The Satyricon

A bawdy extravaganza awaits, filled to the brim with farce, satire, adventure, poetry, literary criticism, and so much more. It's a chaotic and captivating blend of various elements that promise to keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

The combination of these diverse aspects creates a unique and engaging experience. The farce brings laughter and light-heartedness, while the satire offers a sharp and incisive look at society. The adventure takes the reader on a thrilling journey, and the poetry adds a touch of beauty and elegance.

Literary criticism provides a deeper understanding of the works being discussed, adding an intellectual layer to the extravaganza. It's a shame that we don't have the whole text, as it would be fascinating to explore every nook and cranny of this rich and complex creation.

Nevertheless, the promise of what lies within is enough to pique our curiosity and leave us longing for more.

Petronius' Satyrica truly lives up to its rather bawdy reputation. Let me tell you, those ancient pagans were quite a riot.

However, it is a pity that due to its fragmentary nature, with only two books having survived, it fails to really make the reader, or at least this particular reader, care about the actual story.

As a series of vignettes, it has a certain charm and sort of works, but it doesn't quite succeed as a novel in the traditional sense.

Furthermore, I feel that this particular translator, in the Folio Society edition, was perhaps too liberal in his approach. The numerous modern references, such as the United Nations, and the use of slang language like "fly" as an adjective, constantly pulled me out of the story. I guess that makes me a bit of a purist.

On the positive side, the presentation and illustrations in this edition are absolutely gorgeous. It's just that I wished for a different translation that would have been more in line with the spirit of the original work and less likely to disrupt the reading experience with its anachronistic elements.

Our eyes deceive us. Our senses

Stray and trouble the mind, and

Lie to us. This tower hard by is square;

From a distance its corners are round.

A well-gorged belly spurns even

Hybla's honey, and time and again

Cassia offends the nostrils.

So this or that might never

Please or displease, unless the senses

Were forever compelled to lock in strife,

To battle with doubt, trembling in the balance.

Admittedly, it can be a bit of a slog to read this. However, it is a key text if you have an interest in Classics. For those who are familiar with it, there may be no new insights. But for those without the historical context, it might seem quite striking to see the range of sexuality that is expressed and normalized.

Read this and then read Fitzgerald's Gatsby, and you will never look at that book in the same way again. While you're at it, also read TS Eliot's The Waste Land to complete the fulsome threesome.

"...satire is the only way to restrain their madness..."

"...The skinflint buries his treasure, then stumbles on surfaced gold.

A huntsman rends the woodlands

With his pack of hounds; a drowning sailor

Plucked overboard rights the keel

Of his boat; this mistress writes

A love letter, that adulteress sends

A gift, and the dog sleeps on and marks

The footing of the hare.

In the tarrying of the night

The wounds of the hapless abide."

**Note: I read the Paul Dinnage englishing from 1953, revised 1998. I thought it was quite good, but it is definitely limited in terms of notes on the text. While that was done by design, I don't think this is the one that scholars will reach for. Oh well. I thought it was very readable, but I have no idea how it relates to the Latin.

First of all, I really need to express my thoughts. In the profile for Petronius on GR, someone wrote that "Tacitus records that he was eventually forced to commit suicide after being embarrassed in front of Nero." However, this is not exactly what Tacitus actually wrote.

Tacitus described that Tigellinus, jealous of Petronius' superior expertise in the science of pleasure, accused him of friendship with the conspirator Scaevinus. A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius, and he was not allowed to defend himself while most of his household was arrested.

When the emperor was in Campania, Petronius was apprehended as he was going to Cumae. Instead of hastily dispatching himself, he severed his veins and then bound them up as he pleased. He conversed with his friends, listened to their light and frivolous poetry, rewarded some slaves and assigned beatings to others. He dined and dozed, making his death look natural. He also wrote out a list of the emperor's debaucheries and sent it to Nero under seal, then destroyed his signet ring.

It is clear from this that Petronius was not just a voluptuary. Does he show less character than Cato? Tacitus also tells us that Petronius was a capable and energetic administrator when he served as governor of Bithynia and as consul.

Finally, about "The Satyricon". The many lacunae in this text are really a sadness. We can only hope that a complete copy will be found somewhere. This book is extremely funny on many levels. Petronius used different styles and genres of Latin literature to heighten the irony. An English reader can only imagine the text with various styles placed next to each other. Arrowsmith admits he can't fully translate it, especially the puns.

Nevertheless, much of the humor, satire, and irony do come through. It is a treat to read. All the postmodern gurus should listen carefully to Petronius. The satire and irony in this book are not bitter or cutting. Even the most ridiculed character is empathized with by Petronius. How I wish I could go to Trimalchio's banquet!

I have a great passion for this work of Petronius and I would like to encourage someone to read it. We know very little about Petronius, except for the extraordinary portrait that Tacitus makes of him as the "arbiter elegantiae" in his Annals, placing the mysterious author at the court of Nero. His "Satyricon" also raises no fewer interpretative doubts. I believe this text is epoch-making for more than one reason. First of all, the form: approximating it to a modern category, one could say that the Satyricon is a novel, a genre really little practiced in antiquity and certainly considered a minor form of literature. The most famous example is Apuleius with his "Metamorphoses", and few other novels are known to us, all of Greek origin and all based on the same schema: a couple of lovers who cannot unite due to factors that determine their separation until the final reunion. And yet the Satyricon completely overturns this model: at the center of the story is a completely unreal love triangle between three men, with not infrequent female incursions, in which the beautiful Giton is contested by various aspirants and profiteers. Even more famous, however, is the famous dinner of Trimalchio, a pantagruelical and vulgar orgy of the new rich, of the most shameful degradations, among imaginary dishes, dubious sexuality, and indecent tirades. What creates even more confusion, however, is that what remains of the Satyricon corresponds only to book XV and part of books XIV and XVI: everything else has been lost. It follows that this novel must have been a monumental work and perhaps precisely for this reason it was even published in installments, interweaving an entire sale of more "frivolous" and light, as well as licentious, books that must have been very rich in imperial Rome. And yet the literary game of the Satyricon is anything but popular, indeed, it is rather refined: everything revolves around the most extreme parody, the systematic inversion of the classical models on which important literature is inspired and which are here overturned: the protagonists are involved in an implausible homosexual story, the god who persecutes Encolpius, the protagonist, is not the Helios who torments Ulysses, but Priapus, the god with exuberant masculinity who punishes him with impotence; or again, the high models of conjugal love (Ulysses and Penelope) are subverted in the irreverent novella of the "Matrona of Ephesus", which opens a sub-narrative during the dinner of Trimalchio, which in turn is the parody of an entire society that has touched money and has immediately become corrupt and perhaps an exaggeration of the curious cookbooks that we know were beginning to circulate at that time. And yet, as the text progresses, the parody becomes even more extreme: shortly before the last scenes that remain to us, one of the characters launches into the declamation of a little poem, the "Bellum civile", completely traditional, indeed, it would seem stale. Here, then, the art of Petronius becomes explicit: that of the "Bellum civile" is not only an extraordinarily prolific literary topos, but in those same years it was the theme of another memorable work, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan, which in turn was the inversion of the most beautiful Latin epic, the "Aeneid" of Virgil. Thus Petronius accomplishes the unthinkable by challenging the highest models and making parody the engine of the narrative; furthermore, by inserting entire poems, novellas, elegiac compositions and epigrams within this narrative work and evoking the highest epic, he annuls the taxonomy of literary genres as we still understand it today, in a way that perhaps will only be realized again in the twentieth century.

Therefore, the Satyricon is a very modern work that still continues to surprise us. In fact, it is clear to anyone who reads it carefully that the protagonist, and in general every character, is the extreme caricature of a human type and that therefore two narrative planes coexist: that of Encolpius, the "mythomaniac" narrator, who transfigures his vile deeds with the words of the epic, and the "hidden" narrator, Petronius, who guides the story with the literary models that lie behind the book. The result is that Encolpius, imprisoned in his sublime models, accentuates the parody, which then becomes a tool to reveal, through trivialization, how the schemes of the novel have made the true sublime models melodramatic.

Fellini drew the eponymous scandalous film of 1969 from this novel, all dominated by red tints and promiscuous nudity, with convulsive introspections on the meaning of life and the anguish of death, and I believe that much of the meaning of the Satyricon is in the more recent "The Great Beauty" by Sorrentino: also there the director's machine is that of a parody that unmasks the trivialization of true beauty, that which is not great, but sublime.

I close by adding a small editorial note. The Mondadori edition of this book is, to use a euphemism, scandalous: all the poetic inserts and the poems that are integral parts of the text have been cut to favor the modern reader, with a translation that seems to me more arbitrary than free and that shows how the true meaning of the book has not been understood.

A book that I will never be able to recommend in my life.

Here we follow some passages in the life of Encolpio, who has some adventures and misfortunes related to his love affairs with adolescent boys and married women, constantly criticizing the youth and how the Roman society of those times was in decline.

Yes, it made me laugh a few times, but for the most part I spent it uncomfortable, disgusted or tired, there is a lot of sexual ab*se, and even a 7-year-old girl is included in a scene... it's too much for me.

This book seems to focus on rather inappropriate and disturbing themes. While it may have had some moments that could evoke a laugh, the overall content is not something that I would consider worthy of recommendation. The inclusion of such extreme and often immoral situations makes it a rather unappealing read. I believe there are many other books out there that can offer a more positive and engaging experience without resorting to such excessive and uncomfortable material.

The concept of the "least horny Roman lit" is an interesting one. Roman literature is vast and diverse, encompassing various genres and themes.

Some works may focus more on historical events, philosophical ideas, or social commentaries rather than being overly concerned with matters of a sexual nature.

For example, the writings of Cicero, with their emphasis on rhetoric and political thought, can be considered relatively less "horny" compared to some of the more explicitly erotic or sensual works that also exist within the Roman literary canon.

Similarly, the epic poems of Virgil, such as the Aeneid, explore themes of heroism, destiny, and the founding of Rome, often in a more elevated and serious tone that may not be dominated by sexual content.

However, it's important to note that Roman literature, like any other, is complex and multifaceted, and there are many works that do contain elements of sexuality and desire.

The idea of the "least horny Roman lit" is perhaps a bit of a playful or subjective categorization, but it does serve to highlight the range and variety of literary expressions within the Roman literary tradition.

One of the richest characters in the novel Quo Vadis? is the Arbiter Elegantiarum Cayo Petronio.

In one of the chapters of the novel Quo Vadis?, Petronio takes pleasure in presenting his nephew Marco Vinicio with his latest work, his book called "The Satyricon" where he suggests reading immediately the chapter "The Banquet of Trimalchio".

An obvious curiosity led me to investigate if the book really existed and I found it on the internet. So while rereading Quo Vadis? I was already taking care of printing little by little this new book.

The Satyricon, in the edition of the Biblioteca Clásica Gredos and according to Carmen Codoñer, mentions the following: "It is complicated to present a work whose author and era are doubtful and that, moreover, has reached us incomplete or, better yet, fragmented". Throughout the presentation of the book, Carmen Codoñer exposes counterpoints regarding the authorship and publication date of the book. Nevertheless, on the cover Petronio appears as the author. Carmen Codoñer makes a valuable presentation of the book providing us with many details from various sources about the origin of the book.

The work is really very strange. It tells the story of three young Romans (Encolpio, Ascilto and Gitón) who reflect the customs of the time and later an old poet named Eumolpo joins them. The work is narrated in the first person by one of the characters where various tragic and comic situations are told in several fragments with a good dose of sarcasm, mordacity and admirable genius without censoring anything. Likewise, the work combines prose and fragments of poems, some short stories that arise naturally following the rhythm of the events.

Here is a fragment from the second part titled "The Dinner of Trimalchio": "Here they bring us a chafing dish in which there was a wooden hen, with its wings spread out in a circle, in the position they usually adopt to incubate their eggs. Two slaves immediately approached and, to the shrill accents of a melody, began to scratch in the straw, from where they took out turkey eggs and distributed them to the guests. Trimalchio turned in front of this scene, saying: "My friends: these are turkey eggs that I ordered to be laid by a hen. And, by Hercules, I'm afraid they are already hatched. Let's try them, nevertheless, to see if they can still be eaten." They pass us some spoons that weighed no less than half a pound each, and we break the eggs, which turned out to be the work of a pastry chef. I was on the verge of throwing away my portion, for it seemed to me that I could already see the chick formed."

The Satyricon is a fun work that can make you split your sides with laughter at times... a brilliant work that must be reread.