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PETRONIUS (G. (?)1 Petronius Arbiter), Roman writer of the Neronian age. His own work, the Satirae, tells us nothing directly of his fortunes, position, or even century. Some lines of Sidonius Apollinaris refer to him and are often taken to imply that he lived and wrote at Marseilles. If, however, we accept the identification of this author with the Petronius of Tacitus, Nero's courtier, we must suppose either that Marseilles was his birthplace or, as is more likely, that Sidonius refers to the novel itself and that its scene was partly laid at Marseilles. The chief
opinion that the Satirae was a work of the age of Nero. But Quintilian was concerned with writers who could be turned to use in theThe MSS. of the Satiro,e give no praenomen. Tacitus's Petronius is Gaius, though the elder Pliny and Plutarch call him Titus. The name Arbiter, given him by later writers, is not an ordinary cognomen; it may have been bestowed on him by contemporaries from the fact that his judgment was regarded as the criterion of good taste. education of an orator. The silence of Juvenal and Martial other era than that in which Nero's Troica and Lucan's Pharsalia were fashionable poems. The reciting poet indeed is a feature of a later age also, as we learn from Martial and Juvenal. But we know from Tacitus that the luxury of the table, so conspicuous in Trimalchio's Banquet, fell out of fashion after Nero (Ann. 3. 55). Of the work itself there have been preserved 141 sections of a narrative, in the main consecutive, although interrupted by frequent gaps. The name Satirae, given in the best MSS., implies that it belongs to the type to which Varro, imitating the Greek Menippus, had given the character of a medley of prose and verse composition. But the string
Random . There is no evidence of the existence of a regular plot in the fragments, but we find one central figure, Encolpius, who professes to narrate his adventures and describe all that he saw and heard, whilst allowing various other personages to exhibit their peculiarities and express their opinions dramatically.may be accidental or it is possible that a work so abnormal in form and substance was more highly prized by later generations than by the author's contemporaries. - A comparison of the impression the book gives us of the character and genius of its author with the elaborate picture of the courtier in Tacitus certainly suggests the identity of the two. Tacitus, it is true, mentions no important work as the composition of his C. Petronius; such a work as the Satirae he may have regarded as beneath that dignity of history which he so proudly realized. The care he gives to Petronius's portrait perhaps shows that the man enjoyed greater notoriety than was due merely to the part he played in history. " He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, big as an accomplished voluptuary. His reckless freedom of speech, being regarded as frankness, procured him popularity. Yet during his provincial governorship, and later when he held the office of consul
emperor had practised. A fact confirmatory of the general truth of this graphic portrait is added by the elder Pliny, who mentions that just before his death he destroyed a valuable murrhine vase to prevent its falling into the imperial hands. Do the traits of this picture agree with that impression of himself which the author of the Satirae has left upon his work ? That we possess therein part of the document sent to Nero is an impossible theory. Our fragments profess to be extracts from the fifteenth and sixteenth books of the Satirae: Petronius could not have composed one-tenth even of what we have in the time in which he is said to have composed his memorial to Nero. We may be sure too that the latter was very frank in its language, and treated Nero with far greater severity than the Banquet treats Trimalchio. On the other hand, it is clear that the creator of Trimalchio, Encolpius and Giton had the experience, the inclinations and the literary gifts which would enable him to describe with forcible mockery the debaucheries of Nero. And the impression of his personality does in another respect correspond closely with the Petronius of the Annalsin the union of immoral sensualism with a rich vein of cynical humour and admirable taste. The style of the work, where it does not purposely reproduce the solecisms and colloquialisms of the Vulgar rich, is of the purest Latin of the Silver age.2 Nor would there be any point in the verses on the capture of Troy and the Civil War at any 1 Ann. xvi. 18. 2 The false taste in literature and expression fostered by the declamationes is condemned by both Persius and Petronius on the same grounds. Cf. too Pers. i. 121, hoc ego apertum, hoc ridere meum, tam nil, nulla tibi uendo Iliade with Sat. 52, meum intellegere nulla petunia uendo; Pers. ii. 9, 0 si ebulliat pa/rums, praeclarum funus, et o si sub rastro crepet argenti mini seria with Sat. 88, Alius donum promittit, si propinquum divitem extulerit, alius si thesaurum eioderit and 42, home animam ebulliit; Pers. iv. 26, arat quantum non muses oberrat with Sat. 37, fundos habet qua milvi volant. Both use the rare word bare. Animam ebullire occurs in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, and the verbal resemblances illustrate perhaps rather the common use by both writers of the vulgar style. Cf. for resemblances to the style of the younger Seneca and the date of the work in general, Studer, Rh. Mus. (1843). The fragment opens with the appearance of the hero, Encolpius, who seems to be an itinerant lecturer travelling with a companion named Ascyltos and a boy Giton, in a portico of a Greek town, in Campania. An admirable lecture on the false taste in literature, resulting from the prevailing system of education, is replied to by a rival declaimer, Agamemno, who shifts the blame from the teachers to the parents. The central personages of the story next go through a series of questionable adventures, in the course of which they are involved in a charge of robbery. A day or two after they are present at a dinner given by a freedman of enormous wealth, Trimalchio, who entertained with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance a number of men of his own rank but less prosperous. We listen to the ordinary talk of the guests about their neighbours, about the weather, about the hard times, about the public games, about the education of their children. We recognize in an extravagant form the same kind of vulgarity and pretension which the satirist of all times delights to expose in the illiterate and ostentatious millionaires of the age. Next day Encolpius separates from his companions in a fit of jealousy, and, after two or three days' sulking and brooding on his revenge, enters a picture gallery, where he meets with an old poet, who, after talking sensibly on the decay of art and the inferiority of the painters of the age to the old masters, proceeds to illustrate a picture of the capture of Troy by some verses on that theme. This ends in those who are walking in the adjoining colonnade driving him out with stones. The scene is next on board ship, where Encolpius finds he has fallen into the hands of some old enemies. They are shipwrecked, and Encolpius, Giton and the old poet get to shore in the neighbourhood of Crotona, where, as the inhabitants are notorious fortune-hunters, the adventurers set up as men of fortune. The fragment ends with a new set of questionable adventures, in which prominent parts are played by a beautif ul enchantress named Circe, a priestess of Priapus, and a certain matron who leaves them her heirs, but attaches a condition to the inheritance which even Encolpius might have shrunk from fulfilling.4 If we can sup-pose the author of this work to have been animated by any other motive than the desire to amuse himself , it might be that of convincing himself that the world in general was as bad as he was himself. Juvenal and Swift are justly regarded as among the very greatest of satirists, and their estimate of human nature is perhaps nearly as unfavourable as that of Petronius; but their attitude towards human degradation is not one of complacent amusement; their realism is the realism of disgust, not, like that of Petronius, a realism of sympathy. Martial does not gloat over the vices of which he writes with cynical frankness. He is perfectly aware that they are vices, and that the reproach of them is the worst that can be cast on any one. And, further, Martial, with all his faults, is, in his affections, his tastes, his relations to others, essentially human, friendly, generous, true. There is perhaps not a single sentence in Petronius which implies any knowledge of or sympathy with the existence of affection, conscience or honour, or even the most elementary goodness of heart. For the whole question of possible predecessors and Petronius's relation to the extant Greek romances see W. Schmid, " Der griechische Roman " in Jahrbucher fur das klass. Altertum, &c. (1904). One would certainly have expected the realistic tendency which appears in the New Comedy, the Characters of Theophrastus and the Mimes, to have borne this fruit before the first century of our era.(W. C. Su.) ' Omnes qui in testamento meo legata habent praeter libertos meos, hac conditions percipient quae dedi, si corpus meum in partes conciderint et astante populo comederint (141). The work has reached us in so fragmentary and mutilated a shape that we may of course altogether have missed the key to it; is may have been intended by its author to be a sustained satire, written in a vein of reserved and powerful irony, of the type realized in our modern Jonathan Wild or Barry Lyndon. Otherwise we must admit that, in the entire divorce of intellectual power and insight from any element of right human feeling, the work is an exceptional phenomenon in literature. For, as a work of original
" Has inter ludebat aquis errantibus amnis Spumeus et querulo vexabat rore lapillos." And some of the shorter pieces anticipate the terseness and elegance of Martial. The long fragment on the Civil War does not seem to be written so much with the view of parodying as of entering into rivalry with the poem of Lucan. In the epigram extemporized by Trimalchio late on in the banquet: Quod non expectes, ex transverso fit Et supra nos Fortuna negotia curat, Quare da nobis vino. Falerna, puer," we have probably a more deliberate parody of the style of verses produced by the illiterate aspirants to be in the fashion of the day. We might conjecture that the chief
gift to which Petronius owed his social and his literary success was that of humorous mimicry. In Trimalchio and his various guests, in the old poet, in the cultivated, depraved and moody Encolpius, in the Chrysis, Quartilla, Polyaenis, &c., we recognize in living examples the play of those various appetites, passions and tendencies which satirists deal with as abstract qualities. Another gift he possesses in a high degree, which must have availed him in society as well as in literaturethe gift of story-telling; and some of the stories which first appear in the Satirae--e.g. that of the Matron of Ephesushave enjoyed a great reputation in later times. His style, too, is that of an excellent talker, who could have discussed questions of taste and literature with the most cultivated men of any time as well as amused the most dissolute society of any time in their most reckless revels. One phrase of his is often quoted by many who have never come upon it in its original
The important editions are (I) with explanatory notes: Burmann (Amsterdam, 1743, with Heinsius's notes), and, of the Cena only, Friedlander ( Leipzig
Cambridge , 19o4); (2) with critical notes: Biicheler (Berlin, 1862, 4th ed., 1904). Translations into German in Friedlander's edition (Cerra only), into French By de Guerle (complete, in Garnier's Bibliotheque), into English in Lowe's edition (Cena only) and Bohn
Leipzig
(W. Y. S.; W. C. Su.). End of Article: PETRONIUS (G. (?)1 If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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