(27-66) poet
Petronius lived during the time of the Roman Empire and served as Emperor Nero’s adviser in matters of luxury and extravagance. His sophistication in sensual pleasure even earned him the title arbiter elegantiae; tacitus in his Annals refers to Petronius as a sensualist “who made luxury a fine art.” Petronius managed to combine his official duties with a chaotic lifestyle, sleeping during the day and living during the night, but his life ended tragically when he was betrayed by a rival and dismissed by Nero. As a result, he committed suicide, which Tacitus described as the ultimate act of refined self-control.
For contemporary readers, Petronius is famous for his Satyricon, a brilliant satire of excesses in Nero’s Rome. Although only fragments of this work survive, enough of the text remains to provide evidence of Petronius’s satirical talent and in-depth knowledge of Roman society at the height of the empire’s prosperity. He demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the language and sociology not only of the Roman elite but also of the lower classes.
The Satyricon also is the best existing evidence of the prominence of homosexuality in the Roman Empire, which Petronius describes in a vivid, lively manner. The main character of the work is En-colpius, a student whose name, according to some translators, means “crotch.” Encolpius offends the god Priapus, and as a result he is forced to undergo a sequence of painful but generally comic misadventures, mostly of a sexual nature. The world of the Satyricon resembles a sexual carnival, where gender and orientation are easily interchangeable. This work unambiguously articulates a very specific philosophy, which was, according to the author, widespread among the Roman Empire’s elite. According to this philosophy, the only real sin consists in denying one’s sexual appetites. To do so is considered blatant hypocrisy and is punished, generally through comic ridicule. This view on morality is explicitly expressed in the paired tales of the Widow of Ephesus and of the Boy of Pergamon.
Written in a.d. 61 and first printed in 1664, the Satyricon has since become a prototype for a number of novels about homosexuality. The first English translation was published in Paris in 1902 and attributed to Sebastian Melmoth, a well-known pseudonym of Oscar Wilde. Contemporary works using the legacy of the Satyricon include John Rechy’s City of Night (1963), Daniel Curzon’s The Misadventures of Tim McPick (1975), and Luis Zapata’s Adonis Garcia (1979). In these novels, as in the Satyricon, travel is portrayed as a license or venue for sexual experimentation and indulgence. The film version of Petronius’s masterpiece was produced by Federico Fellini in 1968. Though the film succeeds in capturing Satyricon’s grotesquerie and powerful homoeroticism, it loses most of Petronius’s humor.
Petronius is remembered as much for the content of his Satyricon as for his elegant prose and verse, including even the colloquialisms and common language of some of its characters. The Satyricon is the earliest example of the picaresque novel in European literature.
An English Version of a Work by Petronius
The Satyricon. Translated by P. G. Walsh. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Works about Petronius
Conte, Gian Biagio. The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of Petronius’ Satyricon. Translated by Elaine Fantham. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Courtney, Edward. A Companion to Petronius. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
