Introduction

Who was Petronius Arbiter? The twentieth century’s most famous ancient novelist is one good answer. Of all the works of ancient prose fiction—by Apuleius, Xenophon, Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus—only Petronius’s Satyrica resonated with the twentieth century, providing Eliot with the epigraph for The Waste Land and Fitzgerald with the ur-text for Gatsby—originally entitled “Trimalchio at West Egg”—and Fellini with his film. The fascination of the arbiter elegantiae—as Nero’s court called Petronius—on twentieth-century avant-gardists is quite puzzling. What sets this fragmented text apart from kindred others? Is the answer precisely that it is one of a kind? Why did Petronius’s scabrous text become modern experimentalists’ favorite ancient analogue? That Auerbach’s Mimesis identified Petronius as one of three authors who exemplify classical representation could also be adduced as evidence of Petronius’s newfound status in the modernist century.

Epigrams and Satire in Latin Poetry

“Epigram” is from a Greek word that means “inscription.” Greek epigrams originally were inscriptions on objects or monuments (often tombs), intended to identify their owner or maker, and are usually defined as pointed and witty maxims or adages. Latin epigrams, too, can be identified as early funerary inscriptions, but they also comprise the erotic and occasional verse of the sort that Catullus wrote and the extant Priapea, a collection of poems about the phallic god Priapus and attributed to an unnamed group of poets who met at the house of Maecenas (the patron of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius, among others). Similar poems, largely lost, were attributed to such authors as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny, and Petronius. From a later period there are epigrams by Claudian, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Pope Damasus I, and those authors represented by the Anthologia Latina. By far the greatest body of extant Latin epigram, however, is the collected poetry of Martial, who, in his 1,561 poems, changed the epigram into something almost uniquely his own. Martial will therefore be the focus of this portion of this article. Epigrams fall into four categories: (1) inscriptions, (2) short erotic poems, (3) special verses for social occasions, and (4) the short satirical poem having a “point.” This fourth category causes epigram to be most closely allied to satire. Roman satire, like Latin love elegy (“elegiac poetry”), is considered to be a uniquely Roman poetic form. Originally a mix of verse forms, or of both prose and verse forms, it soon acquired its own character as an ironic or humorous treatment of human faults and foibles. Menippean satires, named after the 3rd-century bce Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara (in Palestine), were a mixture of prose and verse. They were imitated by Varro, L. Annaeus Seneca, Petronius Arbiter, and the emperor Julian. “Roman satire,” however, most often refers to the dactylic hexameter satirical poetry (“Roman verse satire”) of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal.

Disintegrated Assurances: The Contemporary American Response to the Satyricon

In an essay published in a recent issue of Greece & Rome, P.G. Walsh examines the views of the American scholars Gilbert Highet, Helen Bacon, and William Arrowsmith and comes to the very sensible conclusion that they are wrong in believing that Petronius Arbiter had any moral purpose in writing the Satyricon. While ultimately it may prove impossible for one side in this debate to convince the other, Walsh's arguments, and the way he goes about propounding them, can provide us with some illuminating hints as to why the Petronius controversy arose in the first place. And there are unexplored aspects to the terms on which the argument is being conducted which, when examined and carefully considered, may point the way toward a possible resolution.