Petronius

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The Roman voluptuary Petronius Arbiter (died ca. 66) is the ascribed author of the "Satyricon", a fragmentary picaresque novel generally considered one of the most brilliant productions of Latin literature.

The "Arbiter" of the ascribed author's name is clearly intended to imply an identification with the Petronius who is called elegantiae arbiter, or judge of elegance, by Tacitus, and whose death by suicide in 66 is described by Tacitus in a famous passage. The author's identity has been vigorously disputed by those who feel that the novel should rather be ascribed, on the basis of style, customs described, and other internal evidence, to the 2d or 3d century, but the majority of scholars are willing to accept the former identification as probable.

His Life

Petronius had proved his ability as proconsul (governor) of Bithynia and later as consul under Nero. Modern scholarship has thus identified him with Titus Petronius Niger and showed that his first name was incorrectly reported (as Gaius) by Tacitus and correctly by Pliny the Elder and Plutarch. He then, according to Tacitus, by the assumption or imitation of vice and by his authority in matters of taste and style, became such an influential favorite of Nero that the Emperor would not approve of anything as elegant or artistic without Petronius's approval. This influence aroused the jealousy of Nero's powerful and sinister favorite, Tigellinus, who bribed a slave to implicate Petronius with Scaevinus, the major figure in the recently discovered conspiracy of Piso.

Nero's court was in Campania, and Petronius hurried to him to defend himself, but at Cumae he found that his case was hopeless and decided to commit suicide. The end was worthy of the man: he refused to indulge himself in sentimentality or a fashionable and ostentatious show of consoling himself with philosophy, such as had marked the end of Seneca. He had his veins cut, and alternately closed and reopened, while he played at composing verses with his friends, rewarded or punished his slaves, ate a good dinner, and took a nap, so that, as Tacitus says, his death, even though forced on him, would seem as though it had come by chance.

At the end Petronius refused to declare his loyalty to Nero, as was customary (largely in order to prevent the confiscation of the estate), but wounded the Emperor's vanity by composing and sending to him a detailed and categorical account of Nero's debaucheries and experiments in vice, and he broke his signet ring in order to prevent it from being used to forge documents which would endanger others.

The Satyricon

The similarity of the character of Petronius as described by Tacitus to that which one can ascribe to the author of the Satyricon is perhaps the best argument for their identity. The Satyricon is witty, elegant, and sophisticated: the author clearly had wide experience of literature, good society, and men of all ranks and conditions, as well as a freedom from moral and sentimental restraints and inhibitions and a taste for the licentious which resembles that of Petronius.

The plan of the work, in a mixture of prose and verse known as Menippean satire, is apparently based, somewhat loosely, on a parody of the Odyssey: just as Odysseus suffers from the wrath of Poseidon, so Encolpius, the hero, suffers from the wrath of Priapus, the phallic god, who afflicts him with impotence, and he wanders around, through a series of low and scandalous adventures, in search of a cure with his companions, the scoundrelly boy Giton, with whom he is in love, and the equally disreputable Ascyltus.

The fragments we have seem to come from the fifteenth and sixteenth books and represent part of a series of excerpts made in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. The only long passage preserved is the "Dinner of Trimalchio, " which was discovered at Trogir in Dalmatia about 1650. It shows the dinner party of a vulgar parvenu freedman in a small Italian town, attended by the three protagonists and an assortment of lowborn but successful men, and is delightful not only for its picture of vulgar ostentation and ignorant aping of good society but also for its keen psychology, with the refined but decadent and worthless protagonists played off against the boorish but vital and human local citizens. It is also the best representation of common, ordinary Latin speech (Vulgar Latin) preserved from antiquity.

In addition, a series of elegant short poems have been preserved under the name of Petronius. There are, however, grave differences in style among them, and there is no agreement as to which, if any, are actually by him. There have been numerous forgeries of fragments of Petronius, some of which have been used by unwary editors and translators.

Further Reading

A major study of the Satyricon is H. D. Rankin, Petronius the Artist: Essays on the Satyricon and Its Author (1970). See also John P. Sullivan, The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study (1968); Gilbert Bagnani, Arbiter of Elegance: A Study of the Life and Works of C. Petronius (1954); and John Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian (1927; 3d ed. by A. M. Duff, 1964) and Roman Satire (1936). The introduction and notes to William Arrowsmith's translation (1959), although elementary, are interesting and generally accurate.

Petrōnius Arbiter (d. AD 65), Latin satirical writer, author of the Satyricon (‘tales of satyrs’), usually assumed to be the voluptuary of that name at Nero's court, whose life and death are memorably described by Tacitus (Annals, 16. 18). He was at one time governor of Bithynia and later a consul, and was subsequently admitted by the emperor Nero to the inner circle of his intimates and chosen by him, in Tacitus' words, as his ‘arbiter of taste’, elegantiae arbiter, a play on his name. Tigellinus, prefect of the praetorians, whose jealousy he aroused, falsely accused him to the emperor as implicated in the conspiracy of Piso (see ROME 10); he committed suicide, but not before he had smashed a valuable wineladle to prevent it falling into the emperor's hands, and written a letter detailing the latter's vices. Tacitus describes Petronius as devoted to the refined pursuit of pleasure, indolent in his ordinary life, but energetic in public affairs.

Of his long picaresque novel, the Satyricon, only parts of books 14, 15, and 16 survive. Like the Menippean satires (see MENIPPUS) it is in prose interspersed with verse, and describes the disreputable adventures of two young men Encolpius (the narrator) and his friend Ascyltus, and the boy Giton who plays the others off against each other, as they wander through the low haunts of the semi-Greek cities of southern Italy. The three are completely devoid of morals but have a quick intelligence which sees them through their escapades, narrated with dispassionate realism. The principal episode in the surviving portion of the work is the Cena Trimalchionis, ‘Trimalchio's dinner-party’ (it appears in only one manuscript, not found until the seventeenth century). Trimalchio is a freedman, a vulgar nouveau-riche to whose dinner-party the adventurers obtain admission. He and his wife Fortunata present an ostentatious display of wealth in the decoration of the house and in the profusion of fantastic dishes set before the guests; there are grotesque incidents during dinner—a drunken brawl and a dog-fight—and ridiculous conversation; Trimalchio's absurd conduct as he becomes more and more drunk finally reaches a maudlin stage in which he describes the contents of his will and his future monument. Two good ghost stories round off the episode, one about a werewolf, the other about witches substituting a changeling made of straw for a boy. The whole is told with amazing vitality and panache.

A further character in the remaining incidents is a disreputable old poet named Eumolpus with whom the adventurers travel to Croton in south Italy to advance their fortunes by fraud. The seavoyage ends in shipwreck, and the extant portion of the work ends with various amorous adventures and misfortunes. In the course of these Eumolpus expounds his views on epic poetry (in chapter 118 he refers, in a phrase that has since become famous, to Horatii curiosa felicitas, ‘Horace's studied felicity’). As illustration of the kind of inspirational poetry of his own day that he deplores, he recites sixty iambics on the fall of Troy and some 300 hexameters on the civil war of 49 BC. It is Eumolpus who, at an earlier stage (111), relates the story of the widow of Ephesus who, watching inconsolably in the vault where her recently dead husband has been laid, is induced by a kindly soldier to take food, and presently to accept him as her lover. This is a story very similar in type to the Milesian Tales. Petronius' characters, while thoroughly disreputable, are not wholly unlikeable. The racy, vivid, colloquial Latin in which the Satyricon is written reveals a great deal about the popular speech of the time, as does the Rabelaisian humour about tastes and attitudes. A few lyric and elegiac poems by the same author have also survived.

In the surviving manuscript, the authorship of the Latin picaresque novel Satyrica is credited to "Petronius Arbiter." Most scholars believe (although conclusive evidence is lacking) that this is Gaius (or Titus) Petronius, who served the Roman emperor Nero as Arbiter Elegantiae (judge of elegance, or director of entertainment). He fell from the emperor's favor and was ordered to commit suicide in A.D. 66. The historian Tacitus describes the courtier's death in his Annals (book 18, sections 18–19).

The Satyrica is a novel of low life in Roman Italy, centering on the narrator Encolpius and his boyfriend Giton. The author may seem to celebrate—he certainly does not condemn—his characters' amoral lifestyle: they are usually penniless and often involved in disreputable sexual adventures.

In medieval Europe the Satyrica was a secret classic. No complete copy survived to modern times; we have only fragments. The longest surviving episode (sections 26–78), important for food history, is known as Cena Trimalchionis, or 'Trimalchio's dinner'. This immensely rich former slave regales his guests (including Encolpius) with food and conversation intended to display urbanity but more truly betraying empty pretentiousness. The main course is a roast pig, served as if still whole. In fact it had been gutted normally, and afterward stuffed with cooked sausages, which look like (and are made from) intestines: a clever, but tasteless, presentational trick. The wine is labeled "opimian, one hundred years old," but at the date of the fictional dinner any surviving Italian wines of the famous opimian vintage were 180 years old and almost undrinkable: such contradictions are meant to reveal the host's ignorance of gastronomy. Almost every item in the menu has some satirical undertone. Cleverly balancing between naive astonishment and cynical disdain, the narrator tells us a lot about gastronomy and dining customs under the early empire. Featured among the hors d'oeuvres at Trimalchio's dinner, dormice (roasted, dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seeds) will forever remain typical of Roman cuisine.

Bibliography

Courtney, Edward. A Companion to Petronius. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Petronius. The Satyricon. Translated by William Arrowsmith. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Petronius. Satyrica. Translated by R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney. London: Dent, 1996; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated by Michael Grant. Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin, 1956.

—Andrew Dalby

Quotes:

"It is fear that first brought gods into the world."

"He has gone over to the majority."

"I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

This article is about the Roman author Petronius. For other uses of the name, see Petronius (disambiguation).

Petronius
Born	ca. 27 AD
Died	ca. 66 AD
Occupation	Novelist
Notable work(s)	possibly Satyricon

Gaius Petronius Arbiter (ca. 27–66 AD) was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is speculated to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 As a writer 1.2 Death 2 In fiction 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Life

Tacitus, Plutarch and Pliny the Elder describe Petronius as the elegantiae arbiter, "judge of elegance" in the court of the emperor Nero. He served as consul in the year 62 AD. Later, he became a member of the senatorial class who devoted themselves to a life of pleasure, whose relationship to Nero was apparently akin to that of a fashion advisor. Tacitus gives this account of Petronius in his historical work the Annals:

“He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, that by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and that he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. His reckless freedom of speech, being regarded as frankness, procured him popularity. Yet during his provincial government, and later when he held the office of consul, he had shown vigor and capacity for affairs. Afterwards returning to his life of vicious indulgence, he became one of the chosen circle of Nero’s intimates, and was looked upon as an absolute authority on questions of taste ('arbiter elegantiae’) in connection with the science of luxurious living.”

None of the ancient sources give any further detail about his life, or mention that he was a writer. However a medieval manuscript, written around 1450, of the Satyricon credited a “Titus Petronius” as the author of the original work. Traditionally this reference is linked with Petronius Arbiter, since the novel appears to have been written or at least set during his lifetime. The link, however, remains speculative and disputed.

As a writer

Petronius’ development of his characters in the Satyricon, namely Trimalchio, transcends the traditional style of writing of ancient literature. In the literature written during Petronius’ life the emphasis was always on the typical considerations of plot, which had been laid down by classical rules. The character, which was hardly known in ancient literature, was secondary. Petronius goes beyond these literary limitations in his exact portrayals of detailed speech, behavior, surroundings, and appearance of the characters.

Death

Petronius’ high position soon made him the object of envy for those around him. Having attracted the jealousy of Tigellinus, the commander of the emperor’s guard, he was accused of treason. He was arrested at Cumae in 66 AD but did not wait for a sentence. Instead he chose to take his own life. Tacitus again records his elegant suicide in the sixteenth book of the Annals:

“Yet he did not fling away life with precipitate haste, but having made an incision in his veins and then, according to his humour, bound them up, he again opened them, while he conversed with his friends, not in a serious strain or on topics that might win for him the glory of courage. And he listened to them as they repeated, not thoughts on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and playful verses. To some of his slaves he gave liberal presents, a flogging to others. He dined, indulged himself in sleep, that death, though forced on him, might have a natural appearance. Even in his will he did not, as did many in their last moments, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other of the men in power. On the contrary, he described fully the prince's shameful excesses, with the names of his male and female companions and their novelties in debauchery, and sent the account under seal to Nero. Then he broke his signet-ring, that it might not be subsequently available for imperiling others.”

In fiction

Petronius, usually assumed to be the author of the Satyricon, appears or is referenced in several works of fiction:

• Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis and its adaptations (but see below for the film), where C. Petronius is the preferred courtier of Nero, using his wit to adulate and mock him at the same time. He is horrified at Nero's burning of Rome, and eventually commits suicide to escape both Nero's antics and his anticipated execution.

• Mika Waltari's novel The Roman.

• in Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Door into Summer, in which the protagonist's cat is named "Petronius the Arbiter".

• in Jesse Browner's novel The Uncertain Hour, which recounts Petronius' final banquet and suicide (as told by Tacitus, Annals 16).

• in Anthony Burgess's novel The Kingdom of the Wicked, Gaius Petronius appears as a major character, an advisor to Nero.

• In the 1951 film of Quo Vadis, Petronius is portrayed by Leo Genn, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

• In the 2001 film of Quo Vadis, Petronius is portrayed by Boguslaw Linda. It was the first Polish adaptation of Sienkiewicz's novel.

• In the 1835 short story "A Tale of Roman Life" by Alexander Pushkin, Petronius' final days in Cumae are chronicled.

In recent times, a popular quote (reportedly by Charlton Ogburn, 1957^[1]) on reorganization is often (but spuriously^[2][3]) attributed to a Gaius Petronius. In one version, it reads:

“We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

See also

See also...
Works at Domínio Público
Works at Dominio Público

• Satyricon
• Supplements to the Satyricon
• Asteroid 3244 Petronius named after the satirist

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

1. ^ "The Quotations Page". http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/25618.html. Retrieved 2007-09-14. 
2. ^ "Petronius Arbiter, Time Traveller". http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/petronius.html. Retrieved 2007-09-14. 
3. ^ "ARTICLES FROM THE PETRONIAN SOCIETY NEWSLETTER". https://umdrive.memphis.edu/mhooker/psn_articles.html. Retrieved 2008-05-22. 

External links

• Works by Petronius at Project Gutenberg
• Latin text of the Satyricon from The Latin Library

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