We are not certain—it is only the general opinion—that the Petronius whose Satyricon still finds many readers was the Caius Petronius who died by Nero’s orders a year after Lucan. The book itself contains not a word to serve as a clue; and Tacitus, who describes the arbiter elegantiarum with pithy eloquence, makes no mention of the disreputable masterpiece. Some forty epigrams are ascribed to a Petronius, including a line that almost sums up Lucretius: primus in orbe deos fecit timor—“it was fear that first in the world made gods”;3 but these fragments too are silent about the author’s identity.
The Satyricon was a collection of satires, probably in sixteen books, of which only the last two remain, themselves incomplete. They are saturae in the Latin sense of medleys—here of prose and verse, adventure and philosophy, gastronomy and venery. The form owes something to the satires of Menippus, a Syrian Cynic who wrote in Gadara about 60 B.C., and to the “Milesian Tales,” or love romances, that had become popular in the Hellenistic world. As all extant examples of these are later than Petronius, the Satyricon has the distinction of being the oldest known novel.
It is hardly credible that an aristocratic lord of luxury, and master of fine taste, should have fathered a book so profusely vulgar as the Satyricon. All its active characters are plebeians, ex-slaves, or slaves, and all the scenes are of low life; here the Augustan preoccupation of literature with the upper classes is violently ended. Encolpius, who tells the tale, is an adulterer, a homosexual, a liar, and a thief, and takes it for granted that all sensible men are the same. “We had it understood between ourselves,” he says of himself and his friend, “that whenever opportunity came we would pilfer whatever we could lay our hands upon, for the improvement of our common treasury.”4 The story begins in a brothel, where Encolpius meets Ascyltos, who has taken refuge there from a lecture on philosophy. Their escapades among the towns and trolls of southern Italy form the thread of the wandering narrative; their rivalry for the handsome slave boy Giton unites and divides them in picaresque romance. At last they come to the house of the merchant Trimalchio; and the rest of the extant work is given over to describing the Cena Trimalchionis, the most astounding dinner in literature.
Trimalchio is an ex-slave who has made a fortune, has bought enormous latifundia, and lives in parvenu luxury with the appointments of a palace and the atmosphere of a stew. His estates are so vast that a daily gazette must be written to keep him abreast of his earnings. He begs his guests to drink:
If the wine don’t please you I’ll change it. I don’t have to buy it, thank the gods. Everything here that makes your mouth water was produced on one of my country places, which I’ve never yet seen; but they tell me it’s down Terracina and Tarentum way. I’ve got a notion to add Sicily to my other little holdings, so in case I want to go to Africa I’ll be able to sail along my own coasts. . . . When it comes to silver I’m a connoisseur; I have goblets as big as wine jars. … I own a thousand bowls that Mummius left to my patron. . . . I buy cheap and sell dear; others may have different ideas.5
He is a kindly fellow withal; he shouts at his slaves, but he pardons them readily. He has so many that only a tenth of them know him by sight. “Slaves are men,” he says, generously remembering his origin; “they sucked the same milk that we did . . . and mine will drink the water of freedom if they live.” To prove his intentions he has his will brought in and reads it to his guests. It includes specifications for his epitaph, which is to end with the proud claim that he “grew rich from little, left 30,000,000 sesterces, and never heard a philosopher.”6
Forty pages describe the dinner; a few sentences will convey its aroma:
There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, beef on Taurus . . . the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo … on Libra a balance holding a tart in one pan and a cake in the other. . . . Four dancers ran in to music, and removed the upper part of the tray. Beneath it . . . stuffed capons and sows’ bellies, and in the middle a hare. At the corners four figures of Marsyas spouted from their bladders a highly spiced sauce upon fish which were swimming about. … A tray followed on which was served a wild boar; from its tusks hung baskets loaded with dates; around it were little suckling pigs made of pastry. . . . When the carver plunged his knife into the boar’s side, thrushes flew out, one for each guest.7
Three white hogs walk into the room, and the guests choose which one they will have cooked for them; while they eat, the winning hog is roasted; soon it re-enters; when it is carved, sausages and meat puddings emerge from its belly. When the dessert arrives Encolpius has no stomach for it; but Trimalchio urges his guests onward by assuring them that the dessert has been made entirely out of a hog. A hoop is lowered from the ceiling, bringing to each diner an alabaster jar filled with perfume, while slaves replenish empty glasses with ancient wines. Trimalchio gets drunk and makes love to a boy; his fat wife protests, and he throws a cup at her head. “This Syrian dancing whore,” he says of her, “has a poor memory. I took her off the auction block and made her a woman, and now she puffs herself up like a frog. . . . But that’s the way it is: if you’re born in an attic you can’t sleep in a palace.”8 And he bids his major-domo keep her statue off his tomb, “else I’ll be nagged even after I’m dead.”
It is a powerful and savage satire; realistic only in its details, and probably true of only a small segment of Roman life. If Nero’s Petronius wrote it we must count it the merciless caricature of the nouveau riche freedman by a patrician who had never earned his keep. There is no mercy in the book, no tenderness, no ideal; immorality and corruption are taken for granted, and the life of the underworld is presented with gusto, without indignation, and without comment. Here the gutter flows directly into classic literature, bringing its own judgments and taste, its own lusty vocabulary and hilarious vitality. Sometimes the story rises to those sublime heights of nonsense, obscenity, and vituperation which crown the epic of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Apuleius’ Golden Ass would follow in its steps; Gil Blas, seventeen centuries later, would rival it; Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones would continue its meandering tradition. It is the strangest book in the literature of Rome.