1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Petronius

by William Young Sellar and Walter Coventry Summers

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 personages of the story are evidently strangers in the towns of southern Italy where we find them. Their Greek-sounding names (Encolpius, Ascyltos, Giton, &c.) and literary training accord with the characteristics of the old Greek colony in the 1st century A.D. The high position among Latin writers ascribed by Sidonius to Petronius, and the mention of him beside Menander by Macrobius, when compared with the absolute silence of Quintilian, Juvenal and Martial, seem adverse to the 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 the education of an orator. The silence of Juvenal and Martial 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, but 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, he had shown vigour and capacity for affairs. Afterwards returning to his life of vicious indulgence, he became one of the chosen circle of Nero’s intimates, and was looked upon as an absolute authority on questions of taste (arbrter elegantiae) in connexion with the science of luxurious living"^[2] Tacitus goes on to say that this excited the jealousy of Tigellinus, an accusation followed, and Petronius committed suicide in a way that was in keeping with his life and character. He selected the slow process of opening veins and having them bound up again, whilst he conversed on light and trifling topics with his friends. He then dined luxuriously, slept for some time, and, so far from adopting the common practice of flattering Nero or Tigellinus in his will, wrote and sent under seal to Nero a document which professed to give, with the names of his partners, a detailed account of the abominations which that 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 Annals—in 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.^[3] Nor would there be any point in the verses on the capture of Troy and the Civil War at any 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 of fictitious narrative by which the medley is held together is something quite new in Roman literature. This careless prodigal was so happily inspired in his devices for amusing himself as to introduce to Rome and thereby transmit to modern times the novel based on the ordinary experience of contemporary life^[4]—the precursor of such novels as Gil Blas and Roderick 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.

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 beautiful 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.^[5] If we can suppose 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.

The work has reached us in so fragmentary and mutilated a shape that we may of course altogether have missed the key to It, it 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 power, of humorous representation, of literary invention and art, the fragment deserves all the admiration which it has received. We recognize the arbiter elegantiae in the admirable sense of the remarks scattered through it on education, on art, on poetry and on eloquence. There is a true feeling of nature in the description of a grove of plane-trees, cypresses and pines:

“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 cnteiing into rivalry with the poem of Lucan. In the epigram extemporized by Trimalchio late on in the banquet:

“Quod non expectes, ex transverso fit—
  supra nos Fortuna negotia curat,
  Quare da nobis vina 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 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 literature—the gift of story-telling; and some of the stories which first appear in the Satirae—e.g. that of the Matron of Ephesus—have 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 context, “Horatii curiosa felicitas.”

Authorities.—Until about 1650 only part of the Banquet of Trimalchio, with the other fragments of the work, was known. The best MS of this type is a Leiden MS., a copy by Scaliger of one which seems to have belonged to Cujacius. Marinus Statilius (see, however, Ellis, Journal of Philology, 12, p. 266) discovered at Trau in Dalmat1a a MS containing the whole Banquet, which was first published at Padua in 1664.

The important editions are (1) with explanatory notes Burmann (Amsterdam, 1743, with Heinsius’s notes), and of the Cena only, Friedlander (Leipzig, 2nd ed., 1906) and Lowe (Cambridge, 1904); (2) with critical notes Bucheler (Berlin, 1862, 4th ed, 1904). Translations into German in Friedlander’s edition (Cena only), into French by de Guerle (complete, in Garnier's Bibliothèque), into English in Lowe’s edition (Cena only) and Bohn’s series (complete) Lexicon to Petronius by Segebade and Lommatsch (Leipzig, 1898) Criticism, &c, in Haley, “Quaestt Petron” (Harvard Studies, 1891), Collignon, Étude sur Petrone (Paris, 1892), Emile Thomas, L’Envers de la societé romaine d’après Petrone (Paris, 1892), Hirzel, Der Dialog, 11 (Leipzig, 1895); Tyrrell, Latin Poetry (London, 1895), Norden, Antike Kunstprosa i (Leipzig, 1898), Henderson, Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero (London, 1903), Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (London, 1905), and the various histories of Roman literature (especially Schanz, §§ 395 sqq.)  (W. Y. S.; W. C. Su.) 

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1. The MSS. of the Satirae 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.
2. Ann xvi. 18
3. 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 pecunia uendo, Pers ii 9, O si ebulliat patruus, praeclarum funus, et o si sub rastro crepel argenti miki seria with Sat 88, Alius donum promittit, si propinquum divitem extulerit, alius si thesaurum effoderit and 42, homo animam ebullit, Pers iv 26, arat . . . quantum non milius oberrat with Sat. 37, fundos habet qua milvi volant. Both use the rare word baro. 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).
4. For the whole question of possible predecessors and Petronius’s relation to the extant Greek romances see W. Schmid, “Der griechische Roman” in Jahrbücher für 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.)
5. Omnes qui in testament meo legata habent praeter libertos meos, hac conditioner percipient quae dedi, si corpus meum in partes con cider int et astante populo comederint (141).