Of all the literary works to have survived from the ancient world, few have been as celebrated – or as outrageously provocative – as the Satyrica. Traditionally ascribed to the Petronius who lived and died under Nero’s rule, one of the most darkly fascinating periods of Roman history, the Satyrica recounts a bizarre odyssey through contemporary everyday life. With its startling originality, bawdy humor, and vivid characterizations, Petronius’s brilliant, but fragmentary, novel has inspired countless writers and artists through the ages, most famously the Italian film director Fellini. The grotesqueries and excesses of the book’s most best-known extant section, Trimalchio’s feast, are particularly notorious and influential.

Reflecting the Satyrica‘s unique stature in world literature, Petronius: A Handbook features a dozen original essays that explore the world portrayed by Petronius. Commissioned from leading scholars specializing in the ancient novel, Julio-Claudian culture, and early Roman imperial history, each essay tackles a specific aspect of the Satyrica – from the novel’s literary structure to its social and historic contexts and modern reception in literature and film. Collectively, the essays provide the first comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach to the study of the Satyrica and its relevance to our understanding of the early Roman Empire. Authoritative and insightful, Petronius: A Handbook will unravel the mysteries of one of the greatest literary works that antiquity has bequeathed to the modern world.

Of all the literary works to have survived from the ancient world, few have been as celebrated – or as outrageously provocative – as the Satyrica. Traditionally ascribed to the Petronius who lived and died under Nero’s rule, one of the most darkly fascinating periods of Roman history, the Satyrica recounts a bizarre odyssey through contemporary everyday life. With its startling originality, bawdy humor, and vivid characterizations, Petronius’s brilliant, but fragmentary, novel has inspired countless writers and artists through the ages, most famously the Italian film director Fellini. The grotesqueries and excesses of the book’s most best-known extant section, Trimalchio’s feast, are particularly notorious and influential.

Reflecting the Satyrica‘s unique stature in world literature, Petronius: A Handbook features a dozen original essays that explore the world portrayed by Petronius. Commissioned from leading scholars specializing in the ancient novel, Julio-Claudian culture, and early Roman imperial history, each essay tackles a specific aspect of the Satyrica – from the novel’s literary structure to its social and historic contexts and modern reception in literature and film. Collectively, the essays provide the first comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach to the study of the Satyrica and its relevance to our understanding of the early Roman Empire. Authoritative and insightful, Petronius: A Handbook will unravel the mysteries of one of the greatest literary works that antiquity has bequeathed to the modern world.

Jonathan Prag is a University Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of Merton College. His main areas of research are Hellenistic and Republican Sicily, and the Roman Republic. He has edited a volume (Sicilia nutrix plebis Romanae) on Cicero’s Verrines, and is currently co-editing a volume on The Hellenistic West and writing a book on the non-Italian soldiers of the Roman Republican army.

Ian Repath is Lecturer in Classics at Swansea University. His principal research interests are Greek and Latin prose fiction, and literary aspects of Plato. He is the author of the forthcoming article, Plato in Petronius: Petronius in platanona, and co-editor (with John Morgan) of Where the Truth Lies: Fiction and Metafiction in Ancient Narrative. He is a founding member of KYKNOS, the Swansea, Lampeter, and Exeter Centre for Research in Ancient Narrative Literatures.

Petronius

A Handbook

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Prag and Ian Repath
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-5687-5

Chapter One

Reading the Satyrica

Niall W. Slater

No Roman in Petronius’s original audience read the Satyrica as you are now reading this book. Unless you have a Xerox or screen copy before your eyes, you are holding in your hands the form of book the Romans called a codex, a volume of pages folded or sewn together. This remarkable technological innovation of the late Hellenistic age only gradually replaced the papyrus scroll (Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 1-5,34-6). Although the codex is attested before Petronius’s time, we have no reason to believe it was yet used for such literary works.

Even more importantly, the Satyrica that comes down to us is a fragment of a much larger work. Notes in the much later copies that have survived suggest that what we can read today are parts of Books 14, 15, and 16 of the whole – originally, therefore, three separate scrolls out of a group of at least 16, and perhaps as many as even 20 or 24, if Petronius lived to finish whatever plan he had for the Satyrica.

Nor is it necessarily the case that a first-century Roman who wanted to know the Satyrica pulled a scroll from a shelf or a box in order to read it. Elite Romans often had slaves read to them, alone or in gatherings, as the polymathic elder Pliny did (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 3.5.7-17). Trimalchio does both: he listens to his clerk read news from his estates at dinner (53), but when a troop of performers enters to recite in Greek, he takes up his own scroll to read in Latin (out loud, though perhaps only for his own benefit – and to prove that he can read? [59]).

Such details are not merely of antiquarian interest: it is important to understand that the bound copy of the Satyrica that you pick up today to read is a profoundly different object, offering a different experience from that of the Roman two millennia ago. Awareness of the differences can do much to bridge the gap, even as some things remain tantalizingly beyond our grasp.

Reading Fragments and Fragmented Readings

The fragmentary nature of the Satyrica poses an ongoing challenge for readers. The text that we read today reflects an active struggle, particularly by scholars in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, to put together as complete and readable a narrative as possible, as they rediscovered two groups of manuscripts preserving different parts of the text (Reeve 1983). Sometimes those manuscripts indicated where there were gaps (of words, a few lines, or even pages) in the now lost exemplars from which they were copied, but interruptions in sense indicate other losses as well. Most modern translations indicate where material has likely been lost, but we can rarely be certain how much.

This process of construction is not just an additive one, since various manuscripts sometimes present even the text they do preserve in conflicting order. Readers must decide what the “right” order is by reading, and, where the text does not make sense, whether the problem stems from there being something missing or textual corruption. The reading mind fights against the fragmentary state of the text, with results that have varied widely over the centuries. Most of our reading here will proceed sequentially through the text as reconstructed. Realize that your own reading experience is part of the process of patching the tattered scrolls together.

When our text begins, someone is talking, denouncing the way public speaking is currently taught and practiced. Only when the person addressed interrupts do we discover that this speaker is also the overall first-person narrator of the Satyrica and a young man (adulescens 3) to boot. It will be 17 more chapters in the current text before we learn his name from someone else’s passing remark: Encolpius.

The loss of so much text, particularly the opening, means that we cannot come to this story as the author originally planned. Did Encolpius introduce himself to the reader, narrate any background to his story, or just plunge in? The two obvious comparisons for such a long fictional story told in the first person are both later than Petronius: Achilles Tatius’s Greek novel, Leucippe and Cleitophon, told to us by Cleitophon after a brief introductory frame story, and Apuleius’s Golden Ass or Metamorphoses, with its puzzlingly playful prologue (Kahane and Laird 2001 offer multiple views of its games) followed by Lucius’s narrative of his adventures. Neither of those prologues tells us right at the beginning where the story is going, though Cleitophon explicitly sets out to tell what love has made him suffer, while Lucius, after a first-person prologue probably not in his own voice that nonetheless promises us readerly pleasure, simply begins his adventures on the road.

The loss of any initial frame forces us as readers to make (and continually revise) judgments about what we read as we go along. The temporal standpoint from which Encolpius narrates has been keenly debated. While drama enacts its events in a fictive present, right here and right now, narrative fictions (except for a few recent experiments) are always told after the fact: but how much after? Roger Beck (1973) and even more Gottsklk Jensson (2004) have insisted that Encolpius the narrator speaks from a much later point in time than Encolpius the character within the narrative; therefore the “older” Encolpius can and should have a very different point of view. The textual basis for this theory amounts to three passages looking back in time and two looking forward, all within the narrative of Trimalchio’s dinner. Arriving at Trimalchio’s house, Encolpius says apologetically “if I remember correctly” (30.3) just before he quotes the wording of a notice. After reporting a number of jokes, he says “600 such have escaped my memory” (56.10). Later, though, some dishes come to the table “the memory of which offends me” (65.10). Together, these three passages do indicate that Encolpius’s telling of the story is logically later than the actual events themselves, but given how much they have to drink, he could easily have forgotten 600 jokes by the next morning. Two other passages refer, with extreme brevity (47.8, “we did not yet realize,” and 70.8, “what follows”), to things just about to happen. Thus, while a much older Encolpius may have begun the story, many readers will find that nothing requires such an assumption, let alone the view that his later self wanted us to see his youthful adventures through a lost and sharply different evaluative frame.

This matters, because the world of the Satyrica is full of surprises, of sudden and sometimes violent changes of action, scene, or mood, and many readers yearn for something to hold on to over the bumps. The literary texture can change, sometimes with warning, sometimes without. When Encolpius stops quoting himself at the beginning, we discover his interlocutor is Agamemnon, a local teacher of rhetoric, who agrees with him about the decay of eloquence in their day. Agamemnon tries to express part of his agreement through reciting a poem of his own composition, after praising the style of Lucilius, the early Roman satirist. (Based on later experience of both characters, a reader may also decide Agamemnon has personal, even sexual reasons for wishing to ingratiate himself with Encolpius.)

This poem is the reader’s first encounter with a fundamental feature of style in the Satyrica, the shift back and forth between prose and poetry, sometimes announced, as here (“I shall express myself in verse”), sometimes not. What most Roman readers could detect as well is an odd lurch within what looks like a single poem on the page, but which would not sound like one read aloud, an effect most translations fail to reproduce. The first eight lines of the poem at 5 are in an iambic meter, the remainder in hexameters. As a pioneer in Roman verse, Lucilius wrote poems he termed “satires” in both iambics and hexameters, though there is no evidence he combined these normally disparate meters within individual poems. While the two sections might individually resemble Lucilius, Agamemnon’s homage therefore looks and sounds like bad gene-splicing: a hippogriff of a poem (see Courtney 2001: 59-61 for a different and more complicated view of the poem). Encolpius has no chance to respond to or comment on Agamemnon’s argument or his poem, as the audience listening to the next speaker now exits, and he seizes the opportunity to slip away.

We, as readers, could easily race after Encolpius, but this little poem offers a good example of both the potential and limits of an approach to the novel based in the experience of readers, ancient and modern. While there are many variations within reader-response criticism, all approaches acknowledge that no text is either written or read in a vacuum. Readers bring their own experiences and expectations to the task of reading, and authors of any skill write with this in mind. Wolfgang Iser (1978) designates the experience the reader brings, both of life in general and literature in particular, as the reader’s repertoire. For example, in order to read about declamation (declamatores 1.1; declamare 3.1) with enjoyment, it helps a reader to have some notion what declamation is. An exchange during the Cena illustrates just this point. Trimalchio demands that Agamemnon entertain him and the other guests with an outline of his declamation (peristasim declamationis 48.4) earlier in the day, and the guest obliges:

When Agamemnon had said, “A poor man [pauper] and a rich man were enemies,” Trimalchio said, “What’s a poor man?” “Very witty,” said Agamemnon and laid out some debate scenario [controversiam].

Trimalchio’s heavy-handed joke is based on the pretence that he is so rich that he does not even know what the basic word pauper means. Since Agamemnon’s theme is among the tritest controversiae (see Richlin, SEX IN THE SATYRICA, p. 94, on these rhetorical exercises), a Roman reader would recognize that Trimalchio, whose vocabulary and repertoire includes such Greek rhetorical jargon terms as peristasis, is being deliberately obtuse as well as self-aggrandizing.

What then is the joke, if any, in Agamemnon’s “Lucilian” poem, and on whom? The modern reader needs help to figure out who Lucilius was and what he wrote. It seems very likely that Petronius expected his Roman reader to know both, and know better than Agamemnon. Part of the joke, then, is that Agamemnon knows Lucilius as a writer of famous quotations but does not grasp that, even though Lucilius used different meters for his poems, patching two different meters together into one poem makes the result completely un-Lucilian (cf. Panayotakis, PETRONIUS AND THE ROMAN LITERARY TRADITION, p. 60, on Trimalchio’s “Publilian” poem). The unanswerable question here, though it will become much more interesting at other moments, is whether the narrating Encolpius realizes this. If he does, he is in on the joke. If not, we as readers can enjoy a laugh at his expense too.

Genre, Narrator, Narrative

Let us backtrack briefly. When we pick up a book today, a number of signals (author, title, cover art, jacket blurb, as well as the place in the bookstore or library where it is found) help us classify it: is it a novel, biography, history, or a cookbook? This notion of genre creates expectations for the reader that may be fulfilled or played with: a recipe in a cookbook is expected, but one in a novel is an interesting surprise. The ancient reader had some such signals (scrolls often had a tag called a titulus attached which might include the author’s name as well as a title), but might need to read some of a work’s contents as well to decide what to expect. The few ancient references to the Satyrica call it a fabula, a narrative, but that is not enough to tell us exactly how ancient readers classified its genre.

The surviving manuscripts and most older translations give the title of Petronius’s work as Satyricon, but this is the Latinized form of a Greek genitive plural understood with libri (“The Books of the Satyrica“). The original title was therefore Satyrica. Roman readers knew both fictional works (such as Aristides’ Milesiaca or Milesian Stories; see Morgan, PETRONIUS AND GREEK LITERATURE, p. 45) and historical works (such as Ctesias’s Persica and Indica) with similar titles. Surviving Greek prose fictional narratives with such titles, including Xenophon’s Ephesiaca (Ephesian Tale) and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (Aethiopian Tale) are later than Petronius, so whether Satyrica would arouse reader expectations of a long fictional narrative is questionable (see Whitmarsh 2005, especially 602-3). The exact meaning of the title is still debated, but the root in Satyrica seems to allude both to the tradition of Roman satire (satura) and to the novel’s satyr-like subject matter, though ironically, since the narrator Encolpius often fails as a satyr.

The first episodes (Encolpius’s and Ascyltos’s separate adventures in a brothel, their quarrel over the boy Giton back at their lodgings) soon establish a theme of erotic misadventures and sufferings. Combined with the title, this might make it tempting to read the Satyrica through the frame of romance or novel (Walsh 1970). Differences soon appear, however. The Greek novel typically shows us the sufferings of devoted couples, separated by dire circumstances (Konstan 1994).While these can include homosexual couples, fidelity to each other is still the hallmark of these stories, rousing readers’ sympathies. In the surviving Satyrica, Encolpius and Giton are never long separated, and their sufferings, real enough at least to Encolpius, are portrayed comically rather than tragically. Parody of romance is therefore a possible frame for the Satyrica, but this will not account for other elements. (See Morgan, PETRONIUS AND GREEK LITERATURE, p. 40.)

(Continues…)

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