SOURCE: "The Approach to Romanesque Poetry," in The Romanesque Lyric: Studies in Its Background and Development from Petronius to the Cambridge Songs 50-1050, University of North Carolina Press, 1928, pp. 66-83.

In my preceding narrative I have several times used the phrase Romanesque poetry to describe a certain manner of early European metrical writing.

As so applied, my choice of the word Romanesque is determined by the current application of the same attributive term to transitional types in the history of the fine and decorative arts. When thus employed Romanesque of course specifies "belonging to or designating the early medieval style of art and ornament derived from those of the Roman empire." As hitherto used in the domain of art Romanesque describes mainly that modification of the classical Roman form which was introduced between the reigns of Constantine and Justinian and which was an avowed attempt to adapt classical forms to Christian purposes.

Now I want to have a single word with which to refer to whatever poetry in western Europe since the Augustan Age derives its main elements of plan and construction, its purpose, theme, and imagery from Roman verse. I need one term like Romanesque to specify a distinct departure from Roman writing and yet a sideline descendant of it—a term, in short, which will run like a stout golden thread through the Silver Age, through the revival of letters under Hadrian, the African schools of Fronto and Tertullian, the fourth-century renaissance, and those two centuries after the troubadour Fortunatus, which seem so sterile of creative literary production but are so fruitful and significant with regard to polyphonic music. It is the lack of animating ideation of six centuries of Latin writing, caused by the failure to achieve one all-embracing phrase for their activity, which has led critics to speak of decay, debasement, preciosity, and final extinction when characterizing the natural and ordered stages that poetry had to undergo on its long pilgrimage from Rome to Canterbury. Whatever else may be said of such a phrase as Romanesque poetry, it will be agreed that its use may help to explain every historical departure of Latin writing from the classic idealism or formalism of Augustan Rome. No phrase is so satisfactory, so little vague as Romanesque poetry to indicate that the matter of verse has come to predominate over its form. Romanesque presumes in art the quality of the personal, ephemeral, emotional, or sensual, as opposed to that of the ideal or ethos. It notes that less attention is paid to objective methods of composition than to the expression of subjective feeling—hence it always suggests romantic as opposed to classical.

It will still be rashly contended by some people that Romanesque poetry is but a corrupted imitation of Roman writing, and yet this is never true, for it is a new thing in the world, the slowly matured product of a long period and of many influences. Let me say most emphatically that even where Romanesque poetry is but a short remove from debased Roman art, if it is yet definitely removed and contains at least one new element or unit which is entirely absent from Roman—no matter how slight that element (as of personal appeal or pathos or fancy) may seem to be—then the style of art and ornament in poetry is no longer Roman, it is Romanesque; whether in whole or in part, it is an entity as separate from Roman as a Romance language is separate from the Latin tongue.

There are two well worn paths between which the modern student of Romanesque poetry ordinarily chooses when he approaches the merging of Latin tradition with Gothic and Frankish culture in the Gaul of the fifth and sixth centuries. Because I propose to follow neither of these clearly marked trails, I feel it incumbent upon me to state promptly the reasons for my nonconformance to custom in this regard.

The first of these hallowed routist routes from decadent classical poetry to that which we term Romanesque starts with Horace and Catullus and with such moments of Vergil as carry the idyllic manner to a higher tension. A beginning is made with this trio because most modern critics not unreasonably consider them to be the finest exemplars of Latin lyric verse. This first path ends with Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Boethius, Colum Cille, Columban, Gregory of Tours, and Venantius Fortunatus, and—except for a vivid revival in the rococo measures of fourth-century lyric art—is felt to run all the way downhill to the tawdry Romanesque rhetoric that marks its inglorious close. The critic who pads the hoof along this route and approaches the study of Romanesque poetry from this direction finds, laudably enough, that the successors of the Augustan Age are less and less able to sustain the splendor of Horatian diction, and to him poor sixth-century poets inevitably assume the rôle of mendicants at the end of a trail that swoops sharply down from the summits to the sunset.

Now I gain neither healing nor help in my poetic pilgrimage by proceeding from the assumption that Romanesque poetry is only a barbarous corruption of classical molds. Such an assumption feeds me indeed with Rome but robs me of Whitechapel and Strawberry Hill. It causes my historic sense to atrophy, for it fosters a biased scholastic connoisseurship at the expense of all power fully to enjoy poetry written during the parlous centuries of Gothic Night. Such preconception as to the nature of Romanesque verse takes no account of that changed character of people in western Europe and of that consequent shifting in expression to embody new social conditions to which I have devoted much space in my opening chapters. Such prejudgment demands of me asthetic snobbery, in that I am supposed to prefer meticulous copyings of poetic masterpieces to the confusing experiments and innovations of rebellious racy art. It blinds me to all values that lie outside the pale of conventional classic complacency. Such a recapture of the romantic spirit in verse as mirrors, no matter if dully, new efforts put forth by men in the first century of Christ, finds no sympathetic response in him who willfully ascribes each deviation from Augustan norm to a perversion of taste. This amateur of decadent Graeco-Roman verse extols the ancient priests of poetry but decries its newer prophets. He is so content to exalt the stagnant art of the pagan past that he belittles the advance in poetic endeavor during six centuries—their incessant, restless experiment; their tireless speculation about aesthetics; their unwearying effort to apply them to the actual production of poetry and to exert the conscious human will upon art as it had not been exerted before.

So much, then, in the way of reaction against the first of the paths by which the modern student of Romanesque is unfortunately wont to approach the merging of Roman pagan tradition with Gothic and Frankish ideals of taste. Let us now turn to the second path, the one that starts with the world of medieval poetry, of which, by consensus of opinion, the ecclesiastical and vagabond Latin verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries furnishes him with many noblest examples. From this point of audition the modernist critic harks back to thin earliest notes of Latin Romanesque as these loose themselves waveringly from the full-stopped diapason of classical sound. Such a critic's ears still tingle reminiscently with the mad catachresis of canonical Latin poured forth by Gerbert and Fulbert and Wipo, by Serlo and Gerald and Baudri, by Alan and Adam and Hildebert and Nigel, Bernard and Walter, and Philip le Breton, by him of Salisbury and Vinesauf and Vendôme and Rennes and Morlaix and Grevia, by Peter of Blois and Reginald of Canterbury and Henry of Huntingdon and Hildebert of Lavardin and Hugo of Orleans and Godefrid of Rheims, by Hilary and Abelard and Odo of Orleans, Golias, Archipoeta, Mapes and Primas, and all who belong to the graceless Order of Goliards, whose names do not linger in the knowledge of men but who wrote imperishable MSS of modern song, like Cambridge and St. Omer and Queen Christine and Benedictbeurn. And to the ears of such a critic the Latin poems of fourth and sixth-century Gaul—Gothic, baroque, and rococo—give out a satisfying tone; their singers no longer seem to seek our alms but rather stand prophetic and erect at the beginning of that polyphonic path which strikes sharply upward from a dawn-filled horizon to the table-land of medieval Latin lyric utterance.

I cannot truthfully say that I treasure the result gained from following this second pathway chosen by the modernist more highly than the attitude gained through following the first one, the way invariably affected by the classicist. For neither classicist nor modernist regards his journeying in Romanesque poetry as an end in itself. To either critic the road offers no place of sojourn, but only a causeway between two points. It has to them no high reason for individual existence in and of itself—both types of critic see it only in direct relation to what has preceded it or to what follows after. They do not apply their historical sense to the study of Romanesque poetry. They do not apply to it certain psychological tests that are now familiar to every modern man of culture, in an attempt to discover if Romanesque verse (like sculpture, architecture, mosaic, carving) is a characteristic art, or, on the other hand, if it expresses the racial and social temper of the time which produces it. Critics seek no real values in Romanesque poetry as such, and, therefore, find none. Critics censure the rebellious quality in Romanesque, forgetful that it is just the mark of high artistry so to exercise its individual will as to die fighting a world that will not change. Better far is such rebellion than the harmony of dull and complacent monotones that ruled the Græco-Roman decadence; particularly after new ages and novel societies had come to the front of the western stage.

In our critical analysis of poetry, any judgment at which we may arrive depends upon the viewpoint from which the subject is approached. It is maintained by some that an atom has energy when studied in vacuo animœ, irrespective of the mood of the scientific observer. But certainly a Romanesque poem—or sculpture or cathedral or carving or mosaic—has neither charm nor meaning unless it be in the mind of its beholder. "Reared as I had been among people who despised Gothic architecture," said Goethe, "I fed fat my distaste for those overloaded and complex ornaments which by their grotesquerie appeared to preach the gospel of gloom. And then all at once I saw the new revelation—the very thing that had seemed to me so contemptible now engaged my spirit, and conversely. A sudden perception of beauty in all its forms thereupon flooded my soul."

It is as hard for us to realize there was a time when Goethe turned his back upon the Strasbourg minster, as it was for his contemporaries to learn he could regard this edifice with a favoring eye. But that is not the point. The point is that Gothic notions such as dwell in a church wall, the doggerel of folksong, the broadsides of Lutheran prose, the art of Shakespeare and even of Pindar were not conceptually or conceivably beautiful to Goethe until the moment when through Herder's teaching he felt them so to be. And thereafter they had for him necessitous, inherent beauty.

When with a mind single to the beauty of classical Roman poetry the student pursues a path which leads from Horace to the provinces, he finds the long flourishing of Romanesque a dreary time indeed. And in a Gallo-Roman society subservient to its military element, where barbarian slaves who gained ascendancy over a brutal soldiery might spawn on the throne of the Cesars, he cannot hope to see the profession of poetry in a flourishing condition. Then it seems to him inevitable that the cult represented by Horace and the elegiac poets should become esoteric, and its enjoyment be confined to a rapidly diminishing class, whose sole source of inspiration and whose only audience is of the academy. Then he sighs at the divorce of tradition from contemporary thought, at the very moment when the opposite is true. He grieves over the increasing divergence of written and spoken Latin, and makes an ill face as an elocutio novella, the idiom of common life, rises ever more sensibly to the surface. And finally, when a poet's meaning can no longer be deciphered by reference to the pages of Forcellini's totius latinitatis lexicon—what wicked irony sparkles in this title!—when a poet's contemporaries exalt him if he but spell correctly and his phrases parse, then does the amateur of Augustan poetry exclaim with unction, Rome is dead! And he refuses to sanction the Hisperic speech of a sixth century which has basely denied its birthright.

But when with a mind full of the beauty of resurgent thirteenth-century Latin lyric verse the modern student impatiently seeks the first indications of breaking in the stiff, implacable ritual of classical meters, then there is a freshness as of dawn in the new style that makes itself felt in the latter years of the principate of Augustus: the straining after romantic effect, the love of startling color and gorgeous imagery, the surfeit of brilliant epigram, the sense of masquerade and elaborate felicity of expression. Such a student holds high the Silver Age for the unexpected service it was to render that period of the Middle Ages when Greek was a hidden mystery to the western world—it was then that Lucan and Statius, Juvenal and Persius, and even the humble author of the Ilias Latina did their part in keeping the lamp alive and illumining the darkness before the budding morrow of the Renaissance. He finds vastly engaging many a half-forgotten line of Ausonius, Sidonius, and Venantius. For he sees a new nation coming into existence among the ruins of classical civilization in Gaul, and knows that a new idiom with firefly gleams of lai and chanson is being evolved. And his spirit chafes for the bright morning that is to come when Rome shall at last give up her reluctant ghost—a suicide, like Werther's, too long delayed! And the moment this modern student's eye surely catches the first gray foreshadowings of Carolingian renaissance, he longs to cry out, Rome is not dead but risen! And for him there exists meaning in every poetic excrescence of this old life that is real, not alone in the happier births of literary genius, but in the lucubrations of Vergil the Grammarian, and in the Hisperica famina, the Lorica, the Rubisca, the Adelphus adelpha, the Vita Columbani, and the Antiphonary of Bangor.

Perhaps I shall make myself clearest in distinguishing the attitude of classicist and modernist (romanticist) towards Romanesque poetry by taking refuge in concrete illustration.

A classicist who would derive his criteria for judging all Romanesque poetry by Horace's standard of performance finds little to admire in the verses of Petronius. For Horace, in the words of Garrod, is not profound, not ecstatic. He has discovered what we might have thought did not exist: the poetry of good sense. It is in virtue of this that he appeals to nearly all the moods of the average man and satisfies most needs, save the very highest. Horace is wise without pedantry, noble without cant, at all points humane and genuine. He has a hard, cool mind. For him life streams by like the passage of some peaceful Saturnalia. The scene has its dark patches, but Horace moves serenely amid its shifting phases; solidly content with life, the kindly uncle of the whole human race. By habit he speaks in lofty tones to Time and the world; his sonorous verse is pitched to the greatness of the empire it reflects; he has a nigh, moral seriousness and a supreme instinct for measure and proportion.

Whereas, if he speak of them at all, the classicist refers to the epigrams of lyric Petronius with bare tolerance, citing them for want of better as stock examples of a Latin that has already become Silver, on its foredoomed way to being of baser metal yet: bronze, iron, pewter, lead, tin, and scrap. For by the day of Petronius the great movement of the Latin-speaking provinces had begun. While still in a sense subordinate to Italy, these provinces had grown to be organic parts of the empire instead of subject countries. The municipal institutions and civic energy of Rome were multiplied in a thousand centers of local life in Italy and Gaul, Spain and Africa. Like the empire itself, Latin poetry had taken a broader basis. The exquisite austerity of the old verse was gone, and its diction, formed by a purer taste amid a grave and exclusive public, was eclipsed by new and striking styles. As the political extinction of Rome proper approached and the one overwhelming interest of the City ceased to absorb individual passion and emotion, the tension on poetry and art became relaxed. Feeling grew more humane and personal, social and family life reassumed their real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing new to literature, the Romanesque, the romantic spirit. With its passionate sense of beauty in nature, idyllic poetry reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life; the elegy and the epigram are full of a new freshness of feeling, and the personal lyric is born, with its premonitions of a simple pathos which is as alien to the older Roman spirit as it is close to the feeling of medieval romance.

Now no one has brought the phantom of freshness into the Latin poetry of love and nature more definitely than Petronius. In fact, if we except a very few of the best poems of Propertius, Latin elegiacs have nothing to show that combines such perfection of form with such sensuous charm. Therefore, your modernist finds (with a start of surprise) in the lyric Petronius the words and the tone of today:

ENCOURAGEMENT TO EXILE

Leave thine own home, 0 youth, seek distant
 shores!
For thee a larger order somewhere shines—
Fear not thy fate! For thee through unknown
 pines
Under the cold north-wind the Danube pours;
For thee in Egypt the untroubled lands
Wait, and strange men behold the setting sun
Fall down and rise. Greatly be thou as one
Who disembarks, fearless, on alien sands. (1)

THE MALADY OF LOVE IS NERVES

Night's first sweet silence fell, and on my bed
Scarcely I closed defeated eyes in sleep
When fierce Love seized me by the hair, and
 said,
(Night's bitter vigil he had bade me keep),
"Thou slave," he said, "a thousand amorous
 girls
Hast thou not loved? And canst thou lie
 alone?
O hard of heart!" I leaped, and he was gone,
And with my garment in disordered swirls,
And with bare feet I sought his path where
 none
There was by which to go. And now I run,
Being weary, and to move brings me no
 peace;
And tuming back is bitter, and to stay
Most shames me in the midmost of my way—
And all men's voices slowly sink and cease;
The singing birds, my dogs that, faithful, keep
My house, the roaring streets, to me are still.
Alone of men, I dread my couch, my sleep—
1 follow after Love, lord of my will. (2)

NOBLESSE OBLIGE

Pride of birth or degree proves no man to be
 upright—
Noble alone is he whose hands have never
 known fear. (3)

ILLUSION

Our eyes deceive us, and our sense
Weighs down our reason with pretense,
And in false ways goes wandering:
The tower that stands wellnigh four-square
Loses sharp comers in blue air
And softens to a rounded thing;
The liquor of Hyblaean bees,
My hunger sated, fails to please;
I hate the smell of cinnamon!
For this thing or for that, why weep
Or smile, except our senses keep
A doubtful battle never won. (4)

WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS …

Dreams that delude with flying shade men's
 minds
No airy phantoms are, nor sent by gods
From any shrine of theirs, but each man only

Weaves for himself his dream. And when in
 sleep,
Conquered, his limbs repose, and quiet comes,
Then the imponderable mind pursues
In darkness the slow circuit of the day.—
If towns have shook before him and sad cities
Under the weight of flames have been downrazed,
Javelins and fleeing armies he beholds,
The funerals of kings and plains wide-watered
With rivers of shed blood. If he's an orator,
Statutes and courts appear before his eyes;
He looks with terror on tribunals thronged
With multitudes. The miser hides his riches
And digs up buried treasure, and the huntsman
Drives through the shaken woods his yelling
 dogs.
The sailor dreams of shipwreck; from the
 waves,
Gasping, he takes his vessel, or in death
Seizes on it and sinks. And the adultress
Dreams, and so yields herself. The woman
 writes
In dreams unto her lover: why, the dog,
Sleeping, believes he follows on the hare!—
So all night long endured, the wounds of day
Doubly are sorrow to the miserable. (5)

NEALCE

Nealce, forever
   That night shall be dear
Asleep in my bosom
   That first saw you here;
And dear be the spirit,
   The lamp and the bed
When softly you came to
  A joy that is fled.
And now we are older
  We still must endure

The pitiful trouble
   Of age that is sure;
And since the brief years
   We shall lose with delay,
Let us kiss as of old,
   Let us love as we may.
Ours once was a passion
   Too sudden to spend—
Ah, now let us guard it
   Lest quickly it end! (6)

REMEMBERED SHORES

O sweeter to me than life may be is the sea and the sand where I May come once more, a remembered shore that I love changelessly; And day is fair in that region where I swam as the naiad swims, The cold sea-maid with whom I played a wager of hands and limbs. And the fountain's pool all day is cool, and the seaweed washes in, And 0 the sand, and the quiet land where love knows never a sin! I have lived my life. And not the strife of fortune can take from me What time has given—a quiet haven, the past, and the shore, and the sea. (7)

Now Petronius, as my reader will recall, lived in the days of Nero and would be famous as a lyric poet but for two things: first, his verse is overshadowed by his most remarkable novel, the Satyricon; second, classicist critics are prone to abuse him, in common with his great contemporaries Seneca, Martial, Juvenal, Lucan, Pheqdrus, and Statius, because he did not follow in all things linguistic and literary the mold of an age long dead—as if the future should abuse our poets for doing aught but ape Dryden and Pope. Be that as it may, there is but one first-century lyric with which we may reasonably compare the above-given odes of Petronius, and that one is Statius's well-known Apostrophe to Sleep. From the classicist point of view, it is a far more deserving ode than any of Petronius (because it adheres more tightly in form and manner to traditional verse). But I doubt if the moderist will agree with this verdict, although the translation has been designedly cast into a form best suited to display to English readers the virtues of its original: a verse-scheme after Sir Philip Sidney's hexameter sonnet.

APOSTROPHE TO SLEEP

What have I done, 0 Sleep, gentlest of
 heaven's sons,
 That, miserable, I only forfeit the boons you
 spill?
 The flocks are silent each one, and beast
 and bird are still,
The truculent streams lie quiet, the sea-wave
 no more runs,
Curved tree-tops droop in slumber like men
 (and weary ones)—
 The seventh moon my staring eyeballs now
 doth fill,
 And morning and evening stars, seven
 dawns with dewy chill
Have sprinkled me in pitsy. Where shall I
 speak my orisons?

Sleep, is there any, lying in a fair girl's arms
  all night
  Who sighs and sends you from him? Hither
  let him send!
   Shed not your wing-feathers upon my
 sleepless eyes—
  Let happier souls pray so. Mine be the
 lesser prize:
 Go by with airy stride, touching with your
 wand's end—
No more than that—my face, even though the
 touch be light. (8)

But, however classicist and modernist may feel as to the difference between the art of Petronius and Statius, one important fact is manifest. A crack of division has occurred—call it a flaw, if you insist—which marks off two sorts of lyric verse in the first century. One sort is the Statius ode which clings to traditional Roman ideas and forms, as ivy clings to an old oak; it represents the past. The other sort is the Petronius epigram which varies, if slightly, yet always definitely, from Roman ideas and forms of the past. It foreshadows the end of ancient poetry; it contains germinally the inner spirit of romantic revolt; the amateur of modern verse turns to it without shock of sudden transition. It is not Roman except in the modeling of its verses. It is Romanesque.

For the first time in Latin verse we have in the epigrams of Petronius the most genuine and pathetic expression of a man's weariness. The best of them speak of quiet country and seaside, of love deeper than desire and founded on the durable grace of mind as well as the loveliness of the flesh,¹ of simplicity and escape from court. They speak of these things in a new way and with unmatched sincerity—they give us a poetic naturalism as unexpected as it is real. Therefore, as I am more concerned to describe the actualities of poetry than to characterize it according to the passing notions of any one day, I conceive it my duty not to give Petronius a bad name and then proceed to depreciate him—nor a good name and then rush forward in his praise—but rather to assign him his presumptive place in the scheme of things.

There is no more convenient place to which to assign the beginning of the history of the Romanesque lyric than the considerable number of epigrams, attributed with more or less certainty to Petronius,² which are preserved in the fragments of the Latin Anthology, seven of which have been quoted in translation above. It is with these epigrams of the age of Nero that the crack of division appears in Latin poetry which never thereafter heals, no matter how powerfully one abortive attempt after another is put forth during the following centuries to bridge the widening gap between western European verse and its pagan predecessors.

We must pause here to be quite sure of our ground. First, we must acknowledge readily that long before Petronius there veined Latin poetry elements that are curiously not Greek and not Roman, that breathe somehow of modernity of mood; of a tenderness and a sensibility that belong to romantic rather than to classic worlds. No one, it seems to me, not even Mackail, has written so well of this elusive Italian quality in Roman poetry as has H. W. Garrod, this quality that robs it of the danger of passing at its best for rhetoric, and at its worst for prose. This ingenium molle, we are told, whether in passion as with Propertius³ or as with Vergil in reflection, is that deep and tender sensibility which is the least Roman thing in the world and which in its subtlest manifestations is perhaps the peculiar possession of the Celt.⁴ The unelaborate magic of Catullus is that of the Celtic temperament—the fourth Eneid is the triumph of an unconscious Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic. Even before the Augustan Age Latin poetry is facetus—it glows and dances; has lepor—is clean and sprightly; has venustas—is possessed of a melting charm. Often enough, too, in the poetry of personal invective—in the Epodes and some of the Odes of Horace, in Catullus, and in the Vergilian Catalepton—we have that Italum acetum, that vinegar of coarse and biting wit from the countryside which has its origin in the casual ribaldry of the vindemiatores, in the rudely improvised dramatic contests of the harvest-hoihe; pert and ready and unscrupulous in assigning its object inalienably to the pit. And the quickened force of this wit is like to seem to a modern man as up-to-date and recent as any songs irrepressible Heine borrowed from a similar source: the south-German reaping-couplets, schnaderhupfeln.

If these things be true, then why not begin our history of the Romanesque lyric with Catullus, say, whose poetry is much less actually classic than that of Vergil and Horace, wherein are exhibited in a greater degree the qualities of grandeur, harmony, and stability? The passion of the senses so lifts more than one elegy of Catullus into regions where the moral judgment stands abashed, that nothing in the world seems significant save the personal trouble of a soul on fire. Why not begin with him?

Because, as Garrod is prompt to explain, although the quickening force in the best Augustan poetry is the Italian blood, yet not without reason do we speak of this poetry as Roman. For it was made by Italians who were already Romanized; the Italian spirit worked always under the spell of Rome and not under any merely external compulsion. And the spell of Rome was still over the whole of Roman poetry. The Italians were only a nation through Rome—it had behind it a great life and expressed a great people, their conscious deeds and their national ideals. Until the Christian Era has begun and we possess in the date of the birth of Christ a greatest symbolic indication of the ending of an ancient world of Roman life and poetry, it is vastly convenient for us to regard that world as a classical entity and to disregard the patent fact that side by side with it—ever since the influx into Italian art of Alexandrian models, at least—there had been a new world of poetry growing up which had with that classical entity so little in common that it is only confusing to take the former into account. In the way of literary analysis it is worth while to hunt out even in Ennius (B.C. 239-169) an Italian vividness and a colored phraseology that is neither Greek nor Roman—a swiftness, wild agitated tones, and a prophetic fury wrought by fire that are mayhap half Calabrian, half Celtic. But we must not forget that the Italian and the Roman elements of Latin poetry are never really so separate and disparate as in literary analysis they would seem to be. And thus for many reasons it is best to treat as of one composite but integrating mold the poetry written in Latin to the closing days of the Augustan Age—for the sound of it all is the sound of a great nation.⁵

That there is more than the convenience of criticism in such a position is evident when we recall with Mackail that it is only in the growth and life of the new (Christian) world that the decay and death of the old can be viewed with equanimity, or in a certain sense can be historically justified. For it is the law of poetry that life comes only by death—she replenishes one thing out of another and does not suffer anything to be forgotten before she has been recruited by the death of something else: materies opus est ut crescantpostera saecla. Poetry works out Roman classical forms towards a definite goal of perfection: the expression of one great national life and spirit. For such forms we have one name that fits like a tight cap: Roman. When great new forces begin to destroy the beauty of Roman forms of verse, forces that are strangers to them, and flaw them beyond their ability to recover, then poetry with passionless action breaks up perishable Roman materials and begins anew. Here, late in the afternoon of the Augustan Age, comes this new melting down of the primitive matter of Roman forms, to prepare it for alien civilizations. This moment in the gradual evolution of the purpose of history begins the period of Romanesque.

Other lyric poets of early Romanesque besides Petronius are but names to us: Getulicus, consul in 26 A.D., whose mistress, Cesennia, was herself a poetess; Casius Bassus, Vagellius, Sosianus, Montanus, Lucilius junior, Sulpicia, and some of Pliny's poet friends. Luckily, however, there has survived to us from these days the pastoral writing of an unknown author, from the first twenty-four lines of whose Lydia the following brace of sonnets have been most honestly derived:

LYDIA

I

Fair fields and meadows, how I envy you
     That are more fair since in you, silent-
 wise,
     Love's fairest darnsel plays or stands and
 sighs.
You have my Lydia's voice, you have her
 view,
Her eyes to smile before. Doth she pursue
    Some song of mine her voice hath
 learned to prize?
    She sings—my ears have heard her in
 that guise.
Teach her to love. Ye fields, I envy you.
O there is no place made so fortunate,
     And there's no earth knows such
 beatitude
     As that wherein she sets her snowy
 feet;
Or where with rosy hand the vine-branch rude
    She plucks somewhile before the grape
is sweet
     And ripens to its Dionysian state.

II

Among the many colors of the flowers
   She'll lay her limbs that breathe the
 breath of spring,
   And to the sweet crushed grasses
 whispering,
Shyly retell the story of love's hours.
Then shall rejoice the fields and forest-bowers,
     The water-brooks shall then run loitering,
     The fountains freeze, and bright birds
 cease to sing
What time my dear makes lament for love's
 powers.

I envy you, ye fields. You have my joy,
     And she is yours my bliss is fashioned
 of.
        My dying members waste away with
 sorrow,
My heat of life the cold of death doth
 borrow—
    She is not here, my lady and my love!
       I envy you, ye fields. You have my
 joy. (9)

The appearance so early in the history of Romanesque idyl of the Petrarchistic manner is of vital interest. Judged by Vergil's standard of performance, the Lydia is deemed not only too slight and ineffectual to be included with his works but too negligible even to be the famous poem of like name written by Valerius Cato.⁶ Says Frank, our verse abounds with conceits that a neurotic and sentimental pupil of Propertius—not too well practiced in verse writing—would be likely to cull from his master. We have here the situation of Goethe and the Strasbourg minster over again, in the case of Frank and Lydia; but of Goethe before the moment of conversion to that "grotesquerie" which is a glory of the Elizabethan lyrics.

This grotesquerie is the final triumph of the romantic over the classical attitude. Whether more implicitly real, as in our pieces from Petronius, or definitely mannered, as in the Lydia, we have come with it from an age of reason to an age of feeling.

Romanticism is a literature dominated by the lyrical element. Lyricism is individualism; it expresses ideas and emotions that are ours. Emotions, in turn, are of two sorts: sentiments of love and hate, hope and despair, enthusiasm and melancholy. Some of these emotions are concerned with the universe, the materials with which we construct the image of the exterior world—sensations. Others of these emotions are muscular—odors and taste. This second set romanticists leave to the realists; their own lyricism is sentimental and picturesque.

Under romanticism the emotions of others interest us only as they are men like us; hence the poet becomes the representative of humanity. Lyricism transports us into the realm of the universal—the sadness and desire of the individual become the problem of life and death, emotionally considered. Ours not to seek the reason behind the moi that is sad or desirous; ours to lay aside the exercise of intelligence and reflection, to leave behind psychology, science, exact method, steps in logic, the art of thinking and rationalizing. Lyric poetry, picturesque literature, living history—these are the things that count in an age of Romanesque. Against the rules are the definition of genres, the interior laws of each form, all precepts of taste.

To the modern reader who—whether consciously or not—studies classical Roman poetry with a bias that favors the personal element in art, the most serious defect of Augustan writing lies in the weakness of its lyrical impulse. In the words of Sikes, whether we understand lyric in its original sense as a poem sung by a single voice or a chorus, to the lyre, or extend the definition to any short poem which gives perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, we must admit that Roman poetry does not often satisfy the definition.⁷ Quintilian's remark that "Horace is about the only lyric poet of Rome" indicates that the Romans themselves realized this weakness and knew their poets rarely sing.⁸ They speak, says Sikes, they recite or even chant; but they do not commonly break out into that ecstasy of emotion which seems to demand music as its medium. Though he never lacks the perfect expression, Horace seldom rises to imaginative intensity: no burning moments, no absorbing passion, no thrill of rapture for gratified desire, no spasm of torture in frustrate hope; his equal muse is strange alike to the highest joys and the deepest despair.

The most that we may expect from such a situation is the social lyric suited exactly to the whims and tastes of a leisured caste. In so far as Catullus in the intimate lyric and Vergil in the more personal type of idyl had anticipated Romanesque elements of poetry, they were destined to be without discoverable posterity. The individual lyric of Catullus had been made of no account by Horace.

Notes

¹ See Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, p. 32: The literary treatment of the passion of love is one of the matters in which the ancient world stands farthest apart from the modern world. Perhaps the action of love on human lives differs but little from one age to another, but the form in which it is expressed was altered in western Europe in the Middle Ages, and ever since we have spoken a different language. Strangely enough in this regard, the Nealce of Petronius finds its closest parallels in the lyrics of the Elizabethan Age.

² Immediately following the epigrams assigned to Seneca, Codex Vossianus, Q. 86, gives sixteen epigrams, each headed by the word item. Of these, two are quoted by Fulgentius as the work of Petronius. Especially in view of the fact that they all bear a marked family resemblance to one another, there is, therefore, a strong presumption that they are all by the author of the Satyricon. Further, there are eleven epigrams published by Binet in his edition of Petronius (Poitiers, 1579) from a MS originally in the cathedral library of Beauvais, but now lost. The first of the series is quoted by Fulgentius as being by Petronius, and there is no reason for doubting the accuracy of Binet or his MS as to the rest. These poems are followed by eight other epigrams, the first two of which Binet ascribes to Petronius on stylistic grounds, but without MS authority. Lastly, four epigrams are preserved by Codex Vossianus F., iii, under the title Petronii; of these, the first two are found in the extant portions of the Satyricon. The evidence for the Petronian authorship of these thirty-seven poems is not conclusive, but the evidence against such authorship is of the slightest. See Bahrens, Poetke Latini Minores, IV, 74-89, 90-100, 101-108, 120, 121; Haseltine's edition of Petronius (Loeb Library), and especially H. E. Butler, Post-Augustan Poetry from Seneca to Juvenal (Oxford, 1909), pp. 134 f.

³ Propertius, in whose Umbrian blood there was possibly some admixture of the Celtic, speaks of himself as mollis in omnes. H. W. Garrod, The Oxford Book of Latin Verse (Oxford, 1921), p. xviii. Of the makers of Roman poetry very few indeed are Roman. Livius and Ennius were half-Greeks from Calabria. Nacvius and Lucilius were natives of Campania. Accius and Plautus—and later Propertius—were Umbrian. Coecilius was an Insubrian Gaul. Catullus, Bibaculus, Ticidas, Cinna, Vergil, were Transpadanes. Asinius Gallus came from Gallia Narbonensis, Horace from Apulia. Of the considerable poets of the empire, Lucan, Seneca, Martial, are of Spanish birth. A Spanish origin has been conjectured for Silius. Claudian is an Alexandrian, Ausonius a Gual, Statius and Juvenal are Campanians, Persius an Etrurian. Rome's rôle in the world is the absorption of outlying genius. See Garrod, op. cit., pp. xv f.

⁴ The subtle and moving effects in the Eclogues of this molle ingenium are well characterized by Mackail when he speaks of the note of brooding pity which pierces the immature and tremulous cadences of Vergil's earliest period. We are passed out of classicism into what we call romanticism. The Celtic spirit—for that is what it is—is overmastering. It constantly girds a poet and carries him whither he would not. See Garrod, op. cit., p. xix.

⁵ The argument all through here is Garrod's.

⁶Lydia, poem, verses 104 to 183 (end) of Dirœ. Despite its attribution to Valerius Cato by Ellis (Amer. Jour. Philol., 1882, pp. 271-284; ibid., 1890, pp. 1-15), its publication in 1907 in the Oxford text of Appendix Vergiliana, and the opinion of Lindsay (Class. Rev., 1918, p. 62), most Latinists today join with Tyrrell in considering it the work of an unknown poet contemporary with Petronius. See Tenney Frank, Vergil (New York, 1922), p. 131.

⁷ E. E. Sikes, Roman Poetry (New York, 1923), p. 9. The reader will, of course, recognize my restatement of Lanson's famous passage in the preceding paragraph on romanticism.

⁸ Somehow I cannot feel with Sikes that Quintilian's failure to say a word in this connection of Catullus is primarily due to his ranking the latter as a writer of lampoon and epigram, and therefore technically outside the lyrical canon. It would seem more reasonable to presume that Quintilian and other critics of the early Empire found Catullus too prone to be guided by his emotions, too apt to be unreticent and self-revelatory, too preoccupied with his sex and his soul, too slow to subordinate reason to feeling, too little restrained by the rules governing an artistic if corrupt generation, to be considered in the first flight of aspirants for lyric fame. But see Sikes, op. cit., pp. 9 ff.

Nepos in "Atticus," lists Lucretius and Catullus as the leading poets of the late Republic, and Velleius Paterculus some sixty years later (circa 30 A.D.) lists Lucretius, Catullus, and Varro in the same connection. This may or may not be significant of critical insight. Sikes himself declares that an urban life, highly artificial and conventional, dominated by "good taste," shrinking from any form of eccentricity, could not foster the intensity of personal emotion which overflows in lyrical utterance. Sikes grants that the statement that the Augustans were intent on repressing "enthusiasm" may seem in flat opposition to the subjective poetry of the elegiac writers who are chiefly occupied with their own loves or (as in Ovid's Tristia) their own misfortunes. But he contends rightly that Propertius and Ovid were not minded to be lyrical; they made no song of either their passion or their woe; they may have felt deeply and truly, but their feeling was restrained by the code of refinement and good breeding. The elegy must conform to the character of a Roman gentleman, who may be a profligate but must never forget to be an artist. Since Roman art was typical rather than personal, the lover must not emphasize the individuality of his mistress or himself. Celia or Delia or Corinna, says Sikes, is any mistress for any lover.

Moses Hadas (essay date 1929)

SOURCE: "Oriental Elements in Petronius," The American Journal of Philology, Vol. L, No. 4, October-November, 1929, pp. 378-85.

[In the following essay, Hadas gives specific examples of Oriental elements in the speech of particular characters in the Satyricon.]

The art of Petronius in suiting language to character has often been noticed.¹ It has been pointed out, for example, that the Greeks in the Cena are recognizable by peculiarities in their speech.² On the other hand, Professor Tenney Frank's calculations have demonstrated the preponderance of the Oriental element in the Rome and Italy of the early Empire.³ Trimalchio himself proclaims his Asiatic origin,⁴ and we should certainly expect that some of his guests were similarly derived. If Petronius is as skilful a realist in suiting his speeches to his characters as his critics have shown him to be, we might logically expect to find certain Oriental elements in the speech of the guests at the Cena.

The process of assimilation whereby the Easterners took on the habits and speech of Rome went on constantly,⁵ yet traces of Eastern origin must have persisted for two or more generations, in idiom if not in pronunciation, and in habits of thought if not in outward behaviour. Organization of foreign groups according to ethnic origins⁶ would tend to perpetuate racial peculiarities. Conversation among peoples of foreign extraction in New York is apt to betray foreign, traces, and the same condition must have prevailed in Rome. I submit for consideration the following examples from the Satyricon:⁷

26. 9 Trimalchio. Friedlaender⁸ cites the opinion of Bücheler that the name is Semitic. There can be little doubt that -malchio represents the root … which is frequently used like its equivalent rex for a very wealthy or elegant person; the tri- is an intensive prefix as in trifur, trismegistus.

31. 2 Vinum dominicum ministratoris gratia est. Friedlaender puts the emphasis on dominicum: "Die gratia ministratoris besteht darin, dass er vinum dominicum, nicht einen geringeren vorsetzt." But in Babylonian Talmud, Baba Kama 92b, an Aramaic proverb occurs: "The wine is the master's, the thanks the butler's." Our passage seems to be simply a parallel of this proverb.

34. 8 Potantibus … larvam argenteam attulit servus. Though the famous Bosco Reale cup shows the skeleton used as an ornamental design, with probably the same purpose of serving as a memento mori, the origin of the custom is almost certainly Eastern. Herodotus II 78 says that wealthy Egyptians had skeletons brought in at their banquets, and Plutarch, whose testimony may be independent, also refers to this practise.¹⁰ The memento mori motive in connection with the enjoyment of food and drink is frequent in Scriptures: Isaiah 22. 13, 56. 12; Eccles. 2. 24; Luke 12. 19; I Cor. 15. 32.

35. On this chapter Sage¹¹ remarks that Trimalchio's "exactness in astrology is amazing when we think of his capacity for blundering in history, geography, and mythology." It is of course what we should expect of an Oriental.

37. 8 nummorum nummos; cf. 43. 8 olim oliorum. This usage is often explained as a Hebraism (e. g. by Friedlaender) on the analogy of Song of Songs, Vanity of vanities, Heaven of heavens, etc. Suess says categorically:¹² "Nil exstat in his sermonibus, quod merito possit ad auctoritatem patrii sermonis syriaci aut hebraici revocari." He adduces parallels to the present usage from Vergil, Catalepton 5. 6, and Varro, L. L. VII 27, neither of which seems convincing.

37. 10 Babaecalis. No satisfactory explanation of this word has been offered. Mr. Sedgwick reports:¹³ "Mr. Ulric Gantillon suggests that the word may be a pretentious and derogatory inflation of the Persian beg (Turkish bey)." However that may be I feel sure that this word as well as burdubasta (45. 11; see below) and perhaps tangomenas (34. 7 and 73. 6) are transliterated Oriental words. I would call attention to the late Professor W. R. Newbold's article, Five Transliterated Aramaic Inscriptions,¹⁴ and especially to his interpretation of C. I. L. IV 760,¹⁵ where he makes the unintelligible letters TCLOfTORGC into Aramaic words quite in keeping with the obscenity of the Latin part of the inscription, and quite worthy of one of Trimalchio's guests.

37. 10 In rutae folium. Martial XI 13. 5 makes it clear that this expression is a proverbial one for small size. "A leaf of myrtle" is frequently used in a similar sense in rabbinic writings.¹⁶ The leaves of rue and myrtle are not dissimilar.

38. 13 Sociorum olla male fervet. An exact parallel to this proverb in Erubin 3a and Baba Batra 24b has been pointed out by W. Bacher:¹⁷ "A pot which is the common property of a number of partners is neither cold nor hot." Friedlaender corrects the note of his first edition on the basis of this suggestion.

41. 3 Servus tuus. The use of this phrase by a free person for the sake of politeness seems unparalleled in Latin. It is the regular Hebrew usage.… Examples are cited from Genesis 18. 3, I Sam. 20. 7, 8, II Kings 8. 13, etc.

41. 12 Matus. The usual explanation of this word is that of e. g. Sedgwick:¹⁹ "vulg. for madidus, itself slang." … Is not this the sort of expression that might continue, in a Latinized form, in the speech of Trimalchio and his associates?

42. 2 Cor nostrum cotidie liquescit. This seems to be a Semitic conceit. Cf. Joshua 7. 5: "Wherefore the hearts of the people melted and became as water." Psalms 22. 14: "I am poured out like water: my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax."

42. 2 Nec sane lavare potui; fui enim hodie in funus. Roman usage did not forbid a mourner to wash, and the present passage seems to indicate some sort of ritual prohibition rather than simply preoccupation. Such a prohibition does occur in the Talmud, Moed Katan 15b: "A mourner may not wash". Furthermore prohibition of bathing, as well as of certain other physical comforts, was always understood as being involved in any fast.

44. 3 Serva me, servabo te. Similar expressions may be found in all languages, as for example our "Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours"; but Baba Mezia 80a has a literal version of the present passage.

44. 14 Nunc populus est domi leones, foras vulpes. This antithesis occurs frequently in Greek, being found as far back as Aristophanes, Pax 1189. It may be worth mentioning, however, that the proverbial expression seems implied in a passage in the Talmud, Baba Kama 117b: "The lion you spoke of [when he was at a great distance] has turned into a fox [now that he is here]." The rabbis frequently use "lion" to denote a distinguished or worthy person,²³ and leones in 44. 4 is a parallel to this usage: "o si haberemus illos leones, quos ego hic inveni, cum primum ex Asia veni."

44. 17 Nemo ieiunium servat. Fasting was rare among the Romans and the ieiunium Cereris appears to be the only fast that was kept annually, so that Friedlaender can say, "Vielleicht stand im Original: Nemo Cereris jejunium servat." To Eastern peoples fasting was very familiar. The Pharisees fasted on Mondays and T-hursdays and on numerous special occasions. An entire treatise of the Talmud, Taanit,²⁴ is devoted to the regulation of fast days, especially those proclaimed for seasons of drouth.

44.18 Iovem aquam exorabant: itaque statim urceatim plovebat. The following story from Taanit was widely known, and may conceivably have been in the mind of the speaker: "Honi the Circle-drawer was therefore asked to pray that rain should fall.… He then drew a circle and placed himself in its center, and said … 'I swear by Thy great Name that I will not move from here until Thou showest mercy to Thy children'.… The rain then came down with vehemence, each drop as big as the opening of a barrel."²⁵

45.8 Sed qui asinum non potest stratum caedit. The identical proverb is found in the Midrash, Tanhuma P'kude 4.

45.11 Burdubasta. The exact phonetic transliteration of this word into Aramaic gives the meaning "pit of shamefulness". This explanation of this word seems to me more plausible than any heretofore suggested.

46.8 Primigeni. This not uncommon slave name is perhaps a reflection of the special privileges accorded to the firstborn son among Semitic peoples.²⁸ Here it may not be a proper name, but used as in the address of Jacob to Reuben, Genesis 49.3: "Reuben, thou art my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength."

46.8 Quidquid discis tibi discis. Cf. Proverbs 9.12: "If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself."

47.1 Unguento manus lavit. Burmann comments:²⁹ "non succurrat similis luxuriae exemplum." The Mischa mentions the custom of scenting the hands at meals by means of incense passed on a brazier.³⁰ Lavish use of perfumery is characteristic of Eastern countries; scriptural references illustrating such use (though not for the washing of hands) are: Canticles 3.6; Proverbs 7.17; Psalms 45.9; Luke 7.46.

52.3 Petraitis. Sedgwick notes:³¹ "Cognomen of Lycian god Men, Lebas-W 668, 676—CIA 3.73. But here no doubt for Tetraites who occurs as gladiator five times in inscriptions coupled with Prudens." Perhaps the confusion of names is in itself significant.

57.8 In alio peduclum vides, in te ricinum non vides. Cf. Matthew 7.5: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." Also, Luke 6.41.³²

65.5 Habinnas. The name in this form does not occur in C. I. L., but Abinnerici (gen.) does occur (IV 2585, 2599, 2600, 2601), and its recurrence in Josephus, Ant. Jud. XX 22 (Niese) … establishes its Syrian or Jewish origin. Several Talmudic sages were called Abina or Abin.³³ Furthermore the name Abban … occurs in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, which is proven to be of Syriac origin. Professor F. C. Burkitt declared the name to be Semitic,³⁴ and subsequently proves his guess.³⁵

68.8 Recutitus est. Perhaps a conscious disparagement by one who considered himself advanced beyond a barbaric practise. The practise is always associated with Jews; cf. 102. 14 circumcide nos ut iudaei videamur, and Frag. 37 (Bücheler).³⁶

69.9 De fimo facta sunt. "A favorite oriental trick according to Sir R. Burton," Sedgwick.³⁷

72.10 Nemo unquam convivarum per eandem ianuam emisus est, alia intrant alia exeunt. Cf. Ezekiel 46.9: "But when the people of the land shall come before the Lord in the solemn feasts, he that entereth in by way of the north gate to worship shall go out by way of the south gate; and he that entereth by the way of the south gate shall go forth by the way of the north gate: he shall not return by the way of the gate whereby he came in, but shall go forth over against it."³⁸ Apparently Trimalchio's notion of elegance in this regard is ultimately derived from the Temple arrangement or something cognate.

74.12 Urceolum frigidum ad malam eius admovit. Yoma 78a: "Raba used to cool himself on Atonement Day with the outside of a vessel of water."

77.4 Cusuc. Mr. Sedgwick remarks:³⁹ "It is no doubt Eastern. Mr. Gantillon sends me the following note: 'Cusuc is the Persian kushk, a light Summer palace, pavilion, portico. In Turkish it became kosk, pronounced kyosk, whence the French kiosque. Trimalchio says: "Cusuc erat, nunc templum est." The word must have brought with it into the slang of his day both the sense of flimsiness and of the promise of a more pretentious building, temple or palace."'

80.1 Age, inquit, nunc et puerum dividamus: iocari putabam discedentem: at ille gladium paricidali manu strinxit. H. Lucas⁴⁰ recognizes in this a version of the Judgment of Solomon, but says that it is derived through a Greek source. R. Engelmann⁴¹ enumerates no less than five examples of the representation of the Judgment of Solomon in Roman art, and I dao not see why the story cannot have migrated directly without Greek intervention.

94.1 0 felicem, inquit, matrem tuam, quae te talem peperit. Cf. Luke 11.27: "Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which thou hast sucked."

105.4 Placuit quadragenas utrique plagas imponi. Forty stripes is regularly the maximum corporal punishment in all rabbinic legal writings, on the basis of Deuteronomy 25.3: "Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed."

111. The possibility that the origin of the story of the Widow of Ephesus is ultimately Oriental has been widely recognized. I would add that three versions of the story, in details apparently independent of each other and of our text, are extant in medieval Hebrew literature, ranging in date from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries.⁴² Perhaps this may indicate a persistent independent tradition, from which Petronius may have drawn directly.

Notes

¹ F. F. Abbott, The Use of Language as a Means of Characterization in Petronius, Classical Philology II (1907), 43-50.

² Abbott, loc. cit.; A. H. Salonius, Die Griechen und das Griechische in Petrons Cena Trimalchionis, Helsingfors and Leipzig 1927 (known to me only through the review of G. Meyer in Gnomon V (1929), 144-150).

³ Race Mixture in the Roman Empire, American Historical Review XXI (1915-1916), 689-708; and Economic History of Rome, ch. X.

⁴ Satyricon 29. 3, 75. 10.

⁵ For instances of assimilation through Romanization of names, see Mary L. Gordon, The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire, Journal of Roman Studies XIV (1924), 93-111.

⁶ See especially George LaPiana, Foreign Groups in Rome During the First Centuries of the Empire, Harvard Theological Review XX (1927), 183-403.

⁷ I am not here considering oriental affinities of the romance as a whole, such as are suggested by Karl Kerenyi, Die Griechisch-Orientalische Romanliteratur, Tubingen, 1927; of this work see Indices IV and VI.

⁸ L. Friedlaender, 1906.… Petronii Cena Trimalchionis etc.,² Leipzig 1906.

¹⁰ Sept. Sap. Conviv. 148 A, quoted in the Petronius edition of P. Burmann (Amsterdam 1743), p. 194.

¹¹ Evan T. Sage, Petronius, The Satiricon, New York and London 1929.

¹² Guilelmus Suess, Petronii imitatio sermonis plebei qua necessitate coniungatur cum grammatica illius aetatis doctrina, Dorpat 1927, p. 8.

¹³ W. B. Sedgwick, Classical Review XXXIX (1925), p. 117.

¹⁴ In American Journal of Archaeology XXX (1926), pp. 288-329.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 295.

¹⁶ … bHullin 47b, and elsewhere.

¹⁷ In Jewish Quarterly Review IV (1892), pp. 168-170.

¹⁹ W. B. Sedgwick, The Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius, Oxford 1925.…

²³ M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud, etc., I p. 118.

²⁴ This treatise is excellently edited and translated in the Schiff Library of Jewish Classics, by H. Malter, Philadelphia 1928.

²⁵ The translation is that of Malter, op. cit., pp. 167 f.…

²⁸ S. A. Cook in Encyc. Biblica, s. v. Firstborn (II 1525). The word constituted an honorable title among the Semites; see W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites², pp. 458 ff.

²⁹Op. cit., p. 314.

³⁰ Berakhot VI 6; cf. Jastrow, op. cit., II, p. 738.

³¹ W. B. Sedgwick, Classical Review XXXIX (1925), p. 118.

³² Many rabbinic parallels are cited in Strack und Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, Miinchen 1922, I, p. 446.

³³ Jewish Encyc. I, pp. 63-64.

³⁴Journal of Theological Studies I (1900), p. 288.

³⁵Ibid. 11 (1901), p. 429: "In a Latin papyrus dated 166 A.D. and published among the Palaeographical Society's Facsimiles (Series II, plate 190), we learn that C. Fabullius Macer, a lieutenant in the Imperial Fleet of triremes on the Tigris, bought a seven-year-old slave who came from the country beyond the river and answered to the name of Abban or Eutyches (Puerum natione transfluminianum nomine Abban quem Eutychen sive quo alio nomine vocatur [sic]). The name of the slave is obviously identical with that of the merchant who bought the Apostle Thomas to be a carpenter."

³⁶ See Theodore Reinach, Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains relatifs au Judaisme, Paris 1895, Index s. v. circoncision.

³⁷ W. B. Sedgwick, Classical Review XXXIX (1925), p. 118.

³⁸ The Code of Maimonides, under Hilkhoth Tefila, prescribes that all synagogues have two entrances.

³⁹Loc. cit.

⁴⁰ Festschrift zu Otto Hirschfelds 60. jährigem Geburtstag, p. 269.

⁴¹ Ein neues Urtheil Salomonis und die Friesbilder der Casa Tiberina, Hermes XXXIX (1904), pp. 146-154.

⁴² Cf. 1. Davidson's edition of Joseph Zabara, Sepher Shaashuim, New York 1914, pp. Iii ff.

F. A. Todd (essay date 1940)

SOURCE: "The Satiricon of Petronius," in Some Ancient Novels: 'Leucieppe'; 'Daphnis and Chloe'; 'The Satiricon'; 'The Golden Ass,' Books for Libraries Press, 1968, pp. 65-101.

[In the following essay, first published in 1940, Todd provides an overview of the Satyricon, including a consideration of its possible models, and a detailed synopsis of the Trimalchio's Dinner section.]

From Achilles Tatius and Longus we pass to Petronius and Apuleius, and find that in the novel, if in little else, the Romans not only equalled but even excelled the Greeks. In discussing the Leucippe and Clitophon and the Daphnis and Chloe it was necessary, at times, to exchange the part of expositor and critic for that of apologist; but the Satiricon and the Golden Ass, considered as works of art, need no defence.

In the Daphnis and Chloe we encountered the sole example, in antiquity, of a union of the romance with the pastoral; in the work of Petronius we shall find the romance in combination with satire. In this respect, as in many others, the Satiricon is both unique, in the ancient literatures, and characteristically Roman. Everybody is familiar with Quintilian's boast Satira quidem tota nostra est. Satire, Quintilian claimed, unlike other forms of literature, was not of Greek origin but an independent creation of Rome. The earliest satura was a medley, as the name itself denotes: a medley either of different kinds of verse or else of intermingled verse and prose. Lucilius, in the latter half of the second century before Christ, after experimenting with a variety of metres, finally chose a single metre, the dactylic hexameter, as the appropriate vehicle. He further used satura¹ for the purposes of polemic, and so made the name satura, for the first time, connote 'satire' in the sense that the word has borne ever since, namely, a censorious description and criticism of human affairs. His example was followed more or less closely by Horace and Persius and Juvenal. But the medley did not die out altogether. Varro, a contemporary of Cicero in the first century before Christ, wrote, in vast bulk, what he called 'Menippean Satires', a work partly in prose and partly in verse, of which some hundreds of short fragments are still extant. The name 'Menippean' indicated his indebtedness to the Cynic philosopher Menippus who, in the third century before Christ, had written humorously on philosophical themes. In the time of Nero, beyond which we need not go, there appeared two works in the same tradition. Seneca wrote the Apocolocyntosis, which is satire pure and simple; and Petronius wrote the Satiricon (some think that it should be called Satirae), which is not true satire but a satirical novel cast in the Menippean mould. That is the work to which we now turn our attention.

There is no sound reason for doubting that the author of this remarkable work was that Gaius² Petronius whose death under Nero, in the year 66 after Christ, is recorded by the historian Tacitus in the sixteenth book of the Annals. In the seventeenth chapter of that book Tacitus mentions the death of four eminent Romans, of whom one was Petronius. Then in the eighteenth chapter he writes:

'In telling of C. Petronius I must recall briefly his earlier career. His day would be passed in sleep, his night in the duties and pleasures of life. As industry advances others to fame, so had indolence advanced him; and he was regarded not as a debauchee and prodigal, like most of those who waste their substance, but as a man of tutored voluptuousness. And the more unrestrained were his words and deeds, the more suggestive of a certain recklessness of self, with the greater approval were they interpreted as evidence of simplicity. Yet as governor of Bithynia, and soon afterwards as consul, he showed himself vigorous and an able man of affairs. Then, slipping back into vice, or in simulation of vice, he was received into the select company of Nero's intimates as elegantiae arbiter, "arbiter of taste", determining which of the pleasures of superabundance should be approved by the Emperor. He thus incurred the jealousy of Tigellinus, who regarded him as a rival, his superior in the science of pleasure. Tigellinus therefore applied himself to the Emperor's cruelty, his ruling passion, charging Petronius with having been the friend of Scaevinus. He bribed a slave to give information, made defence impossible, and imprisoned the greater part of his household.

'It chanced that just then Caesar was visiting Campania, and Petronius, having travelled as far as Cumae, was being detained there. He endured no longer the postponement of fear or hope. Yet he did not banish life in haste. Having cut his veins, he would bind them up and open them again as he pleased. Meanwhile he would speak to his friends, but not on serious topics nor to make a parade of fortitude; and he would listen to them regaling him, not with disquisitions on immortality nor with the doctrines of philosophers, but with light poems and ribald verses. On some of his slaves he bestowed his bounty, on others a flogging. He dined and he slept, so that his death, though forced, should seem to be natural. Even in his will he did not, as did many of those who perished, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other of the powerful. But he wrote a full account of the Emperor's deeds of shame, adding the names of his male and female accomplices and specifying severally their novel forms of debauchery; and this he sent under seal to Nero. Then he broke his signet-ring, so that it might not presently serve to endanger others.'

There was grim humour in his presentation to the Emperor. Many victims of Imperial tyranny made rich presents to the tyrant or his minister, so that their kinsfolk or friends might be allowed to inherit the rest.³ One imagines Nero expectantly opening the parcel—and extracting from it a catalogue of the abominations he had committed. Petronius was a man of bad life, a man infected with that cynical contempt for morality which was characteristic of Nero's court, and yet was not incapable of the lesser kinds of heroism. Galsworthy might well have taken from him a hint for his 'Old English', that unrepentant but gallant old sinner who goes down with colours flying. One might say of Petronius what Talthybius the herald says of Polyxena in Euripides' play:⁴ … 'much thought he took to fall becomingly': … 'like a gentleman'. He was a fit subject for the pencil of Tacitus, the greatest artist in portraiture among all the ancient historians.

A theory that the account of Nero's excesses to which Tacitus refers was no other than the Satiricon has found enough support to require mention, but need not delay us long. To write such a work in a few days, at most, and in the circumstances described by Tacitus, would surely have been beyond human powers; and if it had nevertheless been written and sent to Nero as a recognizable lampoon on himself and his court, Nero would certainly have caused it to be destroyed. But in fact there is not in all the novel a character who, viewed as a whole, bears the slightest resemblance to Nero, whereas there are many the delineation of whom bears witness to close observation and study of actual types which could have had no place at an Imperial court. There is no need, however, to labour the argument. It is conceivable, no doubt,. that Petronius wrote the Satiricon for Nero; but if he did so, he wrote it not for Nero's discomfiture but for his delectation.

I have been calling the novel Satiricon, but there is no certainty about the name. Bücheler, the distinguished German editor of Petronius, called it Satirae, 'Satires'; improbably, since so obvious a title was not likely to be corrupted into the other recorded names. The name which has gained widest currency in English is Satyricon, with a y, objectionable because it implies a non-existent connexion with satyrs, and to be regarded as a corrupt spelling of Satiricon, the form given (though not on that account necessarily correct) in the oldest manuscript. If Satiricon is right, it is a facetiously coined hybrid genitive plural, Latin with a Greek termination, equivalent to Satiricon libri, 'books of satirical matters,' i.e. 'Satires'.⁵

Of the text of Petronius' novel we now possess only fragments, presumably detached from the complete work by anthologists. In their sum, they amount, in Biicheler's minor edition, to about a hundred and twenty printed octavo pages. Many of these were known and edited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but by far the longest and best of them exists in a single manuscript, the famous Codex Traguriensis, discovered at Trau in Dalmatia about 1650. It constitutes about a third of what is extant, and contains the episode of the Cena Trimalchionis, 'Trimalchio's Dinner', on which the fame of Petronius is most securely based. If some other fragments survive only as witnesses to the depravity of the excerptor, 'Trimalchio's Dinner', at least, owes its preservation to intrinsic merit. With the omission of a very few vulgarities it is fit for the reading of the most modest of youths and maidens. The Trau manuscript⁶ states that our excerpts from the Satiricon are from the fifteenth and sixteenth books. The statement rests on its sole authority, and is scarcely credible. Even if we assumed that the sixteenth book was also the last, though that is not asserted; further, that the extant fragments represent nearly the whole of Books XV and XVI, though that is neither asserted nor probable; we should still be committed to a work of fiction of a length quite unexampled in antiquity, a work longer than all the sixteen books of Tacitus' Annals, longer even than the Pickwick Papers.

The standard edition of the Latin text of Petronius is that by Bücheler, and there is a convenient edition of the Latin, with an English translation by Heseltine, in the Loeb Classical Library. I mention also the serviceable edition, with French translation, critical apparatus, and a few explanatory notes, by Ernout in the Budé collection. The episode of Trimalchio's Dinner may be read in a number of separate editions, of which I name only that by W. D. Lowe, with English version and useful commentary. There are also many translations of the whole work, in various languages, without Latin text. Perhaps the most useful of these, for the English reader, is that by J. M. Mitchell in the Broadway Translations, though like others it is marred by too free a use of modern colloquialisms where the Latin affords no warrant for them.

It is not possible to reconstruct the whole story, nor even, though attempts have been made, to divine, with any near approach to certainty, its central idea. There is much in the surviving fragments that is not narrative at all. For instance, there is much poetry, including an epyllion, a miniature epic, of nearly three hundred lines on the Civil War, and a poem of sixty-five lines on the Sack of Troy; there are also verses which neither are, nor are intended to be, poetry; there is much literary criticism: for instance, the famous characterization of Horace's poetry, Horatii curiosa felicitas, 'Horace's elaborate felicity', is thrown off casually by one of Petronius' characters; and so forth. But let me give a summary.

The action begins in an unnamed town, perhaps Cumae, not far from Naples, and shifts from time to time to other parts of southern Italy. The period is the principate of Nero. The narrator is Encolpius, who is also the central figure of the story.

In the earlier part of the narrative the principal characters are two young men named Encolpius and Ascyltos, and a lad named Giton who is their retainer. They are precious rogues, all three of them: a set of well-educated but needy adventurers, always willing to play the sponger, not averse from a little casual crime. Their morals are deplorable, and they have no redeeming virtues. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a more disreputable gang.

The story, as we now have it, opens abruptly. We find the two young men engaged in a discussion with a rhetorician named Agamemnon; or rather, Encolpius and Agamemnon do the talking while Ascyltos, finding them tedious, manages to slip away undetected. Encolpius laments the decay of oratory, and criticizes sarcastically, though justly, the training given by the schools of rhetoric. Agamemnon admits that his strictures are reasonable, but throws the blame on the pupils and their parents: in order to earn a living, the teacher of rhetoric must provide the sort of instruction that the pupil likes and that the parent at least countenances; among lunatics, he too must rave. He concludes his reply by setting out his ideas in some impromptu verses after the manner of Lucilius. Meanwhile Ascyltos has disappeared. After some alarming and unsavoury adventures in the back streets of the town, the two associates manage to find their lodgings, but presently have a violent quarrel which nevertheless ends in reconciliation. Here there is a gap in the narrative.

We next encounter the rogues involved in a little matter of stolen property. They had purloined some gold pieces and sewn them into a ragged tunic, which they had then had the ill luck to lose, leaving themselves with no more than a couple of pence. But they had also stolen a fine cloak. Coming into a market-place, they chance upon the rustic owners of the cloak who have found the lost tunic and are trying to sell it. Ascyltos makes an opportunity of assuring himself that the gold pieces are still in it. The friends think of suing for recovery in the courts, but wisely decide that this would not be safe. On the other hand, the owners of the splendid cloak recognize their property. Now ensues a pretty piece of wrangling, in the course of which the bystanders propose to impound both garments until a judge can settle the dispute: there is some reason to suspect, as they justly observe, that both articles have been stolen. Ascyltos, however, contrives to procure an exchange, which is apparently to the advantage of the rustics, and the adventurers go off to their inn with the booty.

The next episode is an adventure in which the three are made to suffer for an act of sacrilege. Soon after this, we find them again in the company of the rhetorician Agamemnon, who conducts them to a dinner-party given by the freedman Trimalchio, the description of which, as I have said, takes up about a third of the extant portion of the novel. Of this I postpone consideration.

After the dinner-party there is another quarrel between Encolpius and Ascyltos, and Ascyltos goes off with Giton. Encolpius later recovers Giton, and Ascyltos, having come back in search of the boy, retires discomfited and disappears from the story. In the meantime Encolpius, in depression of spirits, visits a picture-gallery, where he admires works by the old Greek masters. While he thus seeks distraction in the gallery, he meets an old man named Eumolpus, who in the rest of the narrative fills the place left vacant by the withdrawal of Ascyltos.

Eumolpus thus introduces himself: 'I am a poet', he says, 'and a poet, as I hope, not of the meanest inspiration, if only one may put trust in chaplets: though partiality bestows these on the undeserving too. "Why then", you ask, "are your clothes so shabby?" Just for that reason: love of genius never made a man rich.' The two men fall into conversation, and Eumolpus, on this first acquaintance, does not scruple to relate the discreditable particulars of an amorous exploit. Turning to more serious topics, they discuss the decay of art, and Eumolpus, prompted by a picture, composes on the spot, and recites, a poem on the Sack of Troy. (In title, but in nothing else, this recalls the poem that Nero is said to have sung, to his own accompaniment, while Rome was burning.)⁷ Eumolpus' poem proves that he is indeed a poet of parts, but disapproving hearers throw stones at him till he runs away. Encolpius, though complaining that Eumolpus, during an acquaintance of less than two hours, has spoken more often like a poet than like a human being, takes him to dinner on condition that he indulge his mania no more that day.

Hereafter Encolpius and Eumolpus join forces, and we presently find them, with Giton, on board ship. As happened so often, luck was out. The vessel proves to be the property of a certain Lichas, of Tarentum, who has on board, as passenger, a woman named Tryphaena. These were the very people whom Encolpius and Giton most wished to avoid, since they had been the victims of an earlier escapade. At their wits' end, the rascals try to disguise themselves by shaving their heads and eyebrows, but only make matters worse, because, according to the ancient superstition, to cut the hair on a sea-voyage was to invite disaster. The culprits were thrashed for bringing misfortune on the ship. Worse still, they were recognized, and for a time things threatened to go hardly with them until at last a truce was arrived at. There ensued a terrible storm, in which the ship was wrecked and Lichas was drowned. Tryphaena escaped in a boat, and Encolpius and Giton, having been rescued by fishermen, discover Eumolpus in the skipper's cabin spouting poetry with a roar as of a caged beast, and, even in the face of death, filling a huge parchment with his verses. Him, too, they save.

The three friends, safe ashore, find that they are near Crotona, a city notorious for the addiction of its inhabitants to legacy-hunting, one of the popular vices of the time. This happy circumstance suggests to Eumolpus the idea of passing himself off for a wealthy, childless, ailing old man, and thus enriching himself and his two accomplices at the expense of the Crotoniates, who will pay court to him and make gifts. This 'confidence trick' is duly put into execution, and for a time is very profitable. The tricksters live well, if not virtuously, save only that Encolpius is disappointed in a love-affair. But the generosity of the Crotoniates at last begins to flag, and it becomes clear that danger is at hand. Eumolpus therefore announces that his testament will provide only for those, other than his freedmen, who will consent to eat his dead body in public. 'Shut your eyes', he says, 'and imagine that you are eating, not human flesh, but a hundred thousand pounds. And anyhow we'll find some seasonings to change the taste.' And he proceeds to cite allegedly historical precedents for his proposal. The rest of the story is lost.

Observe how very different is, all this from the Greek novels. In the Satiricon we have no lovely and virtuous heroine, no enamoured and much-enduring hero, no pirates, no rhetorical prinking or posturing or acrobatics, nothing in fact of the stock-in-trade of your Tatiuses and Longuses and the rest of them. I grant the shipwreck, but how differently Petronius manages it, and with what dramatic effect! Nor can the Satiricon be rightly regarded as a parody of Greek Romance. Parody by its very nature implies a measure of similarity; but the Satiricon differs widely from the Greek novels in the essentials both of pattern and of substance. Those who have maintained⁸ that Petronius based his novel, by way either of imitation or of parody, on Greek original or originals, may be fairly asked, but will be asked vainly, for trace or record of a possible original. Where there is demonstrable parody or imitation it is of Latin, even of contemporary Latin, as in Eumolpus' poem, after Lucan, on the Civil War. One may doubt whether these critics have any firmer basis for their theories than the assumption, too widely current, that whatever is good in Latin literature must necessarily have been derived from Greek sources. The Satiricon stands alone, without exemplar and without peer; no one but a Roman could have written it, and no Roman but Petronius.

But if I thus claim for Petronius that his work is unique, I must not be thought to maintain that he owes nothing to any predecessor. It was the brain of a a god that gave birth to Pallas, unbegotten and unconceived. The finite genius of man can do no more than cultivate the seed that forebears have sown, or engraft new scions on a stock whose roots are set deep in a past incalculably remote. To recur to an example of which I have already made some mention, Quintilian affirms that Satire is entirely Roman; and if he means that the Romans invented and developed Satire as a separate, well-defined literary species, he speaks truth. And yet Roman satire, before it reached its full development, drew much from the Greeks, without losing its title to essential originality: from drama in the Old Attic Comedy of Aristophanes and the other masters; from the lampoon in Archilochus; from philosophy in the writings of Menippus the Cynic and Bion the Cyrenaic; and so forth: and who shall trace all of these back to their ultimate sources? And so it is with all forms in all literatures. Forgive me for repeating doctrine so well worn as to be trite: Literature is an organism; and though its members are multitudinous and their variety untold, all draw life from a parent stem.

The form of Petronius' novel, a mixture of prose and verse, in which prose greatly predominates, proves his indebtedness to Roman satire of the kinrd called Menippean, such satire as Varro had written. Perhaps there was a revival of interest in this form in Petronius' day, for to the same period, the Neronian Age, belongs Seneca's Menippean satire the Apocolocyntosis, the 'Pumpkinification' (not Deification) of the Emperor Claudius: a poor thing, in the worst of taste, quite unworthy of its distinguished author. Although it is Menippean in form, Petronius' satire approximates more closely in spirit to that of Horace, taking nothing too seriously, 'telling the truth with a laugh', preferring urbane humour both to ridicule and to moral indignation—for which, indeed, Petronius would have found small warrant in his own character and tastes.

In some details the Satiricon is obviously indebted, for manner or matter, or for both, to what were known as the Milesian Tales, although, no less obviously, these cannot have served as model for the whole work. Of the Milesian Tales I have already made passing mention, as one of the factors that contributed to the making of the Greek Romance. They came to be associated with the name of Aristides of Miletus, who collected, and committed to writing, many novelle of diverse ages and origins. Some of these were derived from literature, but most, as seems probable, from oral tradition; ordinarily they were both humorous and licentious. You will find many examples of the type in the Arabian Nights and the Decameron; and there are many more, not recorded in literature, that are still current among people whose taste in fiction is not over-delicate. Aristides' collection of Milesian Tales was translated into Latin in the first half of the first century before Christ by Sisenna—the historian Sisenna, of whom Cicero⁹ unkindly said that his pre-eminence among Roman historians merely showed how poor were the achievements of the Romans in this field. Sisenna's version enjoyed great popularity. Plutarch, in his Life of Crasus, narrates that when the Romans had been defeated by the Parthians at Carrhae, a copy of Aristides' book (presumably in Sisenna's translation) was found in the pack of a Roman soldier; whereupon the Parthian general spoke contemptuously of Romans as men who even in war could not abstain from obscenities.

The most notable specimen of the Milesian Tale in Petronius is the famous story of the Matron of Ephesus told by the poet Eumolpus on board ship.¹⁰ It is the story of a matron so famed for her wifely virtue that women came from far and near to look upon her. So devoted was she to her husband that on his death she joined him in his underground tomb, determined to end her life there by starvation. Her parents came, her kinsfolk, and even the magistrates, but all failed to wean her from her resolve. Her sole attendant was a faithful handmaiden, who kept the lamp burning in the tomb. And there the widow sat, weeping and foodless, for five days. Then some robbers were crucified, and a soldier was posted to watch the bodies. Seeing a light in the tomb, and hearing sounds of lamentation, he went to investigate. Moved by the woman's grief and beauty, he tried to comfort her, and offered her his own food and wine. She refused them, redoubling her manifestations of grief; but the maid, seduced by the appetizing odours, made a hearty meal, and at last, reinforcing her arguments with an apposite quotation, or rather misquotation, from Virgil,¹¹

Think'st thou that ash or shades of buried
  dead
Give heed to this?

persuaded her mistress to do likewise. Thus refreshed, the widow recovered something of her interest in life, and presently noticed, for the first time, that the soldier was a good-looking and well-spoken young fellow. The soldier, helped by another of the maid's quotations from Virgil,"¹²

And wilt thou fight against a love approved?

ventured to pay court to her; but while the courtship proceeded and the soldier was neglecting his duty, the parents of one of the robbers removed his body from the cross and carried it away. The soldier feared for his life, and therefore, paradoxically, resolved to end it; but the good woman, 'no less pitiful than virtuous', could not bear the loss of a second dear one, and gave him the body of her husband to fix on the cross.

Petronius, then, owed something to the Satire, and something to the Milesian Tale. But there, so far as can be discerned, his specific indebtedness ends. There can be few examples, in any literature, of a work so nearly perfect in its kind that owes so little to predecessors: nothing, in fact, but framework and a few incidentals. Let us consider the Satiricon again in relation to the Greek novels. New discoveries, while they afford evidence that there were other kinds of novel, chiefly of quasi-historical content, nevertheless confirm the traditional view, based on the extant examples, that the typical Greek novel was a love-story. In the Ninus we have love in combination with what purports to be history. But the Satiricon, in any relevant sense, is neither amatory nor historical. In the Greek novels one is accustomed to find, because of their very nature, a heroine as well as a hero, whereas in the Satiricon the female characters are subsidiary and incidental. Unless professedly historical, the Greek novels are timeless. Chariton, it is true, makes his heroine the daughter of Hermocrates the Syracusan, a notable historical personage in the fifth century before Christ, and Heliodorus makes his Egypt a Persian satrapy; but these indications of date have no significance for the story, and the other novelists, in this main class, do not even hint, consciously, at a date. The Satiricon, on the other hand, while quite certainly not to be classed as an historical novel, is plainly dated by Petronius in the Neronian Age, and is therefore a novel of contemporary life and manners. In the Greek novels that we know, there is always a contrast and conflict of virtue and villainy, whereas in the Satiricon, while there is some villainy and plenty of vice, there is no virtue of positive kinds at all. The chief characters of the Greek novels are persons of wealth and consideration, those of the Satiricon are totally undistinguished. The Greek novels exhibit characters who, with few exceptions, are not individuals but types: in Petronius, every character is clear-cut and lifelike. This realism in the invention and delineation of characters is matched by an equal realism in the scenes. The Greek novelists usually lack the skill, even if they have the desire, to give the reader a clear impression of a scene: one may imagine, but does not see, 'what it was like to be there'. But Petronius, with a few deft touches, gives you the whole scene with an almost photographic sharpness and particularity: the narrow winding streets, the footpaths, the market-places, the inns, the stews with their inscriptions, the baths, the houses of rich and poor, the fresco-paintings, and all the rest. All are made vivid and convincing, with effortless art; and how true they are to reality the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum bear witness.

All the Greek novelists whose work is extant were professional rhetoricians—'sophist-rhetoricians'—and their novels are products of their art. This accounts, as we have seen, for many of their most striking characteristics: their unrealities and absurdities, their irrelevancies drawn from the common-place book, their artificiality, their passion for display. Rhetoric, they are convinced, can never come amiss, however improbable or inappropriate the circumstances. Chaereas about to commit suicide;¹³ Clitophon contemplating his sweetheart's severed neck;¹⁴ Daphnis watching Chloe asleep;¹⁵ even Habrocomes and Anthea in the bridal chamber;¹⁶ all make speeches that smell, even if they do not positively reek, of the rhetorician's lamp. Hardly less rhetorical is the mould in which the narrative passages are cast. But what of Petronius? Petronius in this matter of rhetoric is a portent. He lived in an age when rhetoric formed the staple of the Roman higher education; a rhetoric, moreover, which, concurrently with the suppression of liberty in public life and in the courts, had become more and more widely divorced from reality. Its marks are almost everywhere on Latin literature of the Silver Age, though the greatest writers avoid its extravagances. In Petronius we encounter the phenomenon of an Imperial writer entirely free from the taint of rhetoric, though himself, no doubt, trained in the customary schools. The schools, on the principle of 'safety first', prescribed to their pupils for declamation or debate themes that had little or no relation to real life. Hear what Petronius, through the mouth of Encolpius, says about them at the opening of the Satiricon:

'Isn't it the same kind of Fury that plagues our declaimers? They cry: "For the freedom of the people was I wounded thus!"; "I sacrificed this eye for you!"; "Give me a guide to guide me to my children, for my hamstrings have been cut and cannot support me!". Even this sort of thing would be endurable, if it paved the way to eloquence. But the only issue of this bombast and of this meaningless burble of phrase-making is that the learners, when they come to the bar, think themselves translated into another world. In my opinion, youngsters become absolute numskulls in the schools because they neither hear of nor see anything of our everyday experience: nothing but pirates, with chains, standing on the shore; or tyrants composing edicts that sons shall cut off their fathers' heads; or oracles, given to stop a pestilence, that three or more virgins shall be sacrificed; honey-balls of rhetoric, every word and deed sprinkled with poppy and sesame. Those who are brought up amongst this sort of thing can no more be sound of taste than those who live in a kitchen can be pleasant of smell. With all respect, you rhetoricians have been the first of all to ruin eloquence.'

So Petronius eschews rhetoric, and in this respect also is sharply distinguished from the authors of the Greek romances. In the narrative passages, and the speech of his educated persons, his latinity is as pure and as free from artificialities as you will find in any prose writer after Cicero. But of this more presently.

The Satiricon is thoroughly Roman both in matter and spirit, and I ask forbearance if, in emphasizing this, I draw attention again to some points on which I have touched already. We have seen how the generalizing Greek genius tends to exhibit the type rather than the individual, in literature as well as in other forms of art; and in so far as Rome is under the influence of Greece, the same tendency persists, as may be observed notably in Latin Comedy. But the Roman is by nature a realist, interested in the particular rather than in the general. It was not by accident that in sculpture, for instance, the Romans achieved their best work in historical sculptures and in portraits, as is proved by countless surviving examples. In the Satiricon there are many types: the millionaire freedman, the teacher of rhetoric, the poet-adventurer, the patchwork-blanket maker, the monumental mason, the quarrelsome wife, and so forth; but each of these is strongly individualized and each is drawn with a vivid realism that has not been surpassed even in the modern novel: in the ancient literatures there is nothing to approach it. Miraculous skill in the delineation of character is among the greatest of Petronius' virtues as a novelist: no matter how insignificant the character may be, however small a part he may play, there he stands before us, individual and complete and alive. What mere marionettes, in comparison, are most of the characters of the Greek novels!

The characters of Petronius are all of types familiar in the Rome and Italy of his day, accurately observed and sketched with a humour which gives to him a very high place among the humorists of the world. How thoroughly he enjoyed writing his book! Latin literature as a whole, like the Peers in Iolanthe, is 'dignified and stately'. It is written for men of station, and is apt to shut out from its august consideration men of lowlier degree—the slave, the freedman, the tradesman, the artisan. From literature we learn little about the common folk of Rome and Italy. But all Petronius' characters are taken from the humbler walks of life. They include the rich with the poor, the educated with the ignorant; but one and all are, as I have said, altogether undistinguished. This indolent courtier, this able and energetic statesman—for he was both—this cultured voluptuary, took a most comprehensive interest in humanity; and it amused him to record the lives and idiosyncrasies and conversation of men and women whom the average Roman noble would regard either not at all or with indulgent contempt. That most of his characters bear Greek names is due not to derivation from some Greek source, but primarily, one may suppose, to the fact that the scenes of the story are laid in southern Italy,¹⁷ a land thickly studden with towns of Greek origin, the towns of what was once called 'Great Greece'. This at any rate makes the use of Greek names appropriate. But it is also possible, I think, that Petronius preferred the thin disguise of foreign names when indicating, as he often does, by his choice of name some characteristic or occupation of the bearer. Of this device, of course, though it is now out of fashion, even modern literature has furnished many examples, and Petronius makes free, though not invariable, use of it.¹⁸ Thus Encolpius suggests 'Cuddle'; Ascyltos 'Thickskin'; Giton 'Neighbour'; Eumolpus 'Sweetsong'. The chief rhetorician is called Agamemnon, 'King of men', and his second-in-command is therefore named Menelaus. Tryphaena is voluptuous, as her name denotes; Circe is as amorous as Homer's enchantress; Pannychis is 'Miss Nightrevel'. Trimalchio, the fabulously wealthy freedman, has a hybrid name, half Greek and half Semitic, which has been interpreted 'Thrice Blessed'.

Petronius is no less complete a realist in language than in character-drawing. Latin falls into three main divisions, all of which are abundantly represented in Petronius. In narrative passages he uses literary Latin which, though less formal than the Latin of the more dignified masters, is of such excellence that because of it the Council of Trent refrained from putting the Satiricon on the Index. His educated characters, such as Encolpius and Eumolpus, speak what was known as sermo urbanus or sermo cotidianus, the everyday Latin of educated Romans, the Latin best exemplified in the correspondence of Cicero and his friends. But the humbler, uneducated persons, such as Trimalchio and his associates, speak the sermo plebeius, for which indeed Petronius is one of our chief authorities. This was the speech of the common people, 'Vulgar Latin' as it is sometimes called, the sort of Latin from which the Romance languages—Italian, French, Spanish, and the rest—are in the main descended. In Petronius we find a Campanian variety of Vulgar Latin, in which there is a considerable admixture of Greek words; just the sort of Latin, except that in Petronius there are few vagaries of spelling to indicate popular pronunciations, that is to be read in the multitude of inscriptions scribbled, in the same era, on walls in the Campanian towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and now recorded in volume IV of the great Corpus of Latin Inscriptions. In vocabulary and accidence and syntax it differs very greatly even from the everyday colloquial speech of the educated, and still more from literary Latin; it abounds in hybrids and slang and irregular formations that would horrify a purist, and exhibits a delightful uncertainty in the use of genders and declensions and conjugations; but withal it is vigorous, forthright, and racy, admirably adapted to the expression of simple ideas, and, in Petronius' use of it, contributes, hardly less than the thoughts of which it is the vehicle, to our comprehension and realization of character. Petronius' astonishing skill in adapting speech to character will become apparent, I hope, when I come, as I shall do now, to the episode of Trimalchio's Dinner.

Trimalchio's Dinner is a study of a vulgar multimillionaire and his friends, a good-humoured satire on the freedmen nouveaux riches of whom there were so many in Imperial Rome. Agamemnon, the professor of rhetoric, has himself been bidden to the dinner-party, and has obtained invitations for Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton. These three forget all their troubles, put on their best clothes, and go off to the baths. At the baths, says Encolpius, 'all at once we see a bald-headed old man dressed in a red tunic and playing ball among longhaired pages. It was not so much the pages that had made us look, though they were worth looking at, as his lordship himself, who was wearing dress-shoes and taking exercise with a green ball. He wouldn't pick up a ball that had touched the ground, but a slave had a bag full of them, from which he kept supplying the players.' This was Trimalchio, their host. After exercise and the bath, he donned a scarlet wrap, entered his palanquin, and moved off homeward preceded by four liveried footmen and a go-cart containing his blear-eyed wizened favourite, 'uglier than Trimalchio himself.

Following their host, the friends presently reach the house. Here again they encounter the ostentation of gay colours, costly as well as abnormal, and therefore a favourite extravagance of Trimalchio and his household. At the door there was a janitor dressed in green with a cherry-coloured girdle, shelling peas in a silver dish; and above, in a golden cage, a magpie was squawking a how-do-you-do to the guests as they came in. This was only a foretaste of the splendours of the house. They pass through a long colonnade decorated, in fresco-painting, with scenes from the life of Trimalchio, and enter a vast hall, the atrium of the mansion, in which the pictures are of scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey and a recent gladiatorial show. And so they reach the dining-hall. Here everything was done to music: if a slave rendered a service, he sang; if he was asked for something, he sang; and the singing was very bad. In fact, it was more like a vaudeville show than a gentleman's dining-room.

With excellent dramatic effect, Petronius delays Trimalchio's entrance till after the hors-d'œuvres. At last Trimalchio, his shaven head protruding from a voluminous scarlet cloak, a fringed and purple-bordered table-napkin about his neck, a silver toothpick in action, is carried in to the music of a band and set down on the couch in the midst of a pile of tiny cushions. 'My friends', he says, with exquisite courtesy, 'I didn't want to come to dinner yet, but rather than keep you waiting by my absence I have quite forgone my own pleasure. Still, you'll let me finish my game of chess first.' And this he does, swearing the while 'like a millhand'.

T, imalchio does his guests extremely well, in wine as well as food. 'Wine', he says, 'is life. This is real Opimian. What I served yesterday wasn't as good, and my guests were much finer gentlemen.' But he must not only be lavish, he must also be original; and his idea of originality is to serve a series of 'freak' dishes such as we used to be told would be provided on great occasions by the baser sort of modern American millionaire. It is all very ingenious, all very costly, and all most marvellously vulgar. A wooden hen, brooding on peahen's eggs in a basket of straw, is brought in to the accompaniment of music. The eggs are handed round, and Trimalchio expresses the fear that they are addled; but they prove to contain dainty figpeckers in a paste of flour and devilled yolk-of-egg. There was a great circular tray on which were represented the signs of the Zodiac, and on each sign was an appropriate dish: beef on the Bull, mullet on the Fish, kidneys on the Twins, and so on. A wild boar, the most highly prized of all ancient game, was carried in: a gigantic bearded slave, garbed as a huntsman, ripped it up with a hunting-knife, and out flew, not 'four-and-twenty blackbirds', but a flock of thrushes, one of which was given to each guest.

All the dinner is of a piece with that. And the servants are in keeping. We meet a cook who can make anything out of anything: goose and fish and game-fowl out of plain pig, fish out of a sow's matrix, pigeon out of fat bacon, squab out of ham; Trimalchio, with pretty wit, as he says, has dubbed him Daedalus. There is the carver happily named Carpus, whence one of Trimalchio's standing jokes: when a dish is brought in, Trimalchio cries 'Carpe, carpe!' that is 'Carver, carve 'er!' And there is the well-meaning young, slave who insults the master by picking up a silver dish that he has dropped, instead of letting it be swept out with the debris of the meal.

The company does not spend all the time in eating and drinking. There is plenty of talk, and plenty of entertainment. Trimalchio, who is no dull-witted ignoramus—a man needs education these days, even at dinner; and his patron, bless him, saw to it that he was made a man among men—Trimalchio bids a guest tell of the twelve labours of Hercules, and how the Cyclops screwed Ulysses' thumb out, tales that he used to. read in Homer when a boy. And he knows how Hannibal invented Corinthian bronze at the sack of Troy, how Ajax went mad because Iphigenia married Achilles, how Niobe was shut up in the Trojan Horse by Daedalus. It is excellent fooling. A guest tells a gruesome tale of a werewolf, the first werewolf story in literature, which Trimalchio caps with a still more horrifying tale of witches. A secretary reads out his report, 'as though it were the City Gazette':¹⁹

'July 26th: On the estate at Cumae, property of Trimalchio, born 30 boys, 40 girls; transferred from threshing-floor to granary, 500,000 pecks of grain; oxen broken in, 500.

Same date: The slave Mithridates was crucified for cursing our master Gaius; put away in the safe, because it could not be invested, £100,000.

Same date: A fire, originating in the overseer Nasta's house, occurred in the gardens at Pompeii.²⁰

On hearing this last entry recited, Trimalchio exclaims 'What's that? When were the gardens at Pompeii bought for me?' 'Last year,' replies the secretary, 'and so they haven't come on the books yet.' Trimalchio flared up and said, 'If properties are bought for me and I don't know within six months, I won't 'ave them entered on my books.'

Trimalchio grows maudlin and causes his will to be read, so that he may be loved as much in life as in death. All the beneficiaries are touched by his generosity. He then reduces himself and the company to tears by giving directions for his funeral. Here are some of them, addressed to his friend the monumental mason Habinnas, who will have the contract for making the tomb.²¹

Turning to Habinnas, he said: 'What about it, dear old friend? Are you building my monument as I told you to? I'm mighty anxious to have you paint by the feet of my statue a pup, and wreaths of flowers, and perfumes, and all Petraites's²² fights, so that thanks to you I may enjoy life when I'm dead. Make the frontage a hundred feet, the depth two-hundred: I want all sorts of fruit about my ashes, and lots of vines. It's plain wrong to have a man's houses nice when he's alive and not to bother about those where we have to be longer. And that is why above all I want put on it "This monument is not to descend to the heir".

'Yes, and I'll see to it that I provide in my will for not being insulted when I am dead. I am going to put one of my freedmen in charge of my tomb to guard it, so that folk mayn't make a dash to my monument to do their business. And please do ships²³ under full sail (on the wall) of my monument, and me sitting on a platform in official robes with five gold rings and pouring out cash to a crowd out of a bag; for you know, I gave a banquet at two shillings a head. I'd like the dinin'-'all to be did too. And you'll do the whole people doing themselves well. On my right you'll put a statue of my dear Fortunata²⁴ with a dove in her hand: and have her with her pup on a lead tied to her belt; and put my kid²⁵, and some large jars sealed so as not to let the wine spill. And you may carve a broken um and a boy crying over it. A sundial in the middle, so that whoever looks at the time reads my name willy nilly. And the inscription—think carefully—how will this do? "C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus²⁶ rests here. He was appointed an Augustal²⁷ in his absence. He could have been on every civil service panel at Rome, but refused. Dutiful, brave, and loyal, he grew from small beginnings and left thirty millions of sesterces. And he never went to a lecture. Farewell: and thou also.'"

After this lugubrious performance all are dissolved in tears, even Encolpius the narrator. At the suggestion of Trimalchio, they all troop out and take a hot bath, during which Encolpius and his friends try to escape. Unsuccessful in their attempt, they return with the rest to renew, the festivity. At last Trimalchio ordered hornblowers to be fetched into the dining-room and to 'play something pretty' while he pretended to be dead. The band struck up a dirge. One of the bandsmen, the son of an undertaker, outblew the others and produced such a thunderous din that the whole neighbourhood was aroused, and the fire brigade, thinking that the house was afire, smashed in the door and set to work with water and axes. In the confusion the friends at last made their escape.

Here is Fortunata, the appropriately named wife of Trimalchio, as described to Encolpius, in chapter 37, by his neighbour at table:

'That's Trimalchio's wife: Fortunata is her name; she measures her cash by the peck. And only the other day, what was she? You'll excuse me, sir, you wouldn't have taken bread from her hand. Now, without why or wherefore, she's God almighty and Trimalchio's factotus. In fact, if it's mid midday and she tells him it's dark, he'll believe her. He doesn't know what he has: he's fairly rolling in it; but this bitch²⁸ sees to everything, and where you wouldn't expect it. She's a steady, sensible body, full of good ideas: why, look at all this gold! But she has a nasty tongue, and clacks and clacks in bed. If she likes you she likes you, if she doesn't she doesn't.'

And having introduced her, Petronius leaves her to reveal herself, for the rest, by word and action.

I have tried in this translation, and elsewhere, to give you something of the flavour of the Latin, a task not easy to accomplish. So much turns, in the speech of Petronius' humbler characters, on the use of a vulgar word or inflexion or turn of phrase for which it is hard to find a satisfactory analogue in English. One can only do one's best, avoiding the excesses of colloquialism and vulgarism, not justified by the Latin, that mar some of the current versions. Some of these humble folk at Trimalchio's party know very well that their speech is vulgar and ungrammatical, and are sensitive about it. Here again Petronius' psychology is exactly right. Thus Echion the blanket-maker,²⁹ after a long discourse, notices that the rhetorician Agamemnon is smiling at his blunders, and forthwith, in his indignation, blunders worse: 'I can see you're saying, Agamemnon, "Why is that nuisance babbling?" Because you, who can gab, won't gab. You're not one of our bunch, and so make fun of the way us poor coves talk. We know you are silly with edication.'

Here is Seleucus,³⁰ fresh from a funeral, speaking after another guest has mentioned baths and wine. The type is not yet extinct:

'I don't take a bath every day. A bath is like the laundryman:³¹ the water has teeth. Every day, and our innards melt. But when I've got inside a mug of mead,³² to hell with the cold. Anyhow I couldn't have had a bath, for I was to a funeral to-day. Chrysanthus—a nice, decent chap he was—has snuffed out. It was only the other day he spoke to me. It seems as if I was talking with him now. Dear, oh dear! We are just blown bags on legs. We're of less account than flies. Flies have some good in them, anyhow; but we are of no more account than bubbles. And suppose he hadn't starved himself. For five days he didn't chuck water into his mouth, and not a speck of bread. And yet he's joined the majority.³³ 'Twas the doctors did for him, or rather his bad 'oroscope; for a doctor is nothing but a comfort to the mind. Still, he had a lovely funeral, with a proper bier and a lovely pall. The mourning was very fine (he set some of his people free), even if his wife was stingy with her tears. Suppose he hadn't treated her well. But your woman who is a woman is a regular kite. Nobody oughtn't to do none of them a kindness: it's just like chucking it into a well. But an old love sticks like a crab.'

And next let us listen to Ganymedes the pessimist:³⁴

'What he's telling us is neither here nor there. But nobody minds how prices is pinching. Good God! I haven't been able to find a mouthful of bread today. And how the drought lasts! We've been starving for a year now. Blast the Flour Board.³⁵ They're up to their games with the millers: "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". And so the small man is in trouble; for with those big bugs it's always Christmas. Oh, if only we had those stout fellers I found here when I first came from Asia! A man could live then.… The way they used to wallop those stiffs and put the fear of God into them! Yes, and I remember Safinius. He lived up by the old arch in those days, when I was a lad. A perfect peppercorn: hot!—wherever he went he singed the ground. But he was straight, he was sure, a friend to a friend, a man you wouldn't mind playing odd-and-even with in the dark.… A penny loaf was more than enough for two; but now I've seen a bull's eye bun bigger. Dear, oh dear! it's getting worse every day. This colony is growing backwards like a calf's tail.'

In the speech of all the uneducated persons there is a vulgar element, but this element varies in amount and kind with the individual. Petronius is too close an observer and too true an artist to make all speak alike, and he differentiates one character from another not only in what is said but also in the manner of saying it. To illustrate satisfactorily, in translations, this aspect of Petronius' realism would be extremely difficult if not actually impossible, and I venture only on a single example. Niceros, who tells the story of the werewolf,³⁶ makes a specialty of the 'bulls' that we call Irish. Admonished by Trimalchio not to be so glum, he says he is afraid that those scholar fellows will laugh at him; but plucking up courage he adds: 'Well, that's their business. I'll tell it all the same. Let them laugh: it doesn't hurt me. It's better to be laughed at than made ridiculous.' And so he begins his tale:

'When I was still in service, we were living in Narrow Street: Gavilla has the house now.' (Note how these details give an air of reality to the narrative as when we are told that Safinius 'used to live by the old arch'.) 'There, as the gods willed, I fell in love with the wife of Terence who used to keep the pub; you knew her: Melissa from Tarentum, the prettiest peach of a woman. But so help me, it was not for her looks or for what I could get that I went with her, but because she was a good honest lass. If I asked her for anything, she never said no. If she made a penny, I had a ha'penny; (all that I had) I gave her to mind, and I was never took down. Her man breathed his last out at the homestead. And so, by tooth and toe-nail, I made and managed a way to come to her. You know, it's trouble that shows the friend.

It happened that the master was out to Capua to fix up some odds and ends. Taking my chance, I persuaded of a guest of ours to come with me as far as the fifth milestone. A soldier he was, strong as the devil. We vamoose about cockcrow; the moon was as bright as at midday. We come among the tombs: my man goes to do his job by the pillars, and I sit there singing and counting the pillars. Then, when I looked back for my mate, he undressed himself and put all his clothes by the roadside. My heart was in my mouth, and I stood like I was dead. But he made a ring of water round his clothes, and suddenly turned into a wolf. Don't think I am joking: I wouldn't tell a lie, not for anybody's fortune. But as I was going to say, when he turned into a wolf he began tc howl and ran off into the wood. At first I didn't know where I was; then I went to pick up his clothes, but they were turned into stone. Didn't I just die of fear! Still, I drew my sword, and whackity-whack!,³⁷ I cut at the shadows until I came to the homestead of my lady friend. I came in like a corpse; I nearly snuffed out; the sweat fairly flew between my legs; my eyes went dead; I hardly came to at all. My lass Melissa wondered why I was out walking so late, and says she: "If you had come sooner, you would at least have helped us. A wolf came into the homestead; and all the cattle, he let 'em blood like a butcher. But he didn't have the laugh of us, even if he did get away: one of our people ran him through with a spear." When I heard this, I could not sleep another wink; but when it was broad day I ran for my master Gaius' house like a robbed publican, and when I came to the place where the clothes had been turned into stone I found nothing but blood. And when I got home, my soldier was lying in bed like a bullick and the doctor was seeing to his neck. I knew then that he was a change-skin, and after that I couldn't have taken a bite of bread with him, not if you had killed me first.'

But in observing the guests, perhaps we have been too neglectful of the host. Before we leave the dinner, let us hear what Trimalchio has to say for himself. By this time all the company are a little the worse for liquor, and Trimalchio so far forgets himself as to kiss a pretty servant. His wife Fortunata is furious; she swears at him and calls him 'riff-raff and 'disgrace' and, finally, 'dog'. Trimalchio throws a cup at her and hits her on the cheek. There are tears on the one side and vilification on the other: Trimalchio won't have her statue on his tomb, for even then she would give him no peace. He won't even let her kiss him when he's dead. Habinnas, who is to make the tomb, and his wife Scintilla both beg him to relent, until Trimalchio, bursting into tears, speaks as follows:³⁸

'Habinnas, sure as I 'ope you may enjoy your pile, if I did wrong, spit in my face. I kissed a thoroughly good girl, not because she's pretty but because she's good. She knows her ten-times, she can read a book at sight, she has made herself a fancy-dress out of her allowance and bought a chair and two ladles out of her own money. Doesn't she deserve to have me take notice of her? But Fortunata says no. You would, would you, Madame high-heels? Take my advice: don't let your luck give you the stomachache, you kite; don't make me show my teeth, sweetie, or you'll feel my dander. You know me: when I once make up my mind there's no budging, me. But let us remember the living. Please enjoy yourselves, friends. You know, I was once just like you: it was merit that brought me to this. It's the little brain that makes men, everything else is plain rubbidge. "I buy well, I sell well"; though others will tell you differently. I am bursting with success. What, snuffler? Still crying? I'll soon make you cry, for what's coming to you. Well, as I was going to say, it was levelheadedness that brought me to this fortune. When I came from Asia, I was just so high as this candelabrus is. In fact, every day I used to measure myself by it. And so as to get a moustache under my beak quicker, I used to rub oil from the lamps on my lips. For fourteen years I was the boss's favourite: there's nothing wrong in what the boss tells you to do. And I pleased the missus too. You know what I mean. I say nothing: I'm not one to boast.

Well, by the grace of God, I ran the house and, look you, took the boss's fancy. In short, he made me co-heir with the Emperor, and I got a nobleman's fortune. But nobody's never satisfied. I must needs try trading. To cut it short, I built five ships, I loaded wine—it was just gold in those days—, I sent them to Rome. You'd think I'd ordered it: all the ships were wrecked. It's not a story, it's the truth. In one day Neptune swallowed three hundred thousand pounds. Think I lost heart? No! Why, I thought this loss nobbut a mouthful, practically nothing. I built a second lot, bigger and better and luckier, so that everybody was saying I was a stout fellow. You know, a great ship is a stout ship. I loaded up again, with wine and fat bacon and beans and scent and slaves. This time Fortunata did the decent thing: she sold all her gold and all her clothes and put a hundred sovereigns into my hand. That was the yeast that made my pile rise. Things go so fast when the gods will. On a single trip I cleared a round hundred thousand pounds. At once I bought back all the properties that had belonged to my patron. I build a house, I buy up slaves and cattle; everything I touched grew like a honeycomb. When I found that I had more than all my home-town together, 'twas "hand from the board!".³⁹ I got clear of trading and began financing freedmen. But when I wanted to retire from my business, an astrologer wouldn't 'ave it. This was a Greek bloke, name of Serapa, who had happened to come to our colony:⁴⁰ he was in the know with the gods. He even told me what I had forgotten, explained everything to me from A to Z. He knew me inside out: could almost tell me what I had had for dinner yesterday. You'd have thought he had always lived with me. I ask you, Habinnas—you were there, I think—: "That's how you came by your missus"; "You are not very lucky in your friends"; "No one ever makes you a fair retum"; "You have great estates"; "You are nursing a viper in your bosom"; and—I touch wood⁴¹—that I still have left to live thirty years and four months and two days. And besides, I'm soon to receive a legacy. This my 'oroscope tells me. If I manage to join my estates up with Apulia,⁴² I'll have come far enough in life. In the meantime, under Mercury's eye, I have built this house. As you know, it was a bit of a shanty: now it's a palace. It has four diningrooms, twenty private rooms, two marble colonnades; upstairs, a lot of small rooms, my own bedroom, this viper's lair, a first-rate crib for the janitor. There's plenty of room for guests. In fact, when Scaurus came here, there was nowhere he preferred to stay, and he has friends of his father to stay with at the seaside. And there is plenty else that I'll show you presently. Believe me, have a penny, and you're worth a penny; have something, and you'll be thought something. So your friend, who was once a frog, is now a king.'

Trimalchio then orders in his funeral robes for the inspection of his guests; the bandsmen are brought in to play a dirge; the fire-brigade arrives; and so the party breaks up in confusion.

What direct influence, if any, the Satiricon has had on modern literature I shall not attempt to estimate. It is the first picaresque novel, and on that account, if on no other, would demand attention. All of it is heartless, and the grossness of parts is extreme. But in humour, and in brilliance of conception and execution, it is a masterpiece; and the loss of the Trimalchio episode, so narrowly averted, would have caused a lamentable impoverishment of the world's literature.

Notes

¹ Later, the spelling satira becomes current.

² Tacitus calls him Gaius, the Elder Pliny and Plutarch call him Titus. Even a contemporary can err in such matters, as Wilamowitz, for instance, in an appreciation of Jebb called him Sir Robert Jebb, a slip perpetuated in the reprint of his Kleine Schriften, i, p. 461.

³ Annaeus Mela, who met his death at the same time as Petronius, is a case in point: cp. Tacitus, Ann. xvi. 17.

⁴Hecuba, 569.

⁵ For this view, see Ernout in the Budé edition of Petronius, p. xxxviii, n. 2.

⁶ It is now in Paris.

⁷ Suetonius, Nero, 38.

⁸ e.g. R. Heinze, 'Petron und der griechische Roman', in Hermes, xxxiv (1899), pp. 494-519.

⁹Brutus, 228.

¹⁰ III f.

¹¹Aeneid, iv. 34 id cinerem aut manes credis curare sepultos? but the maid substitutes sentire for the received text curare.

¹² From the same speech of Anna to Dido: Aen. iv. 38.

¹³ Chariton, i. 5.

¹⁴ Achilles Tatius, v. 7.

¹⁵ Longus, i. 25.

¹⁶ Xenophon of Ephesus, i. 9.

¹⁷ A couple of fragments, preserved by other writers, point to the possibility, though not the certainty, that the scene of a lost part of the novel was Massilia (the modern Marseilles), an ancient Greek foundation in which Greek names would be equally appropriate.

¹⁸ It is perhaps relevant to observe that in Latin fiction a Greek name does not necessarily imply Greek nationality or derivation or even habits. In Martial's Epigrams, for instance, there is nothing un-Roman about a Chaerestratus who for lack of a few pounds loses his right to a place on the Knights' benches in the theatre (Mart. Epigr. v. 25).

¹⁹ 53, 1 ff. The Urbis acta were the acta diurna ('Daily News'), the official daily gazette of Rome.

²⁰ This, I have no doubt, is the meaning of in hortis Pompeianis, not, as Emout (Indices, p. 210) strangely takes it, 'in the gardens belonging to Pompeius', i.e. to (Pompeius) Trimalchio. A local name is needed, as in praedio Cumano, just above; and Trimalchio's estates extend not only to Pompeii but far beyond.

²¹ Chapter 71.

²² An eminent gladiator. Trimalchio (ch. 52) already has a number of cups decorated with his exploits in the arena.

²³ These are to symbolize Trimalchio's trading ventures by sea.

²⁴ His wife, with whom we shall find him quarrelling violently.

²⁵Cicaronem meum: presumably the favourite, mentioned above.

²⁶ This imposing array of names, assumed by Trimalchio on receiving his freedom, does no more than suggest the eminence, wealth, and munificence of Trimalchio's former masters. Chronology, propriety, and the context alike forbid us to suppose that Petronius represents his Trimalchio as a quasi-historical character, formerly the slave of Maecenas and, after him, of a Pompeius.

²⁷ The Augustales, six in number, held a sort of honorary magistracy. In the towns of southern Italy they were always freedmen.

²⁸ This, it seems, is the meaning of lupatria. If I understand it aright, the name is not a reflection on Fortunata's morals, which, in the context, are not impugned. On vulgar lips a coarse word may merely express some strong emotion, as, in this instance, of admiration. Similarly in English one may hear a word which, if taken literally, would be a foul insult, used as an expression of affection and sympathy by those who lack both refinement and an adequate vocabulary.

²⁹ Ch. 46. Echion is a centonarius, a maker of the rag blankets which, soaked in water, were used for putting out fires.

³⁰ Ch. 42.

³¹ Literally 'fuller'. The fullo was the bleacher and laundryman and 'cleaner' of the Roman world, here the butt of the ancient jest that we now direct at the laundryman.

³² Mead is an excellent substitute for a cloak. Cp. Gammer Gurton's Needle: 'No frost nor snow, no wind, I trow, | Can hurt me if it wold: | I am so wrapped within and lapped | Of jolly good ale and old.'

³³ Seleucus does use this cliche, abuit ad plures, much as Niceros (below) says supremum diem obiit 'breathed his last'.

³⁴ Ch. 44.

³⁵ The aediles, whose duties included superintendence of markets and food supplies.

³⁶ Chapters 61 and 62.

³⁷ The manuscript gives matauitatau, which has been variously emended. May it not be, after all, as one of the seventeenth century editors suggested, an onomatopoeic coinage? I should put stresses on the second and last syllables: Note that the incongruity of a sword noisily whacking unsubstantial shadows is quite in the manner of the speaker.

³⁸ Chapters 75 to 77. I make one small change pudoris causa.

³⁹ i.e. 'the game is over'.

⁴⁰ The 'colony', of course, is a town with 'colonial' status.

⁴¹ Literally, 'why shouldn't I tell you?' Like his fellows, Trimalchio is superstitious; but he decides, being emboldened with wine, to take the risk.

⁴² A modest hope. Trimalchio will be content, say, with no more than a third of Italy.