius leaves his reader with a sense of the inevitability of his mode of presentation and context. His characters are all imbued with his peculiar thought and emit the special flavour of his own philosophy of life. This, I would suggest, is true of Petronius' portrayals of character.

Notes

¹ J. P. Sullivan takes the view that the Satyricon rather than being a Kreuzung der Gattungen is a natural development within the boundaries of Menippean satire: The Satyricon of Petronius London 1968, 115, cf 89; C. A. Van Rooy, Studies in Classical Satire and Related Literary Theory, Leiden 1965, 154-5. But cf. W. Kroll, Studien zum Verstindnis der Romischen Literatur, Darmstadt 1959, 223-4 "Die Kreuzung der Gattungen."

² Ariston of Ceos, Aratos, and Philodemos the Epicurean philosopher of the First Century B.C. wrote characterologies: see Schmid-Stahlin, Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur II, 1. 64. The view that Menander had been a pupil of Theophrastus is best treated with caution: A. Lesky, History of Greek Literature (transl. Willis, De Heer) London 1966, 644-5.

³ Sullivan 165, 167.

⁴ S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire, California 1949, 160-1.

⁵Satyricon 1. 1-3.

⁶ Which Sullivan does not regard as naturalistic in the modern sense: 97; E. Auerbach, Mimesis, transl. Trask, Princeton 1953, 28-33.

⁷ Sullivan, 97, 101, 104: "the work is not so much a depiction of the real, for our moral instruction, as a denigration of the real." See also refs at note 6 above.

⁸Cf E. Dujardin, Le Monologue Interieur, Paris 1931, 47-8.

⁹ Sullivan 59, 69, 82; R. Hirzel, Der Dialog, Lips 1895, II 37.

¹⁰ 30, 6-11; 70, 13.

¹¹ Sullivan, ch. VII 232-253; which is a modification of his paper "The Satyricon of Petronius, some Psychoanalytical Considerations," American Imago Vol. 18, 1961, 325-369: he argues that Petronius had scopophilic tendencies.

¹² See Tacitus' account of his personality: Annales XVI, 17-20.

¹³ The expressions in Tacitus' biography: ac dicta factaque eius quanto solutiora et quandam sui neglegentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur. (Annales XVI, 18,2) and: neque tamen praeceps vitam expulit, sed incisas venas, ut libitum, obligatas aperire rursum et adloqui amicos, non per seria aut quibus gloriam constantiae peteret. audiebatque referentis nihil de immortalitate animae et sapientium placitis, sed levia carmina et facilis versus. (19, 2) suggest a certain capacity for self-examination.

¹⁴ 41,9; 46; Frank Frost Abbott, "The Use of language as a means of Characterisation in Petronius," Classical Philology 2, 43-50. On the style of the more sophisticated characters: Peter George's article "Style and Character in the Satyricon," Arion Vol. V, 3, 336-358 analyses the literary elements in their talk.

¹⁵ Perhaps they were agents of his: H. C. Schnur, "The Economic Background of the Satyricon," Latomus, 18, 1959, 790-9, 792.

¹⁶ Abbott, 43-4.

¹⁷ For Lichas' reaction to the story: 113, 2-4: at non Lichas risit, sed iratum commovens caput "si iustus" inquit "imperator fuisset, debuit patris familiae corpus in monumentum referre, mulierem affigere cruci". non dubie redierat in animum Hedyle expilatumque libidinosa migratione navigium. sed necfoederis verba permittebant meminisse, nec hilaritas, quae occupaverat mentes, dabat iracundiae locum: Assuming that Hedyle is his wife.

¹⁸ Also the un-named girl accompanying the peasants: 14, 5 mulier operto capite, quae cum rustico steterat, who, if 16, 3 (illa scilicet quae paulo ante cum rustico steterat) is accepted as genuine, may be the maid of Quartilla. On this question, Sullivan 46-7, Nisbet's review of Konrad Muller's text Journal of Roman Studies 1962, 227-8.

¹⁹The Mimes of Herodas by W. Headlam, A. D. Knox, Cambridge 1966, Introduction esp. xxii-xxiii.

²⁰ For this comical "chase" associated wlth the mime: Cicero Pro Caelio 65: Mimi ergo iam exitus, non fabulae; in quo cum clausula non invenitur, fugit aliquis e manibus, dein scabilla concrepant, aulaeum tollitur: see R. G. Austin's comment ad. loc. M Tulli Ciceronis, Pro Marco Caelio Oratio, Oxford 1952.

²¹Rep. 548 d. Gorg. 493 d: R. G, Ussher's comments, The Characters of Theophrastus Intro. 27; For Plato's description of the "timocratic" man: Rep. 549 d ff; the "democratic" man: 559 d ff., the "tyrannical" man: 571 a ff. H. Reich, Der Mimus, Berlin 1903 Bd. II, 355, 360, 363.

²² On resemblances between Theophrastus' [Kharakteres] and Aristotle, Ussher, 8-11, who is careful to stress the difference in style and time of Theophrastus' work from those of his master (at Rhet. 9, 26; III, 7. 6, for example). Also E. Schwartz, Ethik der Griechen edit. Richter, Stuttgart 1951, 16 f.

²³ Characterology as such first emerges in its full form with Theophrastus' [Kharakteres] Schmid-Stahlin, II, 1. 64. Ussher does not agree with the view that this work has a direct ethical purpose, and suggests that it might have been intended to serve for a Poetic.

²⁴ If we accept that Thucydides' descriptions of the character of peoples (as in Thuc. I, 70) or individuals (Pericles: Thuc. II, 65) or the so-called Melian Dialogue (Thuc. V, 84-114) are (a) sufficiently in the manner of [ethopoia] (b) are sophistic and dialogue: R. Hirzel, Der Dialog I, 45, 53; Protagoras was said to be the inventor of the "Socratic" dialogue Diog. 9, 53 (Hirzel 56).

²⁵ Reich, op. cit.

²⁶ F. A. Todd, Some Ancient Novels, Oxford 1940, 80.

²⁷ Sullivan 67, 168-9, 191-2; H. Stubbe, "Die Verseinlagen im Petron," Philologus Supplement bd. XXV Hefte, 1933 (esp. 103) argues that stylistically, the Bellum Civile poem is Vergilian rather than imitative of Lucan's style, and an implied criticism of L. on stylistic as well as other grounds. cf K. F. C. Rose, "Problems of Chronology in Lucan's career," T. A. P. A. Vol. XCVII, 1966, 379-396.

²⁸ Sullivan, 259: "If there is a 'quasi-moral' principle at work, it is the principle, invoked sometimes by Horace also, of taste, be it taste in literature or behaviour; but taste itself dictates that even this be not taken too seriously" surtout pas de zele: cf J. F. Killeen on Petronius, "James Joyce's Roman Prototype," Comparative Literature IX, 3, 1957, 193-203, rejects alike (201) the tendency to see ethically significant implications and intentions in the Satyricon (Burman, Klebs and others) and in Ulysses.

²⁹ 44. 2, 3, 17, 18; Schnur, op. cit.; P. A. Brunt, "The Roman Mob," Past and Present, 35, 1966, 3-27.

³⁰ A. Rini, Petronius in Italy, N. Y. 1957. 159. E. Courtney, "Parody and Literary allusion in Menippean Satire," Philologus 102, 1/2, 1962, 86-100.

³¹ E. Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen II i. (ed. 5 Darmstadt 1963) 286-7; E. Rohde, Der Griechische Roman, Hildesheim 1960, 267.

³² Note above 28; Varros' work sometimes had a distinct political purpose, … Hirzel I, 455.

³³ Sullivan, 89; G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, London 1965, 196-8; L. P. Wilkinson, "Philodemus and Poetry", Greece and Rome 2. 1933, 144 ff.

³⁴ On the relative smallness of Trimalchio's fortune, Sullivan, 150.

³⁵ Schnur, 791; Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia, Oxford 1960, 70.

³⁶ Meiggs, 222-3.

³⁷ Petronius ridicules artistic extremes in his parodies, but it may be recalled that in fact, at a celebration of games given by Nero, inter pyrricharum argumenta taurus Pasiphaaen ligneo invencae simulacro abditam iniit, ut multi spectantium crediderunt (Suet, Nero 12) cf 21: inter cetera cantavit Canacen parturientem Oresten matricidam etc.

³⁸cf the story of the versipellis, 62, also its echo 63, and the resultant superstitious dread on the part of Trimalchio's guests in 64. The Roman senatorial "establishment" at least endeavoured to control the introduction of new magico-religious ideas into the city: A. Toynbee, Hannibal's Legacy, Oxford 1965, Vol. II, 400 f, 912 f; Augustus caused a large number of the Sibylline oracles to be destroyed in 12 B.C. on the grounds that: nullis vel parum idoneis auctoribus ferebatur, whereas he preserved the genuine ones (Suet. Aug 31. 1.). On this question see G. W. Clarke "The Burning of Books and Catullus 36", Latomus XXVII, 515 ff. The attitude of the Republican ruling class to magic and the like was essentially social—they feared that it might subvert society, indeed the attitude that underlay the S. C. de Bacchanalibus, 186 B.C. is strikingly persistent in Tacitus' stigmatisation of Christianity as an exitiabilis superstitio (Annales XV, 44, 4). Though the magic dreads of Trimalchio and his friends may be native Italian in origin and thus not eligible for suppression and severe reprobation, few respectable persons of the Republic would have admitted them, and in Imperial times, adherents of the Republican style like Tacitus, would have despised them. Servilia gave money to magi to see if her father Soranus would be spared, which is made a charge against her in her trial together with her father (Tac. Annales XVI, 30, 2; 31, 1).

³⁹ Stoics could hardly be expected to feel much sympathy with the pretensions of a princeps who allowed himself to be worshipped as a god, as emerges in the reign of Gaius, E. V. Arnold, Roman Stoicism, London 1911, 393, and on the "Old Roman"—Stoic opposition to Nero, 394-9; B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero, London 1903, 294-302, also ch. XI passim.

⁴⁰ There was some of this plain outspokenness even in such respectable figures as Demetrius the Cynic, the friend of Thrasea: Dio Cassius 66, 11, 13; Suet Vesp. 13. See also H. Musurillo, Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, Oxford 1954.

⁴¹ 75, 10-77, 7.

⁴² A. H. Salonius: "Die Griechen und das Griechische in Petrons Cena Trimalchionis", Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, Helsingfors 1927, II i, 15.

⁴³ Even under an earlier and more humane dispensation, Horace had been able to withdraw from too close an association with the princeps, Suet. Vita Horati 25, C. L. Roth.

⁴⁴ Plato Ep. VII 326 b, c.

⁴⁵ This is indicated by the amount of interest shown by Tacitus in the life history of P. cf H. D. Rankin, "On Tacitus' Biography of Petronius," Classica et Mediaevalia XXVI. 1-2 1965, 233-45; (see below, 106-108).

⁴⁶ Tacitus, Histories I, 1.

⁴⁷ R. Syme, Tacitus, Oxford 1958, 553.

⁴⁸ Juvenal III 147-53, VII 66 ff. G. Highet, Juvenal the Satirist, Oxford 1959, 7-19.

⁴⁹ A statement of what B. E. Perry, The Ancient Romances, A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins, California 1967, calls his "profound but latent pessimism." This coolness is characteristic of Epicurean literary doctrine: Sullivan 57; Grube, 195-6; Wilkinson 146, 149-50; Philodemus Uber Die Gedichte, C. Jensen, Berlin 1923, II, 21 III 5 (ff. 11,13).

⁵⁰ C. Cichorius, "Petronius und Massilia," Romische Studien Berlin 1922, 138-9.

⁵¹ Such as the final reconciliation with life in Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

⁵² For examples of his instability, 16-25; 80, 7; 82, 4.

⁵³ As in the case of the "beats" so it might be said of P's character that: "the pursuit of long-range goods is abandoned for the pleasures and the. anguish of the moment." Elwin H. Powell in Arnold H. Rose, Human Behavior and Social Process, An Interactionist Approach, London 1962, 361.

⁵⁴ 80, 7.

⁵⁵Cf J. P. Donleavy's "Sebastian Dangerfield" in The Ginger Man, or (a most extreme example of antiheroism) Keith Waterhouse's Jubb.

⁵⁶ E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, California 1951, 17 ff.

⁵⁷ Dodds, op. cit. in his chapter "Agamemnon's Apology" passim.

⁵⁸Cf G. S. Kirk, Homer and the Epic, Cambridge 1965, 101-2, on the "monumental" aspect of Homer's work exemplified in his use of pre-existing material.

⁵⁹ A theme drawn into Hellenistic literature and into the novel via the later tragedy: E. Rohde, Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorldufer, Hildesheim 1960, 110, 111.

⁶⁰ E. Klebs, "Zur Composition von Petronius' Satirae," Philologus 47, 1889, 623-635.

⁶¹ Courtney, op. cit.

⁶² R. Hoistad, Cynic Hero and Cynic King, Uppsala 1948: and (without prejudice to the question whether or not Antisthenes is classifiable as a proto-cynic), Mullach, Frag. Antist. 25, 26, 27, ([homerika] of Antisthenes) deal with Odysseus.

⁶³ A conjecture which (I suggest) is not unreasonable in itself but the probability of which is inevitably subject to the incomplete nature of the text which we possess.

⁶⁴ Klebs, op. cit.; Cichorius, op. cit.; Sullivan, 40 ff.

⁶⁵ 136, 5-6.

⁶⁶ 128, 2, 8-9; 129, 5-7; 133, 3; 134; 139, 4 (probably); 140, 11.

⁶⁷ 128, 8-9.

⁶⁸ R. Heinze, "Petron und der Griechische Roman," Hermes XXXIV 1899, 494-519, esp. 498.

⁶⁹ Salonius, 6: "auf dem Schoss Sitzenden." The name does occur in inscriptions etc. H. Stephanus, Thesaurus L. Gr. s.v.; Pape, Griechische Eigennamen.

⁷⁰ Salonius 6: it means "undisturbed, untouched." …

⁷¹ Notice his extreme aggressiveness and brutalised physique and mentality, 80; 92, 2: there is something "gladiatoral" perhaps about Encolpius' past: see 9, 9; 81, 3; 130, 20. In 80 we have the distinct impression of an inexpert gladiatorial combat between E. and A. See Burmann's comments ad loc, and the note of Gonsalius de Salas (in the Burmann edition).

⁷² 82, 1-3: haec locutus gladio latus cingor, et ne infirmitas militiam perderet, largioribus cibis excito vires. mox in publicum prosilio furentisque more omnes circumeo porticus. sed dum attonito vultu efferatoque (animo) nihil aliud quam caedem et sanguinem cogito frequentiusque manum ad capulum, quem devoveram, refero, notavit me miles, sive ille planus fuit sive nocturnus grassator, et "quid tu" inquit "commilito ex qua legione es aut cuius centuria?"

⁷³ 80, 9:

nomen amicitiae sic, quatenus expedit, haeret; calculus in tabula mobile ducit opus,cum fortuna manet, vultum servatis, amici; cum cecidit, turpi vertitis ora fuga.

⁷⁴ He comes between them when they are about to fight, announces that he is the cause of dissension, offers himself to be killed, 80, 4: he quite unexpectedly (from Encolpius' point of view) elects to go off with Ascyltos. Later (91, 8) he admits: cum duos armatos viderem, ad fortiorem confugi.

⁷⁵ 80, 4; 94, 15; 101, 7; 108, 11.

⁷⁶ 30, 7; 94, 8; 97, 9; 101, 2; 108, 10-11; 132.

⁷⁷ 92, 7-11.

⁷⁸ Even at the risk of a stoning, 90, 1 or a beating, 92, 6.

⁷⁹ The reference to him as a gladiator 9, 9, might suggest slave status: Tryphaena's remark, 105, 11: meruisse quidem contumeliam aliquam fugitivos, quibus in odium bona sua venissent, might also suggest this; it is possible that the plurals simply refer to Giton.

⁸⁰ 75, 11.

⁸¹ Trimalchio is not Roman: tam magnus ex Asia veni quam hic candelabrus est: 75, 10: on the question of the Semitic name: Trimalchio see L. Friedlander's note on 26, Petronii Cena Trimalchionis, Amsterdam 1960, 209; W. D. Lowe, Petronii Cena Trimalchionis, Cambridge 1905, 3. Salonius, 6; Meiggs, 224: "Malchio, Malchus" etc.

⁸² For instance: Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius; Salonius 20: J. W. Duff, Roman Satire, Cambridge 1937, 101-5; J. W. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Empire, repr. Cambridge 1958, 126: we may recall the traditional anti-intellectualism of the Romans: C. Marius was completely ignorant of Greek culture: Sallust Jug. 85. No doubt Petronius used Trimalchio as a figure for his satire: Sullivan 150-7 gives a balanced estimate of the whole question.

⁸³ 75, 10 suggests this: so also do the references to ipsimus and ipsima (75, 11) cf the voluntary entry into servitude of one of T's friends 57, 4.

⁸⁴ Notes: 81, 83 above: also Herodas Mime, V.

⁸⁵ We may note that an absurd version of this familiar paradox is attributed to Bion: Hoïstad: 178. B. was reputed to be the author of a book … from which apophthegms on the subject may be derived: Mullach fg. 1.

⁸⁶ 76, 9-10 postquam coepiplus habere quam totapatria mea habet, manum de tabula: sustuli me de negotiatione et coepi (per) libertos faenerare.

⁸⁷ Meiggs, 70.

⁸⁸ Duff, Freedmen etc. ch. VIII.

⁸⁹ Sullivan, 265-7.

⁹⁰ The question of Petronius' simplicitas as suggested by the phrase of Tacitus in speciem simplicitatis which describes how people regarded P's more outrageous actions and sayings (Tac. Annales XVI, 18, 2) has been subject to many different interpretations: see Stubbe, "Die Verseinlagen in Petronius," Philologus suppl. 25 Hft. 2. 150-1; H. Bogner, Hermes 1941, 223-4; E. Bickel, RhM 1941, 269-72. Quite probably archaic "simplicity" is intended (Bickel) in some form or other. One of the best descriptions of species simplicitatis in modern literature is to be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, Bodley Head edit. Vol. II, London 1959, 91: the outrageous, apparently innocent joke about the bathing-dress.

⁹¹ Tacitus probably liked P's apparent simplicity as reflecting old Roman character (quite irrespective of what lay behind the appearance). For Tacitus' conservative tastes: Syme, Tacitus, 553.

⁹²Cf. note 58 above: Petronius has this "rudeness" under perfect artistic control: Abbott points out (49-50) how the language and manner of Trimalchio undergo a change as he becomes more affected by drink in the course of the dinner.

⁹³ 49, 8-9.

⁹⁴ 71, 1: diffusus hac contentione Trimalchio "amici" inquit "et servi homines sunt et aeque unum lactem biberunt, etiam si illos malus fatus oppresserit."

⁹⁵ Note 34 above; Schnur op. cit.: even if Trimalchio's fortune is in fact only of moderate size, he acts on the assumption that it is enormous, which is presumably part of the satire upon him and his kind.

⁹⁶ Especially the rough play at the dinner party in which Sir W. cuffed his son, who in turn hit his neighbour saying, "Box about t'will come to my father anon." John Aubrey, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh: Aubrey's Brief Lives edit. 0. Lawson Dick, London 1949, 319.

⁹⁷ Paul Mackendrick, "The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio," Classical Journal 45, 7, 1950, 304-14.

⁹⁸ Salonius, 7.

⁹⁹ 76, 7: hoc loco Fortunata rem piam fecit: tribute is paid to her business acumen earlier in the text (37).

¹⁰⁰ Fortunata's low early status is attested not only by her husband's drunken abuse of her as milva, fulcipedia 75, 6, but also in 37, 3: ignoscet mihi genius tuus, noluisses de manu illius panem accipere.

¹⁰¹ 67, 6-10: They examine each other's jewellery in a comradely fashion; 47, 12: Scintilla comforts Fortunata in her quarrel with Trimalchio. Both have trouble with husbands who have favourite boy slaves: 69, 1-2; 74, 8.

¹⁰² 134-138: description of a ritual which combines tedium, fear and pain in a fashion that parallels the Quartilla episode (16-25), save that the later episode is more fragmentary: the original text must have been a very minutely detailed account of an obscene ceremony.

¹⁰³ 111-113.

¹⁰⁴ 113, 3-4 non dubie redierat in animum Hedyle expilatumque libidinosa migratione navigium. sed nec foederis verba permittebant meminisse, nec hilaritas, quae occupaverat mentes. dabat iracundiae locum.

¹⁰⁵ Sullivan 194-5: some of Eumolpus' discourse is possibly a parody of Seneca.

¹⁰⁶ 85-87; 140.

¹⁰⁷ See: Sullivan 110, 212-13.

¹⁰⁸ Notes 10, 93 above.

¹⁰⁹ Note 10 above.

Bibliography

Note: Abbreviations: Apart from the usual abbreviations of the titles of well-known works and periodicals (e.g. R-E for Real-Encyclopaedie, PLM for Poetae Latini Minores, etc.) I have sometimes used abbreviations in the notes which are not familiar but which I hope are easily understandable from the context, e.g. "R.R." near "Syme" will stand for "Roman Rsevolution", or D.P. in the context with "H. Herter" will be "De Priapo".

TEXTS, COMMENTARIES, AND TRANSLATIONS

Petronius, The Satyricon, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York, 1960.

Petronii Satirae et Liber Priapeorum, ed. F. Buecheler, Berlin, 1871.

Titi Petronii Arbitri Satyricôn quae supersunt cum integris notis Doctorum Virorum Commentariis; et Notes Nicolai Heinsii et Guilielmi Goesii nunc primum editis, accedunt Jani Dousae Praecidanea, D. Jos Ant Gonsali de Salas Commenta, variae Dissertationes et Praefationes, etc., curante Petro Burmanno, Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1709.

Petronii Saturae recensuit Franciscus Buecheler exemplar ex editione anni MDCCCLXII anastatice iteratum; adiectae sunt Varronis et Senecae Saturae similesque reliquiae ex editione sexta anni MDCCCCXII a Guilielmo Heraeo curata repetita et supplementa, Berlin, 1958.

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Titi Petronii Arbitri Equitis Romani Satyricôn, cum Fragmento nuper Tragurii reperto; Accedunt diversorum Poetarum Lusus in Priapum, Pervigilium Veneris, Ausonii cento nuptialis, Cupido crucifixus, Epistolae de Cleopatra et alia nonnulla, omnia commentariis et notis Doctorum Virorum illustrata, concinnante Michaele Hadrianide, Amstelodami, 1669.

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