Like the work of Rabelais, Swift, and Joyce, Petronius’s satire achieves a rare blend of literary artistry, moral intelligence, and downright raunchiness. His Satyrica energetically explores the moral landscape of early imperial Rome, a corrupt, sprawling empire populated by lechers, gluttons, pansies, vixens, acrobats, and creeps. Amid this decadence, Petronius holds Rome to a measure of decency—not to a priggish or prudish measure, but to a standard of decorum or moral elegance. Even at the hour of his death, urged if not ordered by the Emperor Nero in A.D. 66, Petronius retained the right to judge what counts for civilized behavior and what does not. So, Tacitus tells us, Petronius met death with that same grace, composure, and dislike of phony heroics that he displays throughout his writing: as he bled slowly to death he dined, slept, listened to recitals of light verse, rewarded and flogged his slaves according to their due, and composed a catalogue of Nero’s vices, a copy of which he remitted to the very emperor who had dubbed him elegantiae arbiter, arbiter of elegance.

Only three of the Satyrica’s original sixteen books survive; the work as we have it reads at times like a fragmented, ancient Huckleberry Finn, and at others like a Roman Tristram Shandy. Those who (like the two translators of the present volume) credit Petronius with having invented the novel, or a literary form very much like the novel, are not so far from the mark. In a lively medley of prose and verse, the Satyrica follows its narrator Encolpius as he flees, cons, and dodges his way through la dolce vita of Neronian Rome. The rough and tumble narrative opens somewhere around book fourteen of the original work when, having slipped away from the pettifogging rhetorician Agamemnon, Encolpius stumbles into the backrooms of a whorehouse, where he rejoins his part-time friend Ascyltos and the lovely boy Giton. From that moment on, no matter where Encolpius and his friends turn, trouble greets them: shipwreck, impotence, discord, Priapic rites without end, lechery, superstition, and poetic bombast all take their toll on the three friends. Their misadventures afford a wealth of opportunities for satire, as they suffer professorial windbags, politicized poets, grasping slaves, lascivious madames, big garrulous oafs, fickle friends, and a variety of other common social afflictions.

Branham and Kinney deliver the ancient pleasures of these satiric portraits in an energized, agile prose that aims at a “racy and funny modernity,” as they put it, and that strives to capture some of the flavor of the Latin original in the rhythms and idioms of contemporary American speech. This seems an especially smart way to go after Petronius’s Latin. Like all really good satirists, Petronius mostly lets his characters satirize themselves: his writing is a polite exercise in complicity, in listening, observing, nodding attentively, and encouraging. Petronius does not need to moralize; all that his characters believe, all that makes them ridiculous or deplorable or simply uncouth is patently evident in their conversation, in the arguments they use, the syntax they muddle, the slang they speak.

This is nowhere more apparent than in what is justly the most famous episode of the Satyrica, the dinner at the home of a wealthy freedman named Trimalchio. Dinner at Trimalchio’s is virtually indistinguishable from theater: while slaves perform pantomimes, sing snatches of verse, and play various scripted and costumed parts, Trimalchio’s cooks serve a sickening variety of dishes illustrating half-understood literary conceits. Fortunata, the lady of the house, performs a lewd dance called the cordax while Trimalchio himself imitates trumpeters, plays ball, reviews his accounting books, recites worn proverbs and garbled poetry, interrupts his guests, meditates on his own death, relieves himself, brags, stinks, and indulges in wanton displays of power over groveling slaves. Dinner guests trade wise adages—“a mouse caught in a piss pot,” “a fox caught in the rain”—and grow philosophical as the night waxes on: “A day’s nothin’. Before you can turn around it’s night.” They tell obnoxious riddles and exchange secrets about how to relieve constipation by boiling pine sap in vinegar; one drunkenly remembers a past love (Melissa of Tarentum, “a luscious tomato” if there ever was one); another bemoans the sorry state of education while demonstrating his own cultural illiteracy. And they all talk incessantly, obsessively, about money. One of Encolpius’s dinner companions sums up the moral code of this crowd when he unwittingly delivers a definition of happiness: “See all these cushions? Even the stuffing is dyed purple or scarlet! Now that’s what I call happiness!” No guest at Plato’s Symposium ever put it so succinctly.

Branham and Kinney never mince words in rendering these colorful Latin speeches. They use slang freely, eagerly; they prefer daring to restraint. Their aggressive approach to Petronius’s prose yields some strong, original readings: characters in this translation “cop” free dinners and “schlep” piles of wood. At several turns they are able to infuse new life into Latin meanings. So an “old queen” whose Latin sobriquet is borrowed from a lewdly shaped drinking vessel gets rechristened “Appetizer” (but I am not sure this marks a real improvement over William Arrowsmith’s “Nightcap”). An insatiable lass goes by the name of “Toute-la-Nuite,” the French capturing the delicate indelicacies of her Greek name in Petronius’s original; a corny Frenchified pun —“a fête accomplie”—nicely does the trick when the sound patterns of Petronius’s syntax don’t really admit imitation in English. Or consider what the translators do when Quartilla distinguishes the endowments of her two male consorts by referring to two obscure kinds of fish. Rather than render the Latin literally and consign the meaning of her quip to a footnote, they create their own version: “I don’t think I’d enjoy a sardine after today’s swordfish.”

When the talk is cheap and salty, Branham and Kinney do not flinch; but they are equally good if not better when things get bombastic, spooky, dignified, bathetic, or sad. They spin lines of good poetry and doggerel to match Petronius’s meters, switch effortlessly between styles, and keep pace with the changing rhythms of Petronius’s medley. At least most of the time. Every once in a while, Branham and Kinney take rough measures they don’t need to take: for instance, vix me teneo (“I can hardly restrain myself”) gets too intensified: “I’m really pissed off!” At other times, they seem overeager. Consider the translation history of the cordax, Fortunata’s lewd dance: where Heseltine’s 1913 Loeb translation gave us the “can-can,” and Arrowsmith’s 1959 translation has Fortunata dance “the grind,” Branham and Kinney make her dance “the bump and grind.” Now maybe that little bump doesn’t make much difference in the scheme of things; it just seems a little excessive. The same goes for the American four-letter words that our translators use to render such familiar imprecations as heu heu (“alas! alas!”) and mehercules (“by Hercules!”): these are overstrong and threaten to turn the heady brew of this translation a little sour.

In Branham and Kinney’s defense it might very well be said that our everyday speech has grown much coarser than anything found in Petronius’s colloquial Latin. “Alas and alack!” just doesn’t cut it anymore, and can-cans no longer strike us as lewd and lascivious. If we don’t trade in subtleties, then why should these translators? If we have become so indifferent to diction and syntax that we can no longer recognize inelegance, then maybe crudeness is called for. But I’m not fully convinced, perhaps because the translators seem as unfamiliar with American four-letter words as most Americans are with Latin. Sure, Arrowsmith’s “bugger” is far too British and far too tame to render the expression laecasin, but there are a whole host of American and Americanized expressions for giving somebody the big kiss-off; my Neapolitan uncle Giuseppe uses one that most Americans know. Writing brash, candid American prose requires a strong dose of American brashness and candor. Our translators claim to keep “in touch with the current vernacular” by consulting with their university students; but doesn’t that amount to admitting that they themselves are out of touch with speakers of the vernacular? Despite its bravado, this translation may ultimately lack street smarts; so when some fortunate fellow at Trimalchio’s is said to have it “laid in the shade,” I am not at all sure that the translators didn’t mean “made in the shade.” That’s what we used to say in New Jersey. Have either of these guys been to New Jersey? (Princeton doesn’t count.)

So what if they haven’t been to New Jersey? What if a couple of Latin professors set out to translate Petronius into the American vernacular that they think they hear their students speaking, and end up committing blunders? That makes them charming, doesn’t it? It would, were it not that these little failings seem of a piece with other annoyances here. While most of the footnotes are helpful, some discover Branham and Kinney striking all too familiar postures. A note that should simply refer to Quintilian talks about how, in Petronius, the wrestler Milo’s training is “mockingly sexualized and transferred to a girl from a strongman”; this gender-bending jargon seems an effete response to Petronius’s patent weirdness. When another note informs us that “pre-Enlightenment scholars” were familiar with the evil-eye ritual an old woman performs to treat Encolpius’s impotence, we are, I gather, supposed to infer dreadful consequences about the triumph of reason. These notes and others like them carry into the body of the text the theoretical posturing of the introduction, where “the lay reader” will learn something about Petronius, not nearly enough about early imperial rhetoric, but plenty about “the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.” A darling of reconstructed Marxists, Bakhtin turns out also to be the idol of Branham and Kinney’s textual apparatus—an elaborate mechanism of classical learning, rigged to reclaim Petronius for (you guessed it) other reconstructed Marxists. Alas and alack.