Deciding how to evaluate and interpret The Satyricon by Peronius can be a challenge. The main reason is that the text we have is fragmentary, most of it being lost, damaged, or destroyed. Scholars are not even sure if Petronius, a member of Emperor Nero’s court, was truly the author or not. Maybe that does not even matter because almost nothing is actually known about him. Experts in antiquarian literature regard it as satire, but if that is so, what does it actually say about Roman society? With such an incomplete text, the best we can do is draw some meager conclusions based on what little we have.
Although written in Rome, most of The Satyricon takes place on the Greek peninsula of Peloponnesus. The narrative follows the wanderings of a criminal named Eumolpus and his younger boyfriend Giton. At first they are accompanied by another man Ascyltus, but Eumolpus fights with him constantly for the attentions of Giton and they eventually leave him behind. Soon after they meet up with an older poet named Encolpius who latches on to them because he has eyes for Giton too. His poetry is not well received by anybody and his public recitations result in jeering and stone throwing from the audiences.
Like a picaresque novel, The Satyricon is really about the characters and the situations they find themselves in as opposed to an overarching plot. There is no purpose other than to show different facets of Greek and Roman society. The situations begin with the three characters getting abducted by a priestess of Priapus for an orgy that promises to cover the type of literary territory explored by the Marquis de Sade in a later century; as an audience we are criminally deprived of all the raunchy details because those parts of the text are lost. You might wonder if some puritanical Christian in Rome destroyed them on purpose. Eumolpus and friends attend a lavish banquet at the villa of a rich man named Trimalchio where the decadent setting is used as a backdrop for a discussion over whether Rome is suffering from a moral decline or not. That theme is later taken up again when Eumolpus and Giton meet up with Encolpius for the first time. Later, they travel to Italy and stop in the morally corrupted village of Croton. Somehow, Eumoplus gets sidetracked and seduced by a beautiful and nubile woman of a higher class but he is unable to perform; he launches into the longest, and most hilarious, lament about a man facing a male’s biggest fear ever committed to literature.
One great, and complete, story in this book is about a widow who is mourning in her husband’s mausoleum. A soldier is stationed nearby, guarding three criminals being punished by crucifixion. After spending three days making love to the widow, he emerges to find one of the men is missing from his cross. His solution to this dilemma is one of the funniest conclusions in the narrative. It is hard to tell if this was written to be a mockery of the Christian myth regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It might be coincidental that the details align so well to give an alternate take on that tale but The Satyricon was written in approximately 100 AD and the author was certainly irreverent enough to pull such a satire off. We shouldn’t put it past him to do so.
Overall, there is not enough of the text here to really come up with any grand interpretations of what Petronius intended this work to say. The theme of moral decline is brought up more than once but the earthy humor overrides any moral statement that might have been intended. The story of Eumolpus’s inability to raise wood gets more attention than any prolonged examinations of ethics. In terms of literary history, its style and tone predates classics like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, Voltaire’s Candide, and the aforementioned picaresque genre of the novel. The best way to read and interpret The Satyricon is to take it all at face value and leave it at that. Like the Venus de Milo, the ancient Greek statue Nike, or the ruins at Ephesus, despite the missing pieces, you can admire and appreciate whatever is still there.
Petronius. The Satyricon, translated by William Arrowsmith. Mentor Classics/The New American Library, New York: 1960.
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