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The Satyricon has been traditionally, and rightly, attributed to the courtier of Nero whose downfall and death in A.D. 66 are described by Tacitus (Annals 16.17-20): 17. So the space of a few days saw the fall, in the same bloody action, of Annaeus Mela, Cerialis Anicius, Rufrius Crispinus, and Petronius, Mela and Crispinus being Roman knights of senatorial status... Read the first page
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Wherever a canon of literature is prized, a sort of literary reflex results in parodial imitations. In "The Satyricon", Petronius parodies "The Odyssey", weighing the journey of Homer's Odysseus against the picaresque adventures of Encolpius, the bisexual yet impotent narrator, while the wrath of Poseidon is set against that of Priapus. Petronius alternates verse and prose in an explicit exposé of literary form by interpolating short tales of sex, superstition, and lost legacies. Indeed, this internal story telling is developed to such a degree that the poet not only parodies "The Odyssey" but also satirizes the external narrative of Encolpius so that the parallel with Homer's Odysseus is doubly parodial.
One of the principle narratives, 'Dinner with Trimalchio', introduces the reader to the archetypal self-made man whose intellectual pretentiousness and general vulgarity is a model for many great comic characters of world literature and TV situation comedy. This section of "The Satyricon" establishes the poem as a text intriguing in its 'modernity'. Trimalchio, boasting of his improbable encounter with the Sibyl of Cumae, supplies T. S. Eliot with his epigraph to "The Waste Land" at the same time as enticing the reader into "The Odyssey" of Homer, Virgil's "Aeneid", and the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid. Petronius's character brags of meeting the Sibyl for only a few lines but this is enough to forge an intertextual association, indeed a metatextual commentary on the earlier Greek and Latin texts.
The Sibyl of Cumae, famed for her beauty and prophetic power, attracted the sexual advances of Phoebus, god of the sun. Aeneas, before beginning his descent into Hades, hears how the eloquent deity sought to lure her with grandiose promises of eternal youth. The seer continued to spurn Phoebus's lust until he vowed to grant her anything she asked without condition. Gesturing towards a mound of earth, the Sibyl demanded a year of life for every grain of sand it contained. However, overwhelmed by her desire for longevity, she failed to use her great gift of foresight. This, the most renowned of all classical sibyls, had forgotten the future and her need for youthfulness to accompany age. Aeneas and (supposedly) Trimalchio see the Sibyl caged in a perpetual present, powerless to disclose meaning, longing for death, mumbling in vain as beauty, memory and prophetic powers disintegrate like the old texts Petronius parodies throughout "The Satyricon".
Small wonder Nero dubbed Petronius 'Arbiter of Elegance'! Read this translation and you'll be hooked on Classics and licking your lips for more!
Unfortunately, it's a lousy novel. That's not the author's fault, but is simply because large chunks of the text have been lost over the last 1900 years so there are jarring gaps. While we can, to a limited extent, reconstruct parts of it, all that tells us is what the broad arc of the story might have been. It does not restore the text. You could cut chunks out of any good story, and then largely rebuild the tale, but if you were to read it with those chunks missing (which is the case with my copy of the Satyricon, which lacks even the briefest of inline notes about the missing sections) it would still not be a good read. It's almost a pity that the practice of translators/editors filling in the blanks themselves, making them up out of whole cloth, hasn't taken off, at least for mass-market paperbacks. But then, I suppose, there isn't a mass-market because it's not about some ghastly footballer or pig-faced slag from Essex.
One only for those with an academic interest in the era.
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