The Satyricon is the Ulysses of Roman literature. It is a comic novel intoxicated with language, with the power of verbal craft. As Joyce deploys Hamlet, so Petronius uses the Aeneid—the master text of the literature telling a high tale that is both imitated and parodied by the later text. And, in addition, behind both the Satyricon and Ulysses lies the Odyssey of Homer, the breezy and sublime tale of wandering that informs all Western literature.
The Satyricon is a product of the age of Nero (regnavit A.D. 54–68). Its author, most probably, was an aristocrat who, Tacitus tells us, returned from a vigorous proconsulate in Bithynia to Nero’s court, where he held the unofficial title of “elegantiae arbiter.” The Satyricon—produced by 66, when Petronius committed suicide~dashrecounts the misadventures around the Mediterranean of one Encolpius. These seem the product of the anger of Priapus against him (an echo of Odysseus’s victimization by Poseidon). All that survives, it appears, are chunks of books 14, 15, and 16, where Encolpius and his boy friend, Giton, are in pleasure resorts in south Italy; his adventures may have begun in Marseilles and taken him through Rome.
Sex and poetry are the leitmotifs of the Satyricon.
Sex and poetry are the leitmotifs of the Satyricon. There occur in our text two set pieces that allow Petronius’s genius room to wander. First, the dinner party thrown by the nouveau riche freedman Trimalchio. At it,
