Chapter II: Petronius: Novelist and Poet

The remains of the _Satyricon_—The name Petronius Arbiter—The
Petronius of Nero’s time—Identity of the author—Menippean
form—Earlier adventures of three ne’er-do-wells in the
extant text—The banquet of Trimalchio—Arrival of guests and
host—Courses surprising and excessive—Conduct of the host—His
blunders and egotism—Talk of the guests—Adventures resumed
after the banquet—Sea-voyage and shipwreck—The impostors
at Crotona—Love-episodes and closing scenes—The dramatic
date—Sources and the author’s originality—Traces of literary
convention even in first realistic romance—Morals and
realism—Elements picaresque and sensual—Qualities anticipative
of modern novels—Certain contrasts with Apuleius—Latin of the
_Satyricon_—Plebeian speech—Examples in Petronius—Contrast
with certain contemporary tendencies—His poetry—_De Bello
Ciuili_—Short poems attributed to him—Nature and love.

An intensely interesting, though fragmentary, work, now by common consent ascribed to Nero’s reign, is usually entitled the _Satyricon_ or _Satiricon_ (originally a Greek genitive plural), though the fragments are in the manuscripts also called _satirae_ or _satyri_, and referred to Petronius Arbiter as author. Like the _editio princeps_ of about 1482,[536] several editions appeared without the famous “Banquet of Trimalchio,” which was recovered at Trau in Dalmatia only in the middle of the seventeenth century. In that unique manuscript (_Traguriensis_) an entry had been made to the effect that the fragments belong to Books XV and XVI of Petronius’s “Satyri”; if this is trustworthy, then merely a fraction of a long work has come down to us. Since that thrilling discovery at Trau, all claims to have found additions have proved to be based on forgeries, like the passages published at Paris in 1693 by Nodot, who pretended they were contained in a manuscript from Belgrade.

Quotations from “Arbiter” or “Petronius” are made by several ancient scholars (_e.g._ Diomedes, Servius, Priscian); Fulgentius cites him as “Petronius Arbiter”; Terentianus Maurus calls him “Arbiter disertus,” and Sidonius Apollinaris classes him among renowned masters _eloquii Latini_; but the process of excerpting (like epitomizing, often fatal to an original) probably accounts for the disappearance of the complete work about the seventh century. The limited Petronius now extant was presumably the portion known to Eugenius Vulgarius in the tenth century, to John of Salisbury in the twelfth, and to Vincentius of Beauvais in the thirteenth.

Niebuhr’s opinion that the work was of the third century and Beck’s that it belonged to the time of Augustus or Tiberius have by general consent given place to the established belief that it was written in Nero’s age.[537] Its social atmosphere, its style, its echoes of Seneca, Lucan and even of the emperor, all point the argument in the same direction. Likewise it is in the highest degree probable that the author is the Petronius whose death is dramatically recorded by Tacitus and whose character is attractively idealized by Sienkiewicz in “Quo Vadis?” Gaius (or as Nipperdey[538] preferred, Titus) Petronius was one of a series of Nero’s victims in A.D. 66, and Tacitus devotes two chapters[539] to the career and end of a very remarkable man:

With him day passed in sleep, night in the duties and
amusements of life. Energy makes some men’s reputation, but
idling had made his: he was considered, not a debauchee and
spendthrift like most squanderers of their wealth, but a man
of polished luxury. The freer his sayings and doings and the
more seeming carelessness they displayed, the more cordially
were they construed as looking like straightforwardness. Yet
when governor of Bithynia and afterwards when consul, he showed
himself alert and a match for business. Then, falling back
on vice or aping vice, he was selected by Nero to be one of
his small inner circle, his judge of etiquette (_elegantiae
arbiter_); for the emperor thought nothing charming and
elegantly voluptuous, unless Petronius had given him approval
of it.

As ill luck would have it, he roused the dangerous jealousy of Tigellinus, who proceeded to compass his ruin through a false charge. Nero was in Campania when Petronius received an ominous command to confine himself to Cumae. He was not the man to tolerate fluctuations of fear and hope: on the other hand he was little disposed to fling life away by precipitate suicide: so he alternately opened and bandaged his veins, exactly as he chose, held receptions for his friends and indulged in conversation neither serious nor suggestive of stoical virtue.

He listened as they repeated, not views on the immortality
of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light
poetry and sportive lines. To some of his slaves he gave
generous gifts, to others a flogging. He went in to dinner,
then indulged in sleep so that, though forced upon him, his
death might appear the result of chance. Even in his will he
did not, like most doomed men, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or
any other powerful personage; instead, he wrote a description
of the prince’s scandalous excesses, prefixing the names of
the profligates and the women concerned, and detailing every
immoral novelty; then sealed the document and sent it to Nero.

This _chronique scandaleuse_ written in Petronius’s last hours cannot, as some have hastily surmised, be the _Satyricon_, a far more elaborate production, which must have demanded prolonged leisure for its composition. But the _Satyricon_ enables one to imagine the pith and realism of the terrible indictment hurled at the depraved despot by one who had been his minister of amusements. Certainly, in the qualities ascribed to Petronius by Tacitus, there is nothing to render it unlikely that the ascription of the fragments in the manuscripts to Petronius Arbiter refers to any other person than the Petronius who is called by the historian the emperor’s _elegantiae arbiter_. It is immaterial that Tacitus did not allude to any previous literary work by him: the historian’s grave judgement might not have considered its tone worth mention, and, in any case, it is not his way to record the writings of historical figures. We should never, for instance, have known about Seneca’s voluminous compositions from Tacitus. On the positive side it may be affirmed that the Tacitean portrait of Petronius wears the very features to be expected in the author of a novel depicting low and vicious life in tones which argue intimacy of knowledge and at the same time the almost cynically detached spirit of a spectator. This Mephistophelian _insouciance_ of attitude has the artistic merit of leaving the wickedest and vulgarest characters of the story to act in an absolutely natural way, and exactly fits the brilliant courtier for whom, in spite of a spasmodic energy suggestive of higher capacities, the favourite business of life was the invention, organization and criticism of sensuous enjoyments. A psychology thus complex may well have baffled his closest friends. It might amuse so great a master of facile accomplishment to surprise Rome by an unsuspected talent for administration abroad. The controller of the revels may have been able at will to listen with assumed gravity to philosophical discussions and rhetorical performances, or even take part in what might one day furnish material for satire; in all probability he narrowly observed Seneca and Lucan at court as potential “copy”; but his real affair was to be the ultimate authority on pleasures for exalted society, and, with a defiant unconcern, to live the life of an expert in everything that could contribute towards passing time gaily away.

What remains of the _Satyricon_ is (like the contemporary _Apocolocyntosis_ by Seneca) in the form of the Menippean satire taken over into Roman literature by Varro[540] from the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara, and therefore in prose interspersed with verses. Its story of adventures, many of them unutterably disreputable, is related by Encolpius, one of a trio on a round of escapades among the half-Greek cities of Southern Italy. His fellow-wanderers, rogues like himself, are Ascyltus, a young freedman, and Giton, a handsome serving-boy, who is a bone of contention between them. The narrative is diversified with a few entertaining tales—about a werewolf, about witches substituting a straw changeling for a boy, and the famous one of the widow of Ephesus[541]—digressive stories within a story, which long remained a convention of the novel, like the history of “the man of the hill” in _Tom Jones_.

Our present text opens somewhere on the coast of Campania—perhaps, if indeed it is necessary to locate the scene, at Cumae,[542] though Naples, Puteoli and Misenum are among the rival suggestions. Encolpius, a student of rhetoric for the time being, is delivering a tirade against the unreality and futility of a rhetorical education totally divorced from the business of the actual world. Professor Agamemnon, who is in his company, argues in defence that teachers have to suit current taste or close their academies. The faulty training of the day he ascribes to parents’ insistence on an easy and quick road to proficiency; and, breaking into verse, he recites choliambics on the simple life advisable for an orator, and hexameters on the needful study of Socratic philosophy and Demosthenes. Meanwhile Ascyltus had slipped off, and a crowd of students pour into the colonnade. Encolpius starts in pursuit of his comrade; asks his way of a greengrocer-woman, who guides him to a disorderly establishment, where he discovers his friend, and soon afterwards enters on one of a series of jealous wrangles with him over Giton. In the market-place the pair meet with exciting experiences, told in Latin so admirably natural as to place everything before our eyes. A brawl breaks out because the pair are taxed with being in possession of a stolen cloak (_pallium_), and because at the same time they challenge a countryman wearing a lost tunic of their own, threadbare indeed but very precious for the secret stock of gold coins sewed into it. Folk are much puzzled with the strangers’ willingness to renounce the cloak for the shabby tunic. They just escape arrest, and, when they have reached their inn, are visited by one Quartilla, who, preceded by her servant and attended by a little girl, has come to declare that they owe her penance for disturbing her ritual in the chapel of Priapus. Later, the scene changes to her house, where an orgy leads to general drowsiness, broken at length by the entry of two burglars. When their depredations are interrupted, the robbers pretend to snore, and the convivial licentiousness is renewed.

Then comes the morning of Trimalchio’s banquet (§§ 26-78)—a free repast secured for the adventurers through Agamemnon. Out of the existing total of 141 sections, over 50 are concerned with this episode, whose details vividly recreate an extravagantly vulgar dinner-party given by a wealthy _parvenu_ of the freedman class to people of similar standing and to uninvited guests. It reads like an excursion into an ancient and not unreal land of Cockaigne. There is scarcely a dull piece among all the kaleidoscopic changes from incident to incident between the opening glimpse of the host,

a bald old man in a reddish shirt, playing at a game in which
he never stooped to pick up a ball, if it touched the ground,
but had a slave to supply fresh ones from a bag,

and the final scene during which, amidst the confusion caused by the irruption of the fire-brigade, Encolpius and his friends, surfeited and bored, made good their escape.

Four decorated lackeys precede the great man’s litter, which brings him home in a scarlet woollen wrap from the preliminary bath, while a musician plays small pipes close by, so that Trimalchio shall have music wherever he goes. The guests reach the entrance:

There stood a porter in green, with a cherry-coloured belt,
shelling peas in a silver dish. Over the doorway hung a golden
cage and a spotted magpie in it greeted arrivals.

These splashes of colour make a fitting prelude to the exuberant profusion throughout. Everywhere is a lavish parade of wealth and such an over-plentiful variety of viands that one feels of Trimalchio as of Chaucer’s frankeleyn:

It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke,
Of alle deyntees that men coude thinke.

Trimalchio is drawn as the representative of a new rich class whose social aspiration in any community must always be entrance at all costs into the envied circle of people of quality—that old caste which it must ape in default of manners and traditions of its own and whose culture it must affect with a nervous sense of inferiority imperfectly concealed under blatant self-assertion. A huge chained dog painted on the wall with large letters above, “CAVE CANEM,” played on guests the same mild joke as the familiar mosaic at one of the thresholds in Pompeii. This was, however, merely an introduction to other decorations, which represented Trimalchio in the slave-market, Trimalchio guided to Rome by Minerva, Trimalchio learning book-keeping, Trimalchio appointed steward, Trimalchio at various stages in his successful rise, “and just where the wall-space of the colonnade gave no more room, Mercury had lifted him by the chin and was hurrying him to his elevated official dais (as a sevir Augustalis).” No wonder that Fortune should be there with a horn of plenty and the three Fates spinning golden threads. Trimalchio was one of those who find in their own career a substitute for ancestors. His name reappears incessantly inscribed on as many things as possible: one part of the dining-room door-posts ended in a sort of ship’s beak bearing the legend “presented by the steward Cinnamus to Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, priest of the college of Augustus”; besides, silver dishes might be noted with the host’s name and their weight scrupulously engraved on the edges.

The diners take their places and have _hors d’oeuvres_ served without Trimalchio, who arrives purposely late to the strains of music, his shaven head peeping out above a scarlet cloak and a fringed napkin round his neck—an irresistibly funny figure at which any guest off his guard was sure to laugh (_expressit imprudentibus risum_). His display of rings, bracelet and bangle indicated no better manners than his explanation to his guests that it was inconvenient for him to come so soon, but that he had sacrificed his own pleasure to avoid keeping them waiting. Even so, he means to finish his game with crystal pieces on a draughts-board of terebinth wood.

From this point the banquet proceeds through a whirl of surprise courses and surprise incidents. The pea-hen’s eggs distributed from under a wooden hen prove, though doubtful-looking at first, to contain a fat beccafico wrapped in spiced yolk of egg. A slave-boy is boxed for troubling to pick up a silver entree-dish that had fallen—by orders of the host it must be thrown down again and swept away. To ensure a fair field as in war, he has arranged that each guest shall have a separate table: “so the stinking slaves will make us less hot by crushing past us” (_obiter et putidissimi serui minorem nobis aestum frequentia sua facient_). When his fine old Falernian, labelled one hundred years in bottle, is produced, he indulges in one of his ill-bred remarks, “Yesterday I didn’t supply such a good brand, and there were far more genteel people at dinner” (_heri non tam bonum posui, et multo honestiores cenabant_). The old wine, like other incidents of the dinner, sets the host moralizing. “Ah me, so wine lives longer than poor mankind: so let’s have a good ‘wet’ (_tengomenas_). Wine is life”; but next moment a slave brings in another reminder of death, a mechanically jointed silver skeleton, on which Trimalchio reflects in verse:

Alack for us poor men! man’s little all
Is naught: so shall we all be when we pass
Below. Then let us live while luck allows.[543]

One can but summarize, without entering into details, the fare provided. A Zodiac dish with symbolic dainties above for each of the twelve signs (on which the host insisted on giving a rambling astronomical lecture afterwards) has much finer delicacies concealed underneath. A wild boar on a tray is attended by huntsmen and hounds, and when the boar is opened, the birds begin to fly—thrushes, to wit, limed by fowlers in the dining-room for the astonished banqueters. Three white pigs are driven in, one of them to be turned into a dinner on the spot. Soon after, a pig is served up, to all appearance ungutted, and when by a prearranged jest, the seemingly negligent _chef_ has been stripped for punishment, a stab at the animal releases a tumbling mass of cooked sausages! What promises to be a last course (_epideipnis_) consists of thrushes of fine meal stuffed with raisins and nuts, followed by quinces stuck all over with little spikes to resemble hedgehogs; but to their horror and loathing the sated guests are next confronted with a fat goose garnished ostensibly with fish and different birds, and yet all made, as Trimalchio boasts, by his expert cook Daedalus out of the same ingredient, namely, hog’s flesh! Suddenly two slaves fall a-fighting and smash the waterpots that hang round their necks, thus revealing oysters and mussels to be handed round presently in competition with the cook’s snails on a silver gridiron.

Still more entertainment is derivable from the conduct and talk of the diners than from the conglomerate _menu_. The host at one time inflicts on his guests a hideous tune from a mime; he must crack his joke in shouting “Carve ’er!” (_Carpe_) at his slave “Carver” (_Carpus_), he talks very plainly on subjects customarily thought delicate; he needs to be told by his wife to remember his dignity; and yet later in the meal lets a favourite slave mount on his back and slap him. Loving to create astonishment, he has an enormous hoop let down from an opening in the ceiling to convey golden crowns and perfume-boxes as souvenirs; and he has cakes and fruits prepared to spurt out saffron. After acrobatic performances come Homeric reciters clashing spear and shield. Trimalchio tries to follow their Greek in some sort of Latin _Iliad_, until he thinks fit to explain the situation by his own fatuous version of the tale of Troy:

“You know the story they’re doing? Diomede and Ganymede were
two brothers. Their sister was Helen. Agamemnon ran off with
her and palmed off a hind on Diana in her place. So Homer is
now telling of the fighting between Trojans and Parentines. Of
course Agamemnon won, and married his daughter Iphigenia to
Achilles. That’s what drove Ajax out of his mind, and he’ll
make the sequel clear in a second.”[544]

And so a charger is carried in bearing a calf boiled whole and helmeted for a raving “Ajax” to slash at and divide on the point of his sword among the onlookers.

Another curious recitation is that by a young slave-boy of Habinnas’s, who, with his wife Scintilla, had arrived late in the evening, mellow from a wake. The boy starts with the opening line of _Aeneid_ V., but, being a foreigner, soon makes blunders and actually sandwiches in between Virgilian pieces scraps from Atellane farces “so that for the first time in my life,” comments the smart Encolpius, “even Virgil hurt my finer feelings” (_ut tunc primum me etiam Vergilius offenderit_).[545] This production is, however, in keeping with Trimalchio’s own standard of attainment; for it is one of the signs of his vulgarity that he pretends to a learning which he does not possess. He attempts literary talk with the professor present, claiming culture on the ground that he owns two collections of books—one Greek, one Latin.[546] He used to read Homer when a boy, he adds; and with what effect is evident from the “howlers” in his story of the origin of Corinthian bronze, which bears some resemblance to that of Charles Lamb regarding roast-pig:

“When Troy fell, that charlatan and big rascal Hannibal heaped
all the statues of bronze, gold and silver on to a single
funeral pile and set them on fire: they turned into one
amalgam of bronze. From this mass artificers took pieces and
made cups, dishes and statuettes.”[547]

Such mixed history prepares one for his mixed mythology when he boasts of his ownership of a round hundred beakers

“engraved with Cassandra killing her children—and the little
boys are lying dead so naturally that you’d think they were
alive.[548] I have also a thousand cups, which Mummius left to
my late master; and on them Daedalus is shutting Niobe into the
Trojan Horse.”

The proud egotism of the self-made man who has risen in the social scale is admirably made to betray itself by such means as the engagement-book displayed prominently, the daily gazette of events on his estates read at dinner,[549] his narrative of how he got on in business, or even his attempts at pathos by reading his will, the directions for his tombstone and his own epitaph:[550]

HERE RESTS

C. POMPEIVS TRIMALCHIO MAECENATIANVS:

NOMINATED TO THE AUGUSTAL PRIESTHOOD
IN ABSENCE, HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MEMBER
OF ANY CIVIL GUILD IN ROME, BUT DECLINED.
DUTIFUL, BRAVE, FAITHFUL,
HE STARTED WITH LITTLE, BUT LEFT THIRTY MILLIONS:
YET HE NEVER HAD A COLLEGE EDUCATION.
FAREWELL BOTH HE AND THOU!

The talk of the guests makes a refreshing change from what would otherwise be intolerable gorging. Here the author proves his dramatic realism by drawing from the spoken Latin of the day, introducing its colloquialisms and faulty grammar. A few translated extracts may suggest the off-hand character of the conversation:

“I couldn’t eat any more so I turned to my neighbour to get
all the news I could, and started raking up stories and asking
him who the woman was that was bustling up and down. ‘That’s
Trimalchio’s wife,’ says he, ‘her name’s Fortunata, and she
measures her shekels by the bushel. And what was she just a
little while ago? Well, you must excuse my saying it, but
you wouldn’t have taken a bit of bread from her hand. Now—I
can’t say why or wherefore—she’s in the seventh heaven: she’s
Trimalchio’s _factotum_ (_topanta_). The truth is, she’s only
got to tell him at high noon that it’s dark, and he’ll believe
it. He hasn’t a notion of what he owns—he’s such a plutocrat;
but this lynx of a woman keeps a look-out on everything, even
where you wouldn’t think it.’”

And he proceeds to describe her as sober and thrifty, but a shrew and capable of inflicting, like Mrs. Caudle, curtain-lectures on her husband (_est tamen malae linguae, pica puluinaris_).[551]

Nowhere do we hear more of the true ring of chatter than when the host’s temporary retirement removes all restraint:[552] Dama bawls for an extra tankard:

“Day doesn’t count: it’s night before you can turn about. So
the best you can do is to go right from bed to dinner. And nice
chilly weather we’ve had. Hot baths has scarcely warmed me up.
(_uix me balneus calfacit_). After all, hot drinks is equal
to an overcoat. I’ve had some good pulls, and am absolutely
tight (_plane matus_). Wine’sh gone to my head” (_uinus mihi in
cerebrum abiit_).

Seleucus breaks in—he has been at a funeral:

“Well, well, he’s joined the majority (_abiit ad plures_).
The doctors did for him, or rather his evil stars has done it
(_immo magis malus fatus_). A doctor’s only a comfort to the
mind. Still he had a fine funeral ... and the mourning was
jolly good—he left several slaves their freedom—even if the
widow was stingy with her tears. What if he didn’t treat her
over well? Woman taken all round is a bird of prey. One should
never do a good turn: it’s just like chucking it down a well.
But an old love nips like a crab.”[553]

One bore is interrupted by another; “Let’s remember the living,” shouts Phileros, but he too is soon talking about the dead man and his brother. Next Ganymedes insists on having his growl over profiteers and high prices until Echion, the rag-merchant, the optimist of the party, brings him to book:

“Do give up whining. Now it’s this way, now it’s that, as
the countrymen said when he’d lost the spotted pig. What one
doesn’t get to-day, one will to-morrow—that’s how life pushes
on. S’help me, ye couldn’t mention a better country, if only
it had the right people.... If you emigrate, you’ll be telling
how pigs trot round at home ready-cooked. And, mark ye, we’re
going to have a topping gladiatorial show (_munus excellente_)
in three days more—the public holiday.”[554]

And, reckless of grammar, he rattles on about gladiatorial matches, till he takes to chaffing the professor:

“Now, Agamemnon, I fancy you’re saying ‘what’s this bore
blethering about?’ Folks like you that’s able to speak doesn’t.
You don’t belong to our sort, and so you jeer at the remarks of
we ’umble people. We know as how much learning doth make you
mad.”[555]

With their escape from this maelstrom of junketing, the youths recommence their adventures. It was no easy task after hard drinking to find the way back to their inn in the dark through a strange town. Luckily Giton had made chalk-marks on columns in the daytime, and the white could be seen.

Renewed quarrels between Encolpius and Ascyltus give place to a fresh set of incidents. Encolpius in a picture-gallery has met a shabbily dressed and unprincipled old poet Eumolpus. He can talk effectively on the decay of art[556] owing to the disappearance of the ancient times of rivalry in hard work, when unselfish toil for posterity contrasted with the modern love of wine, women and wealth. Seeing Encolpius interested in a picture of the taking of Troy, he recites sixty-five iambics on this _Troiae Halosis_, introducing the Trojan horse and Laocoon with the serpents as in _Aeneid_ II, and thus briefly handling a theme which had interested Nero. His verses have a way of bringing a shower of stones about his head, but he remains an incorrigible versifier, even later when in imminent danger from shipwreck. Encolpius has deemed it wise to share Giton’s favour with Eumolpus, and the three have made their way aboard ship when Encolpius discovers to his alarm that the ship belongs to an old enemy, Lichas, and that he, with Tryphaena, another deadly enemy made in a lost part of the story, is actually on the vessel. To avoid detection, Encolpius and Giton agree to be shaven and branded to look like slaves; but a sea-sick passenger notices in the moonlight the shaving—an evil omen at sea—and discovery follows, with a free fight in which passengers and crew take part until a treaty of peace is made. Then there are rejoicings aboard, and Eumolpus indulges in elegiacs and hendecasyllabics on the tonsure of the youths, for whom wigs and false eyebrows have to be obtained. To illustrate fickleness, Eumolpus recounts the tale of the apparently inconsolable widow of Ephesus and the kindly soldier. In a storm Lichas is blown overboard and drowned, and the voyage ends in shipwreck.

The closing scenes are laid in Crotona, whither Encolpius and Giton accompany Eumolpus with much bravado and assurance to practise fraud and wilful imposition for their livelihood. Legacy-hunting is the great industry of the city (_nam aut captantur aut captant_, 116). The strangers have decided that Eumolpus shall act the part of a fabulously wealthy landed proprietor from Africa who has unfortunately been shipwrecked, but who can presumably more than repay in the long run any hospitality received at Crotona. Before the impostors set to work, a pause in the narrative permits Eumolpus to propound critical doctrines on historical poetry in his remarks introductory[557] to nearly three hundred hexameters[558] upon the _Bellum Ciuile_ of 49 B.C. It is in the mouth of Eumolpus that the author places the famous phrase about the studied grace of Horace (_Horatii curiosa felicitas_).

Adventures are to the adventurous; and Encolpius, now called Polyaenus, is not long in Crotona before a serving-maid makes amorous overtures to him on behalf of her mistress, and his introduction[559] to this fair Siren named Circe is related with a romantic beauty which deserves to be linked with a less unsavoury intrigue:

“It was not long before she ushered her mistress from her hiding-place and escorted to my side a lady perfect beyond all dreams. There is no language that can contain her charm: words of mine must fall short—her tresses all over her shoulders, a cascade of nature’s own curls; a low forehead with the hair turned back from it; eyebrows running on to the line of her cheeks and, between the eyes, almost united again; eyes brighter than the gleaming stars when there is no moon; just a curve on the nose; and sweet lips such as Praxiteles imagined Diana had. And then her chin, her neck, her hands, and the whiteness of those feet set in a tiny band of gold—she had eclipsed the marble of Paros. I had long loved Doris: I thought nothing of Doris now.”

The meetings with Circe end, however, disastrously for her lover, whom her servants finally expel with ignominy as an unsatisfying swain. Other troubles are in store when he has the misfortune to kill one of three sacred geese, but the imperfections of the text give a disjointed effect to the remaining episodes, which close with a very natural uneasiness on the part of the tricksters that they may be found out, and the grim jest which Eumolpus plays upon expectant beneficiaries under his will by making it a condition in one of the clauses that his heirs shall after his death slice him up and eat him!

* * * * *

While the period of composition may be taken as Neronian, the time of the events related is most likely not much earlier. Though Mommsen put the dramatic date under Augustus, Friedländer prefers the close of Claudius’s reign or beginning of Nero’s; and this proposition fits the case of Trimalchio “Maecenatianus,” freed in boyhood by his patron Maecenas, who died in 8 B.C. Petronius describes Trimalchio as old (_senem caluum_, 27) at the time of his entertainment; hence it may be imagined to have happened about the middle of the first century.

On possible literary sources of the _Satyricon_ perhaps too much has been written in view of the fact that whatever the borrowing, suspected or unsuspected, the work remains a monument of originality for its realistic portrayal of certain grades of contemporary Italian life. The debt to that human fund of material and to the author’s unique genius for artistic handling eclipses any debt to literary sources. Of these sources the most obvious concerns his method of relieving prose with verse after Varro’s Menippean fashion: and to this particular medley (without any claim to the Varronian spirit) the title of _saturae_ may allude. There are also a few burlesque echoes of epic,[560] although, in the absence of the missing books, one cannot be justified in accepting the theory of “The Wrath of Priapus”[561] as a motive comically analogous to a Homeric “Wrath of Poseidon,” and thereby imagined to link the escapades into a unity suggestive of an obscene Odyssey. Persecution by an offended deity of sex-lust may plausibly be considered to operate for part of the story in the spirit of the lines,

Angry Priapus of the Dardanelles
Hunts me on earth and where grey Ocean swells;[562]

but it remains problematic whether it dominates the whole.

Other literary forms have been put forward as credible sources of influence on the _Satyricon_—the serious heroic romance, stories of adventure implied in certain rhetorical exercises among the elder Seneca’s collection, the prologue of comedy, and, with more plainly apposite bearing, the mime for its realism and the erotic Milesian tales[563] in Greek, if not in Sisenna’s adaptations from Aristides. The hypothesis that Petronius travestied such Greek love-romances as are represented by the Ninos story[564] recovered on a first-century papyrus can scarcely hold good where we find no structure clearly suggesting parody to a reader: manifestly the tone of Petronius is far removed from that of the conventional courtships, piracies, voyages, shipwrecks, separations and reunions in the love-stories of later Greek literature.[565] Time has even been spent on an endeavour to prove that picaresque Greek novels existed from which Petronius might have borrowed his rascally heroes. No doubt he owed much: there is equally no doubt that he created the realistic novel; for before him such prose fiction as had appeared in the form of fable, parable or anecdote fell far short of a sustained romance well filled with incident and characterization.

But just as the _Satyricon_ as a whole, however original in spirit, owed something to literary convention, so the _Cena_ repeats stock-features of Greek banquets like the performances by acrobats and reciters, the appearance of the uninvited guest (Habinnas), the quarrel, and the dog-fight.[566] The _Cena_ in Roman Satire had a tradition beginning perhaps in Ennius, but certainly established by Lucilius and developed by Horace; and between Nasidienus’s banquet in Horace and Trimalchio’s dinner-party there are points of resemblance[567] enough to prove how fresh and independent Petronius could be even when he handled a tralatician idea like that of a rich and ill-bred parvenu, or reckless extravagance, or an accident at the feast, or the efforts of guests to smother laughter at their entertainer, or the obvious freedom from restraint among the guests during their host’s temporary withdrawal.[568]

A sentence written in the eighteenth century makes a good introduction to much of the criticism passed on Petronius: “I told him that, in my opinion, he wrote with ease and vivacity, but was withal so lewd and indecent that he ought to find no quarter or protection among people of morals and taste.” So Smollett makes Roderick Random answer Earl Strutwell when he has raised the question of Petronius’s “taste in love” as “generally decried and indeed condemned by our laws.”[569] The judgement has the interest of occurring in a novel which presents a parallel to the _Satyricon_ in its spirit of adventure into more than questionable companies and in its background of rascality and immorality. Petronius’s own line,

You damn a work of fresh outspokenness[570]

may be taken as an anticipation of the attitude of many. In this faithful picture of seamy aspects of Italian life and manners there is much that is loathsome, but there is much that is merely vulgar, much that is innocuously humorous, while as a true presentment all of it retains its value in the history of society. It should be noted too that if Petronius does not condemn, neither does he commend. As a recording spectator with a patrician’s half-amused cynicism and a jaded voluptuary’s thrill from contemplating low life in contrast to court ceremonial and luxury, he was justifiably conscious that he had inaugurated something new in literature.

Any who may entertain misgivings about the title of Petronius’s work to rank as a realistic romance would do well to consider Guy de Maupassant’s preface to _Pierre et Jean_. There he states and defends the position of the realistic artist among novel writers. The realist, because misunderstood, is sometimes injudiciously condemned. No mere slavish copying of contemporary life will produce an adequate sense of simple reality; for an endeavour to incorporate within the limits of a book the whole truth and nothing but the truth would inevitably result in desperate entanglement among an endless number of insignificant details. So the artistic realist, as surely as he values art and under pain of becoming a commonplace verbal photographer, must select characteristic details only, must communicate some meaning which underlies the bewildering miscellany of apparently incongruous incidents, and must, by his readjustment of actualities, compose a synthesis more intelligible and more cogent than life itself. This is a task which genius alone has power successfully to achieve; and, indeed, so subtle is the genius demanded that the higher order of realists must, as Maupassant suggested, prove themselves to be illusionists. In this connexion, one conceives that Petronius’s presentment of Trimalchio’s dinner-party is more effective and more memorable than the exact record of an actual dinner-party would have been. The quality of the host’s character and motives is grasped best from the artist’s manipulation of incidents; for without recourse had to elaborate psychological analysis there can be unmistakeably conveyed, by means of such conversation, behaviour and gestures as the author’s foresight has introduced, a convincing picture of the mental endowment of persons under observation. And, if this is the case with character, so too the events may be chosen and marshalled in such a way as to suggest their special significance in the narrative. These a realist like Petronius will choose and marshal with unabashed candour, disdaining nothing that is common to humanity, and unhindered by qualms of gingerly prudishness.

It is his mode of representing life that places Petronius in the company of Rabelais, Fielding and Smollett. His is a gay, outspoken, unashamed sensuality, flitting naturally from pleasure to pleasure and accepting for his characters without hesitancy the experiences of the world which come their way. This is the true spirit of the picaresque romance. Now one thinks of Gil Blas as a parallel, now of some of Dumas’s adventurers. An amour, a fight, a theft, a carousal, come all alike to Encolpius; and it is among the author’s distinctive merits that without pointless embroideries or reflective digressions he uses an accumulated experience of cities and men to fashion a straightforward and life-like story. It is briskly told, and because its characters seem flesh and blood it smacks of truth. Its living people reveal themselves in part through their doings or misdoings, in part through natural talk; they are, in fact, the sport of their own weaknesses, whether they be the wandering rogues Encolpius and Ascyltus or the self-satisfied profiteer Trimalchio or some of his fellow-freedmen in affluent or in reduced circumstances. From the pen of an adept in sternly realistic treatment of figures and situations the reader must expect the shocking as well as the mirth-provoking; so that frank avowals and naked abandonment of reticence give to the _Satyricon_ some of that kind of realism which is discoverable in certain French and Russian novels. The sensuality is, however, by no means sexual only. There is something Gargantuan, as there is certainly intended to be something satiric, in the overdone profusion which marks Trimalchio’s hospitality; and yet its variety and surprises imply that sort of sensual delight in good food which animates Anatole France’s description, in his _Histoire Comique_, of the Castelnaudary stew a-cooking twenty years till the added ingredients in the pan imparted a quality like that in the women’s amber-flesh of old Venetian masters. This Roman, this Gallic interest in food is not understood in England, where people do not talk about meals as they did at Rome and do in France; but then the renown of England does not lie in her cookery.

It is as a novelist that Petronius must be appreciated. A full judgement on his achievement is prevented by the loss of much the greater part of his work, though enough survives to prove his mastery of some qualities felt to be most enjoyable in the modern novel; such as his humour of situation and dialogue, often as pronounced as in Dickens; his restrained irony of attitude, not tragic as in Hardy, but verging towards Meredith’s comic spirit; his creation of incidents lively and varied, carrying the reader along as rapidly as in Dumas; and his management of pervading atmosphere in consonance with incidents and characters—a great secret in all the most effective tales. But in these light chapters of ancient life let no reader look for depth of thought or passion, or any of that pity and tenderness which make the strength of some of the greatest modern fiction.

The _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius in the second century is the only other fictitious narrative in Latin prose. One must place in a separate category _The Marriage of Philology and Mercury_ written by Martianus Capella in the fifth century. That work was designed by Capella to precede his educational encyclopaedia on the _triuium_ and _quadriuium_. It follows the Menippean form, as the _Satyricon_ did, but is a pedantic allegorical fantasia. _The Golden Ass_ and the _Satyricon_ are alike of a higher imaginative order than the stereotyped romances of erotic adventure which subsequently became common in Greek; but, though they are both more readable than the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea in Heliodorus’s _Aethiopica_ or of Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’s elegant prose pastoral, the _Satyricon_ excels _The Golden Ass_ because of its greater originality and its more typically Roman colour. _The Golden Ass_ betrays more of the influence of Greek Milesian tales, notably in its long[571] but charming episode of _Cupid and Psyche_; and, while it may be considered a satiric romance in its mockery of contemporary superstition, priestly imposture, and a weak police-system under which brigands enjoyed too much licence, still its atmosphere of the marvellous and the magical is widely dissimilar to the prevailing realism of the _Satyricon_, which, except in incidental tales concerning werewolf or witches, seldom departs from fidelity to actual life. Lucius, the hero of the later romance, whose lubricity and prying are responsible for his transformation into an ass, is, no doubt, as the victim of the mismanaged spell, brought into contact with different classes of individuals, different homes, and different religious rites including the mysteries of Isis so finely described towards the close; but the realism is less telling in Apuleius than in Petronius, because the incidents are related in a bizarre African style, whose colour and ring contrast markedly with the natural Latin of the _Satyricon_.

This Latin of the _Satyricon_ has a natural ring, partly because, even where Petronius writes in literary Latin, he is, as a rule, simple, direct and non-rhetorical; partly because he constructs a life-like framework of easygoing remarks; partly because he employs the actual words of everyday conversation. His style is not a unity. He is master of two styles—one educated, the other colloquial.[572] Encolpius, like the rhetorical professor Agamemnon and the poet Eumolpus, expresses himself usually in the polished urbane Latin, which, without being over-formal, is still distinct from the vulgar Latin in which the freedmen speak. Even within this latter sphere, difficulties have been encountered in rigidly demarcating ordinary colloquial elements from plebeian and possibly dialectic elements. It is unlikely that Petronius took pains to manufacture an accurate mosaic of Campanian words: enough, that through broad strokes imitative of the locutions of humble folk he produced an effect like that of the “racy genuine language” which Borrow somewhere admires in criminals’ accounts of themselves; and, in fact, there are echoes as of an ancient Newgate Calendar. This dialogue is as true to life as the talk in Kipling’s “Soldiers Three” or in Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus.” One of the great values, therefore, of Petronius is that his realistic novel, along with comedy, satire and the less formal letters of Cicero, affords examples of that popular Latin which is so important for understanding the genesis of the Romance languages. To take the most familiar instance, it is significant that _caballus_, which descends as the word for “horse” into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Roumanian, should be found in writers like Lucilius, Horace and Juvenal as well as in Petronius.[573]

This _sermo plebeius_, then, Petronius causes to live again for his readers with just admixture enough of Greek[574] to remind us that we are supposed to be in Campania. And so the freedmen, while they dine and revel, speak slangily and ungrammatically, uttering their thoughts in too casual and disconnected a manner to trouble about logical subordination of clauses or periodic form, and interspersing their talk quite appropriately with saws or scraps of popular wisdom, rare compounds and diminutives,[575] irregular inflectional endings and false genders. The sententious is rolled off by Trimalchio with a negligence of grammar which can be paralleled, if not exactly echoed, in English:

“My friends, even slaves are human beings, and they drinks the
same milk as us, even if their evil stars has downed them.”[576]

Commending his wine, he declares “Fishes must swim” (_pisces natare oportet_). Ganymedes grumbles “This district’s going down as the calf’s tail grows” (_haec colonia retrouersus crescit tanquam coda uituli_). “One good turn deserves another” (_manus manum lauat_) says the next guest, who concludes in Latin less commendable than the sentiment, “Education’s a treasure and culture never dies” (_litterae thesaurum est et artificium nunquam moritur_, 46).

The spoken language, being conservative no less than innovating, retained, as it does in many countries, a proportion of archaisms, so that Petronian diminutives and other formations find parallels in early Latin writers. _Gaudimonium_, 61, and _tristimonium_, 63, remind one of words like _mercimonium_ in Plautus; and there is an old-fashioned sound in _sestertiarius_, 45, _dupunduarius_, 58 and 74, _linguosus_, 43 and 63, _dignitossus_, 57, with adverbs like _improbiter_, 66, _largiter_, 71, and _urceatim_, 44. Similarly, several frequentative and intensive verbs are of the sort used by comic authors, and may be referred to the _sermo cotidianus_ rather than to the _sermo rusticus_.[577] Plebeian speech was also, like comedy, rich in transitives of the first conjugation (_e.g._ _argutare_, 46, 57; _aginare_, 61) and in compounds (_recorrigere_, 43, shared with Seneca and Tertullian; _adcognoscere_, 69; _domusio_, 46; _caldicerebrius_, 45, _nesapius_, 50). To the vulgar speech we may set down most of the departures from classic grammatical form, such as 3rd declension nouns transferred to 1st, _e.g._ the Greek words _schemas_, 44, _stigmam_, 45, 69; 2nd declension nouns transferred to 1st, _triclinia_, 71, _intestinas_, 76; 1st to 2nd _margaritum_,[578] 63; 3rd to 2nd _uasus_, 57, _pauperorum_, 46. _Bouis_, 62, and _Iouis_, 58 appear as nominatives: so too _lacte_, 38, which with the adjective in _munus excellente_, 45, is almost Italian. Changes of gender are seen in _caelus_, 39, 45; _uinus_, 41; _balneus_, 41; _fatus_, 42, 71, 77; _fericulus_, 39 (= _ferculum_ with epenthetic vowel from vulgar pronunciation); _lorus_, 57. Notable verb-forms are _uinciturum_, 45, for _uicturum_; _fefellitus sum_, 61; _faciatur_, 71; _mauoluit_, 77. Alterations in voice occur; _e.g._ _potes loquere_, _non loquis_, 46; _pudeatur_, 47. As might be expected, old words are used in new senses; _e.g._ _notaui_, 6 (= “I noticed”),[579] and departures are made from standard syntax; _e.g._ _temptemus si adhuc sorbilia sunt_, 33; _persuadeo hospitem_, 62.

True as he is to certain phases of life and speech, Petronius is yet a contrast to contemporary literary tendencies. In this very realism of his he is independent, and in large measure it must have rescued him from the risk of indulgence in the rhetorical artificialities of the period. He is, besides, a sort of flippant Epicurean counterfoil to the grave Stoic thought in Seneca’s treatises, and he is out of sympathy with Lucan’s manner in composing a historical poem.

Petronius is himself one of the figures in the poetry of the Neronian age. His own poetical attainments were considerable. The mere skill is evident from the varied verse-passages, long or short, in the _Satyricon_. Some of these have a literary bearing like Agamemnon’s didactic lines on the training of an orator, or Eumolpus’s iambics _On the Sack of Troy_—uninspired in face of the inevitable comparison with Virgil, but undeserving of that shower of stones which Petronius merrily makes the reciter earn. The longest piece consists of 295 hexameters to illustrate Eumolpus’s dogmas concerning the dangers which beset a poem on the _Bellum Ciuile_. Without naming Lucan, these pronouncements imply a criticism on his epic, especially in their objection to taking actual facts for poetic material and in their advocacy of divine interventions (_deorum ministeria_) which the _Pharsalia_ had eschewed. The poem itself cannot be read without thoughts of Lucan, particularly in its description of portents and panic. The alarm in Rome over Caesar’s approach is described in a passage characterized by rhetoric, artificialities and monotony in phrase and metre,[580] while it contains pithy sentences recalling Lucan’s style: _e.g._ “as each man fears, so great his flight” (_quantum quisque timet, tantum fugit_), and “slays, if prayers could slay, his absent foe” (_absentem uotis interficit hostem_).

More poetic feeling is shown in some of the shorter pieces, such as the lines picturing the love of Circe and Encolpius in a flowery setting like that of Mother Earth in Jove’s embrace:

Forth flashed rose, violet, and iris soft,
And from the meadow green white lilies laughed:
So bright the ground that to the lush grass called
Our love: and day grew fairer to befriend
Our hidden sighs.[581]

Apart from verses in the _Satyricon_, there are short poems which, with different degrees of authority and in different number, have been considered Petronian. Bährens gives 37.[582] Sixteen pieces follow the epigrams assigned to Seneca in the Codex Vossianus Q. 86, and include two guaranteed as Petronian by Fulgentius, who quotes from them; eleven others were drawn by Binet from a now lost MS. which apparently ascribed them to Petronius, from whom Fulgentius in any case cites one; and they were followed by eight in regard to which at most a stylistic argument can be used; while four more (including, however, two from our mutilated _Satyricon_) are entitled as by Petronius in a different MS., Codex Vossianus F. 111. There is fair reason to believe that these, with a few possible exceptions, are his work, and they may be excerpts from vanished portions of the _Satyricon_. Not unnaturally they vary in theme, metre and style, so that an appropriate motto is furnished by one of the couplets:

Find here what each desires: men’s pleasure goes
Strange ways: one pulls a thorn and one a rose.[583]

The fear that created gods, the emigrant with the world before him, the triumph of worthlessness, an old man’s torrent of tears, betrayal of secrets, perils of the sea, nature’s infinite variety, sympathy in suffering, a sweetheart’s gift of apples, a parrot from India, and a theory of dreams, are among the subjects. A few end in epigrammatic manner with a line which has some of the point though not all the sharpness of Martial. Nowhere, however, can we more readily believe that we have the genuine accents of Petronius than in poems which imply a cordial delight in natural beauty. It is more than a sated epicure’s itch for change from town, because in some a truer poet speaks than in the pastorals of his contemporary Calpurnius Siculus. Thus, Petronius leads his brief description of an autumn scene up to a neat final line:

All the year’s promise stood before our eyes.[584]

Or he pictures his simple country house lovingly indeed, but with a sense of disillusion and an almost Senecan consciousness of wasted time:

Care-free the shelter of my cottage-roof;
And wine-rich clusters hang from fertile elm.
Red apples and ripe cherries load their boughs;
Pallas’ own olive breaks with fruited branch....
Go to now: sell the fleeting hours of life
For rich repasts! I pray my waiting end
May find me here to answer for my hours.[585]

In another poem he hails the sea-side with rapture

O strand more sweet to me than life! O sea!
Blest he who visits oft thy neighb’ring shores.
O lovely day! Once in this scene I used
To rouse the Naiads with alternate stroke.
Here’s depth of pool, there’s seaweed from the bay,
Here trusty haunt for passion unrevealed.
My life is lived; for grudging fortune ne’er
Shall filch from me what happier hours bestowed.[586]

But he has nothing finer than his sonnet-like poem in fourteen lines on the tyranny of love:

In night’s first silence couched, scarce had I found
Repose and given to Sleep o’erwearied eyes,
When cruel Love clutches my hair and cries:
“Keep vigil thou, I say, for all thy wound.
Canst thou, my slave, by thousand amours bound
Alone, alone, thou block, lie sluggard-wise?”
Thereat, barefoot, with tunic loose, I rise
And try all paths, but follow no path round.

I run, I slacken speed, I half retrace
My tracks, then in the highway blush to wait.
Lo! hushed are human sounds and traffic’s roar,
And note of bird and trusty pack that bays.
Alone of all, both sleep and couch I hate,
Heeding, great Cupid, thy imperial lore.[587]