About the Work
The Cena Trimalchionis, or “Dinner with Trimalchio,” is a single surviving episode from a much larger Roman novel. The work to which it belongs is known to us only in fragments, and even its author is a matter of inference rather than certainty. The manuscripts attribute the novel to Petronius Arbiter, and the most widely accepted identification is with a Gaius Petronius who moved in Nero’s innermost circle, was suspected by the emperor, and in 66 AD took his own life before execution could reach him. The novel itself bore the title Satirae, and the surviving excerpts come from its fifteenth and sixteenth books, which tells us that the original was a work of considerable length. Its form is that of Menippean satire, the mixed verse-and-prose genre introduced to Roman literature by Varro and named for its founder, the Cynic Menippus of Gadara—though in the Cena itself, as in the story of the Matron of Ephesus, the narrative runs in prose alone.
The novel’s content consists of events and adventures of varied kinds, narrated by an Encolpius as his own experiences. Among the surviving fragments—distinguished as much by spirit, wit, and elegance of form as by unbridled shamelessness—the Cena Trimalchionis is the most interesting and valuable. Here the author turned his studies of south-Italian small-town life, evidently made with great pleasure, into a masterly picture entirely free of caricature. The edition at hand presents the episode with a German translation and explanatory notes by Ludwig Friedlaender, professor in Königsberg, and is dedicated to Franz Buecheler. Its contents run: an introduction subdivided into literary-historical matters, Leibniz’s report on the performance of Trimalchio’s banquet at the Hanover court in 1702, and municipal life in Italy in the first century; then text and translation; then notes; then an index.
The setting of the episode has been established with some precision. Mommsen proved that Trimalchio’s residence on the Gulf of Naples is Cuma. It is an urbs Graeca, which fits neither Misenum nor Puteoli, and thinking of the latter—a very flourishing place in the first century—is also forbidden by the complaint about the city’s decline. It is further a Roman colony, which excludes Naples. Decisively, the chief officials are called praetors, a title otherwise not occurring in this region, which the magistrates of Cuma bore. The only thing opposing this assumption—Trimalchio’s statement that he saw the Sibyl “at Cumae”—can be removed only by supposing the word Cumis there is an addition foreign to the original text. But if the novel is set in Cuma, Petronius depicted what he saw daily; for he presumably had his villa there, where he also died.
Context
The world that produced this episode was one in which the old machinery of civic self-government was quietly running down. City households, previously left to the sole oversight of the quinquennales, were brought under state control through appointed curatores who supervised municipal administrations. These commissioners were never chosen from the locality they served but from another city or from the two highest orders of the empire, the equestrian and senatorial orders; one commissioner often oversaw the finances of several cities at once. Once government interference in communal affairs began, it was natural that state power expanded ever further, reducing city officials and the senate to an increasingly dependent position while increasing their responsibility for the commune’s financial obligations. As communal positions lost much of their appeal, state service from the beginning of the second century offered richer and more favorable prospects. Hadrian created a gradually all-encompassing bureaucratic hierarchy, a highly complex organism that absorbed a great many personnel and opened brilliant careers. Interest in state service rose while interest in city service declined. Ever more people concealed their wealth out of fear of being drafted into the decurionate and city offices. Perhaps already in the second century the curiae had to be compulsorily filled from among those possessing the requisite census, and increasingly strict measures were taken to maintain them. As a result, the decurionate became a hereditary status in the male line, to which the sons of decurions belonged as such from age eighteen. When necessary, replenishment came from the remaining citizenry, excluding only slaves, freedmen, and those under legal infamy. In the fourth century the curiae were even used as penal institutions into which one was placed for an offense.
Under the urban patriciate formed by the decurions, families belonging to the second order of the empire, the equestrian, held first place; their number, at least since Caligula, increased ever more through new grants in Italy and throughout the empire. Equestrian status was often acquired through military service. Whoever in a legion rose to the highest of the sixty centurion posts, the primipilate, was frequently elevated to equestrian status upon discharge. These so-called primipilares formed a special, highly esteemed class, especially since they enjoyed considerable wealth thanks to favorable discharge conditions. They and other former officers of equestrian rank, notably tribunes of legions and cohorts, are often found in Italian cities holding the highest offices and priesthoods, and elected as patrons of the community: thus the poet Juvenal, who had commanded an auxiliary cohort as tribune, was duumvir, quinquennalis, and priest of the deified emperor Vespasian in his native Aquinum. But even former centurions belonged to the urban aristocracy; already Augustus had granted them, upon honorable discharge, the purple-bordered toga and the rank of decurions. They too often appear as leading figures and apparently enjoyed no less esteem than they claimed through self-importance and pompous bearing. They looked contemptuously down on learned, especially philosophical, education, and were assured of the applause of their listeners when they demonstrated its uselessness and indulged in stale jokes about it.
That harmony did not always prevail between the urban aristocracy and the rest of the citizenry could be assumed even without explicit testimony. Apparently officials and senates were chiefly accused of self-interest in administering city revenues and also of bribery, and they then sued one another before the senate in Rome. Sometimes communal disputes led to riots. One such broke out in Puteoli in 58 AD; stones were thrown and arson threatened; citizenry and curia sent delegations to Rome, one complaining of the greed of officials and notables, the other of the violence of the mob. The first commissioner sent from Rome failed to suppress the unrest; only after the city was occupied by a praetorian cohort of a thousand men and some executions had occurred was harmony restored.
Next in rank and esteem to the decurions, though separated from them by a great unbridgeable gulf, stood in city society the corporations of the Augustales, to which belonged those excluded from the decurionate by unfree birth, insufficient wealth, or a disreputable trade, yet who could claim a position above the level of the masses. The Augustales were religious associations formed for the imperial cult; interest in them too was great during the cities’ flourishing period. Membership in a corporation granted not only various advantages but above all esteem: in money distributions the associations were preferred, received their own seats in theaters and the like. Among all corporations, that of the Augustales was by far the most prominent, not only through its wealth and the respectability of its members but also through its services to the commune and its purpose for the imperial cult. They are generally described as a status like the decurions, and as such stood between the masters and the common people. They felt honored when one of the former kindly returned their greeting, addressed them by name, “like one of us.”
Just as in Rome already under Augustus the Genius of the reigning emperor was the object of a cult practiced officially by the overseers of the city districts and also by numerous private associations formed for that purpose, so outside Rome religious associations often replaced earlier cults of gods with the imperial cult, as in Pompeii the servants of Mercury and Maia first added the name of Augustus to those two deities, but from the year 2 AD bore his name alone; moreover, numerous new associations for this purpose arose in the cities of southern Italy, calling themselves Augustales from the start.
The physical texture of that world is recoverable in some detail. The proximity of a city announced itself to the traveler in ancient Italy through three things: country houses, gardens, and tombs. The custom of spending the hot season in the country was general; in places distinguished by healthfulness or beauty of location, palaces of Roman senators and even of the emperors rose among the villas of city-dwellers, since the great and rich valued possessing so many country houses that they could spend each season in a specially suitable climate. The parks and gardens surrounding these villas resembled modern Italian ones in layout and in their trimmed walls and hedges, artificially clipped trees, waterworks, and statues; yet they lacked several trees and plants we consider characteristic of Italian vegetation, above all the citron and orange. Others were then still new. Peaches and apricots had been introduced only in the course of the first century, the pistachio in its first third, and around the time of Pompeii’s destruction the first melons aroused the interest of naturalists and garden-lovers in Campanian gardens through their scent and shape. Besides these pleasure gardens, every larger city was surrounded by a belt of market gardens corresponding to its size, in which the air was often filled with foul odors, since underground pipes led fertilizers to them from the city sewers. In those gardens before the gates, lilies, roses, and violets were grown on large fields, partly for manufacturing fragrant essences, partly for direct use. The flower luxury of Roman antiquity consisted mainly in a mass consumption of these three and a few other kinds for wreathing, for strewing couches and floors at feasts, for decorating dwellings and tombs. Oil, wine, fruit, and vegetable gardens often supplied not only the markets of the city to which they belonged but also more distant ones: from Pompeii, for example, wine, cabbage, figs, and onions were exported. Vegetables, alongside wheat imported almost exclusively from overseas lands, especially Africa and Egypt, were the main popular food, as wine was the general drink, and oil also took the place of butter in the ancient Italian kitchen, which the ancients used only as a medicament. The tombs too, which lay almost everywhere outside the cities on both sides of the country road, were often enclosed by garden-like plantings.
Between such surroundings one arrived, perhaps through a suburb inhabited by small people like mule-drivers and carters, at a gate of the inner city. Even the formerly fortified cities were then open. Since the general peace seemed forever secured by the Roman world empire, and the thought of a threat to its central land Italy was wholly remote, the crenellated and tower-armed walls, such as Pompeii also has, had become purposeless and were torn down where they hindered growing traffic; as in Pompeii they were replaced along the whole stretch from the Forum Triangulare to the Herculaneum Gate by three-story houses. The streets resembled those of today’s Oriental cities: as here, there were streets with and streets without shops. The latter were the more distinguished, as for example the street now called Mercury Street in Pompeii, with a row of very stately houses, has rightly been designated strada della Signoria. These streets were exceedingly still and dead; their fronts lacked the rows of windows we are accustomed to regard as their animating element. One walked here as between garden walls, interrupted from time to time by closed doors, and saw in the upper stories only here and there windows closed with wooden shutters and bay-like projections. In the Roman dwelling house the rooms lay around inner courtyards.
People gathered at public places, especially the large, bright, decorated baths, as found at Pompeii. These were among the most frequented locales, where people met acquaintances, heard news, and passed idle hours. Filled mainly in the afternoon when business rested, the baths—which usually also contained restaurants—took the place of cafés. Just as in public buildings, the generosity of the wealthy worked hand in hand with communal authorities in feeding the poorer population. Foundations and bequests for buying oil and grain, for free distribution or for delivery at average prices in times of scarcity, were frequent. Private charity went further: foundations to help poor parents raise children until working age were evidently not uncommon. A wealthy woman in Terracina bequeathed capital of more than 200,000 Marks, whose interest was to give a hundred boys and girls monthly money for sufficient grain rations—boys until age sixteen, girls until thirteen; at that age girls already mostly married. At another such foundation at Atina, children received on discharge a gift of more than 200 Marks. From Nerva onward, emperors began funding capital for educating poor freeborn children; Trajan extended these so-called “alimentations” across all Italy. A relief found in 1872 on the Roman Forum shows Italia with her children thanking this emperor. In imperial foundations, boys were preferentially considered; at one foundation for the destroyed town of Veleja near Parma, 246 boys and only 35 girls were to participate. There were charitable foundations not only for childhood but also for helpless old age. About communal care for the sick we know very little, but from the early second century there seem to have been communal doctors in most places, paid from the city treasury. Galenus mentions that in many cities doctors were provided spacious halls with large, light-admitting door openings for treating the sick. Burial places for the poor were established not only by communities but also by individuals. In Sassina in Umbria someone donated a burial place with ten square feet per grave, for citizens and residents, excluding those who hired themselves to the dishonorable trade of gladiators or who as suicides chose the shameful death of hanging. In Bergamo someone founded capital to permanently redeem the fees owed to the community for burials, making them free for all citizens.
Communities were supported by individual civic spirit in schooling. State schools existed only at the main centers of intellectual life—Rome, Alexandria, Athens, and later Constantinople. Other towns had only municipal schools, which arose gradually; at first education was left entirely to private initiative, encouraged everywhere by teachers, like doctors, being exempt from municipal burdens. Even the smallest Italian places likely had at least elementary schools, while only larger ones had schools for scientific instruction and its highest stage, rhetoric. From smaller places parents often sent children to a larger city or Rome. The school of the elder Statius in Naples was attended by boys from Lucania and Apulia. Horace says the school of a Flavius in his hometown Venusia, which big boys of powerful centurions attended with their tablets and pen-cases on their arms, did not suffice his father; despite limited means he sent his son to Rome for an education like that of knights’ and senators’ sons. Around 100 AD Comum still had no teacher of rhetoric, and young people had to study in nearby Milan. The younger Pliny proposed that interested families raise a teacher’s salary by common contributions; himself childless, he subscribed a third of the sum. Only fear of electoral intrigues kept him from giving it entirely to the city—intrigues that often had bad influence where teaching posts were awarded and paid by the community. In such cases people often turned to Rome for a suitable force; candidates appeared with recommendation letters from Roman notabilities and gave public proofs of their knowledge and teaching ability. Gellius attended in Brindisi such a public trial lecture by a teacher summoned from Rome, who recited a Virgil passage very clumsily and faultily, then invited questions; answering one from Gellius, he fully betrayed his ignorance. Deserving teachers received not only salary but honors—for instance, a Latin teacher in Verona belonging to the Augustales received the insignia of decurions; some had statues erected, at least after death. Since Pliny also gave Comum a library of significant value and added capital of 100,000 sesterces for its upkeep and expansion, one may assume municipal patriots’ generosity often provided teaching materials too.
Though communal care and individual liberality were directed to the best and noblest purposes, the impression remains that even more was spent on public amusements and festivities, especially by rich men seeking fellow citizens’ favor. Custom demanded they also draw much of the community into private feasts. Every joyful, solemn family event became very costly: a rich man’s birthday, a son’s assumption of the man’s toga, a daughter’s wedding, entering a city office, dedicating a publicly built structure—in all such cases he usually had to invite the town council, often much of the citizenry, many hundreds or even a thousand persons, or give them money instead of hospitality.
All Italian towns must have had many connections with Rome because many of their members stayed there temporarily or permanently—for the capital’s pleasures, for studies, business, especially lawsuits, and state or military service. The Praetorian guard, of nine to ten thousand men, and Rome’s city watch of three thousand were recruited chiefly in Italy. When Severus reorganized the guard by admitting legion veterans, many young Italians turned to gladiatorial combat and robbery. The most ambitious and talented from all Italy sought Rome, and many rose to high positions. Municipal men were raised to equestrian and even senatorial rank; as senators they left their hometown community, since the empire’s first order belonged to the capital alone. Equestrians remaining at home were the foremost and most respected there, but many left forever for imperial service or the army. Every town was proud of its great men—Cicero says even the mountains and fields of Arpinum rejoiced in his and his brother’s career; meeting an Arpinate, one heard of Marius and perhaps Cicero. No town failed to erect statues to those it could be proud of, as Herculaneum did for the family of Nonius Balbus. Men of equestrian and senatorial rank showed attachment to their homeland through buildings and gifts. The two Stertinius brothers, imperial physicians who gained wealth in Rome, spent it on great buildings beautifying Naples. Pliny the Younger gave Como a capital for feeding freeborn boys and girls, another for building and maintaining baths, and from a third, over 24,000 sesterces in interest, intended for a hundred freedmen’s lifetime support, a yearly banquet for the whole community after their death. Ummidia Quadratilla, a very distinguished woman who died under Trajan at eighty, was born at Casinum; an inscription records she built the town a temple and an amphitheater, whose ruin survives.
Men of the two first orders maintained ties to their birthplace by taking its patronage—the obligation to represent the town and its members in legal and other matters. Patrons were also appointed from respected community members, especially primipilares, but particularly equestrians and senators. The senate list of Canossa names 39 patrons before the decurions—31 senators and 8 equestrians. Every town strove to win patrons in high circles, especially at court and in the senate. The very rich and influential senator Aquilius Regulus, under Trajan, sent a eulogy he had written for a son who died in boyhood in 1000 copies to Italian and provincial towns, asking decurions to have it publicly read by a chosen member with a good voice—and it was done.
Roman authors speak of Italian towns only rarely and in passing, yet we know their conditions gave capital residents material for amusement. In older Roman comedy, small-towners were often staged; only titles survive: the Women of Brindisi, the Woman of Sezza, the Woman of Velletri. The pompous dignity and self-importance of municipal officials is often mocked—the stern face and stiff posture with which an aedile of Arezzo ordered a merchant’s false measure broken, or another had a dish of fish, priced too high, crushed by his attendant. Occasionally it is noted that petty envy and ill-will make themselves felt differently in the narrowness of small-town life than in the world city. On the other hand, it was recognized that Italian towns had more respectability, discipline, and morals than the capital; the towns of Lombardy, especially Padua and Brescia, had particularly good reputations. Many longed for the informality, quiet, and cheapness of a small town. In a small place one could live in abundance on little means—eating from clay, wearing a coarse blue hooded cloak; the toga was worn perhaps twice a month, and some were first dressed in it lying on the bier; a dinner suit lasted ten years. When at a small town’s holidays a often-seen ghost comedy was performed in the grassy theater, and country children fled in terror from the pale mask of the child-devouring ghost into their mother’s lap, one saw senate and citizenry in the same dress, and even high aediles contented themselves with white tunics. In Capua and Naples one could divide time between work and rest undisturbed. In Praeneste, Volsinii, and other favorably situated places one needn’t live in badly built rental blocks as in Rome. There or in Sora, Frusino one could buy an excellent house for the sum paid in Rome as yearly rent for a dark dwelling. One grew one’s cabbage in one’s own garden watered from a well-filled well; it was something to own a bit of land, even if only a lizard had room on it.
Structure of the Book
The edition is built in four movements. It opens with an introduction running to sixty-eight pages, itself divided into three unequal parts: a literary-historical section of some twelve pages; a short section of three pages reproducing Leibniz’s report on the performance of Trimalchio’s banquet at the Hanover court in 1702; and a long closing section of nearly fifty pages on municipal life in Italy in the first century. There follows the text and translation, running from page 69 to page 197, in which the Latin and the German stand facing one another. Then come the explanatory notes, pages 198 to 320, and finally an index, pages 321 to 327.
The episode itself, as it unfolds across the text, has a shape of its own. It begins with the narrator and his companions encountering the household of Trimalchio and being drawn into the dinner; it proceeds through the long sequence of courses, performances, and interruptions that make up the banquet; and it moves through the increasingly chaotic later stages of the evening, in which the host’s behavior, the quarrels of the guests, and the sheer accumulation of spectacle drive the scene toward its dissolution. The narrative is not divided into chapters in the modern sense; it flows as a continuous first-person account, punctuated by the speeches of the guests and by the set pieces of the meal. Within that flow, certain episodes stand out as structural landmarks: the entrance of Trimalchio himself, carried in to instrumental music; the successive courses with their elaborate conceits—the Corinthian bronze donkey, the hen with peacock eggs, the boar wearing a freedman’s cap from whose wound thrushes fly; the reading of the steward’s bulletin; the acrobats; the long speeches of the freedmen; the ghost story of the werewolf and the tale of the ass on the roof; the entrance of Habinnas and his retinue; and the final stages of the evening, in which Trimalchio’s self-display reaches its height and the company’s patience its limit.
The introduction’s three parts correspond to three kinds of framing. The literary-historical section establishes the author, the genre, the setting, and the place of the episode within the larger novel. The Leibniz report offers a curious external witness: a description of a dinner scene in which a testator arranges his burial, frees his slaves, and presides over a feast, with the guests making noises like cannon-fire or the thunder of Jupiter, and a quarrel between Trimalchio and Fortunata that is patched up before the company disperses. The long final section reconstructs the social and physical world of the Italian municipalities—their gardens and tombs, their baths and schools, their charitable foundations and their spectacles—so that the reader arrives at the text already equipped with the furniture of the world it depicts.
Inside the Book
The Edition and Its Dedication
The volume opens as a scholarly edition of Petronius’s Cena Trimalchionis, presenting the text with a German translation and explanatory notes by Ludwig Friedlaender, professor at Königsberg, and dedicated to Franz Buecheler. Its table of contents maps the whole enterprise: an introduction running to sixty-eight pages, the text and translation, a body of notes, and an index. The introduction itself divides into literary-historical matters, a report by Leibniz on a performance of Trimalchio’s banquet at the Hanover court in 1702, and a long study of municipal life in first-century Italy.
The Author and His Death
The Banquet survives only as an episode of a larger Roman novel whose manuscripts name its author Petronius Arbiter—probably the Gaius Petronius who belonged for years to Nero’s inner circle, was suspected by him, and in 66 AD cheated execution by suicide. He was a man who, after proving energetic in high office, ostentatiously gave himself over to pleasure, and his mastery of enjoyment made him an authority at court, consulted by Nero himself as arbiter of taste. Court envy and intrigue drove him to open his veins, and he died with the same cool composure he had lived: he had the cut veins bound and reopened to draw out the end, conversed with friends on frivolous poems rather than philosophy, rewarded some slaves and flogged others, then went to a meal and lay down to sleep so that death seemed almost natural. He refused to flatter Nero or any powerful man in his will, and instead wrote out an account of the emperor’s debaucheries and crimes, naming participants of both sexes, sent it sealed to Nero, and broke his signet ring so it would endanger no one. Pliny adds that before dying he smashed a murrha ladle—perhaps oriental agate—that had cost a fortune, so it should not adorn Nero’s table. The name Arbiter, the evidently Neronian date of the work, and its author’s high culture and worldly knowledge all support identifying this Petronius as the novelist.
The Novel’s Design
The novel’s content consists of varied events and adventures narrated by an Encolpius as his own experience. Buecheler had already observed that the plot disposed Encolpius’s contacts with Priapus across three cities he visited—Massilia, Cuma, and Croton—and Elimar Klebs made it very probable that the wrath of Priapus was the guiding motif binding the loosely connected parts into a whole. That wrath, incurred by a temple desecration apparently committed at Massilia, served the plot as Poseidon’s wrath served the Odyssey. Its turn into the comic, and the travestying of the pathos proper to epic and tragedy, followed from the work’s comic basic character, so that a fantastic bond encircled vivid depictions of reality and lifted the whole from common reality into the ideal sphere of art. The novel was not short; the excerpts come from the fifteenth and sixteenth books, and its title was Satirae. Its form is the Menippean satire introduced to Roman literature by Varro and named for the Cynic Menippus of Gadara, alternating verse and prose—though in the Banquet of Trimalchio, as in the episode of the Matron of Ephesus, the narrative is exclusively prose.
The Banquet as Social Portrait
Among the surviving fragments—distinguished as much by spirit, wit, and elegance as by unbridled shamelessness—the Banquet of Trimalchio is the most interesting and valuable. Here the author turned his studies of south-Italian small-town life, evidently made with great pleasure, into a masterly picture entirely free of caricature. Mommsen proved that Trimalchio’s residence on the Gulf of Naples is Cuma: it is a Greek town, which fits neither Misenum nor Puteoli, and thinking of the latter is forbidden by the complaint about the city’s decline; it is further a Roman colony, which excludes Naples; and decisively, its chief officials are called praetors, a title otherwise absent from the region but borne by the magistrates of Cuma. The only obstacle—Trimalchio’s remark that he saw the Sibyl “at Cumae”—can be removed only by supposing the word an addition foreign to the original. If the novel is set in Cuma, Petronius depicted what he saw daily, for he presumably had his villa there, where he also died.
Leibniz’s Report on the Hanover Performance
The introduction then turns to Leibniz’s account of a dinner scene performed at court. In it a testator arranges his burial, the monument to be erected for him, and his legacies in a comical manner, freeing his slaves, who grimace and cry out lamentably as the will is read. At the feast he immediately grants freedom to one named Bachus, boasting that he has gods in his power; the slave first takes the hat, the mark of liberty. When the master drinks, these same slaves make a noise like cannon-fire, or rather the thunder of Jupiter, a good omen if it came from the left. In the midst of the rejoicing the goddess of discord throws one of her apples: a quarrel breaks out between Trimalchio and Fortunata, he hurls a glass at her, and they are reconciled only with difficulty—yet reconciled nonetheless, so that everything ends as agreeably as possible. The procession with hunting bodies, drums, musical instruments, and songs finishes as it began, and Leibniz judges that Trimalchio surpassed himself.
Urban Life in First-Century Italy
The introduction’s third section opens with the traveler’s approach to an ancient Italian city, announced by three things: country houses, gardens, and tombs. The custom of spending the hot season in the country was general, and where healthfulness or beauty of location favored it, the palaces of senators and even emperors rose among the villas of city-dwellers, since the great and rich prized owning enough country houses to spend each season in a specially suitable climate. The parks and gardens resembled modern Italian ones in layout, with trimmed walls and hedges, artificially clipped trees, waterworks, and statues, yet they lacked trees and plants we now consider characteristic of Italy—above all the citron and orange. Peaches and apricots had been introduced only in the course of the first century, the pistachio in its first third, and around the time of Pompeii’s destruction the first melons aroused the interest of naturalists and garden-lovers in Campanian gardens through their scent and shape. Besides these pleasure gardens, every larger city was ringed by market gardens corresponding to its size, their air often foul because underground pipes carried fertilizers from the city sewers. That agriculture and horticulture, with the associated animal husbandry, were almost entirely displaced from the city by the time of Pompeii’s destruction is shown by the small number of animal skeletons found there: in the twelve years from 1861 to 1872, besides ninety-three human skeletons, only three of dogs, seven of horses, eleven of chickens, two of turtles, and one of a pig. Before the gates, lilies, roses, and violets were grown on large fields, partly for fragrant essences and partly for direct use, since the flower luxury of antiquity consisted mainly in mass consumption of these kinds for wreathing, for strewing couches and floors at feasts, and for decorating dwellings and tombs.
The Editor’s Excursus on Italian Towns and Rome
The segment opens not with Petronius but with a scholarly discussion of Italian municipal life under the empire. The editor catalogues the goods that flowed through Italian markets — coarse woolens from the Genoese coast, fine cloths from Parma and Modena, soldiers’ cloaks from Canossa, purple from Tarentum, carpets from Padua, pottery from Arezzo and Cumae, iron from Elba worked at Pozzuoli, sausages from Lucania, fish broth from Pompeii, oil and olives from Venafro and Umbria, and wine from across the peninsula, Italy being antiquity’s chief wine land. He then turns to the ties binding every town to Rome: men left home for pleasure, study, lawsuits, and service, and the Praetorian guard and city watch were recruited chiefly in Italy. The ambitious sought the capital and rose to equestrian and senatorial rank, while those who stayed behind were the foremost citizens of their towns. Every community was proud of its great men — Cicero claims even the mountains and fields of Arpinum rejoiced in his career — and erected statues to them, as Herculaneum did for the family of Nonius Balbus. The wealthy repaid their birthplaces with buildings and gifts: the Stertinius brothers beautified Naples, Pliny the Younger endowed Como with funds for feeding freeborn children, baths, and a banquet for the whole community, and Ummidia Quadratilla built Casinum a temple and an amphitheater whose ruin survives. Towns competed for patrons from the highest circles; the senate list of Canossa names thirty-nine patrons before the decurions. Aquilius Regulus, a senator under Trajan, sent a eulogy for his dead son in a thousand copies to Italian and provincial towns and had it publicly read. Roman authors mention small towns only in passing, yet their conditions furnished the capital with amusement: comedies staged small-towners, and the pompous dignity of municipal officials was mocked — an aedile of Arezzo ordering a false measure broken, another crushing an overpriced dish of fish. Small-town life was also envied for its respectability, quiet, and cheapness: one could live well on little, wear the toga twice a month, buy a fine house for the yearly rent of a dark Roman flat, and grow cabbage in one’s own garden. For such reasons Juvenal has a friend, to —
The Intercession for a Slave
The narrative proper resumes with a client who had given Trimalchio a cloak. A slave had let the treasurer’s clothes be stolen in the bath, worth barely ten sesterces. The guests turned and asked the treasurer, who was counting gold in the atrium, to pardon the slave. He raised his head haughtily and said the loss grieved him less than the fellow’s carelessness: through him he had lost table-clothes of genuine Tyrian purple, given by a client, though already washed once. He granted the slave nonetheless.
The Slave’s Gratitude and the Singing Household
As the guests entered the dining room, the same slave met them, thanking them with a shower of kisses and promising they would soon learn whom they had benefited: “lordly wine is the goodwill of the cupbearer.” Alexandrian slaves poured snow-chilled water over their hands; others attended their feet, cutting toenails and singing even at this tedious task. The narrator, testing whether the whole staff sang, asked for a drink; a slave replied in shrill melody, and so did everyone of whom anything was requested. One might have thought it a pantomime chorus, not a private dining room.
The Appetizer and Trimalchio’s Entrance
A fine appetizer was served; all reclined except Trimalchio, for whom the first place was kept free. On the tray stood a Corinthian bronze donkey with a double sack holding green and black olives; two dishes bore his name and the weight of the silver. Soldered bridges held roasted dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy; hot sausages sat on a silver grill over Damascene plums with pomegranate seeds. Trimalchio was carried in to music and laid among small cushions, provoking laughter: he stretched his shaved head from a scarlet dressing-gown, a napkin with red border and fringes around his neck. On his left little finger he wore a large partly gilded ring; on the next finger one that seemed wholly gold but was set with iron stars. He bared his right arm, adorned with a gold armlet and an ivory circlet.
Dice, Peacock Eggs, and the Cleared Course
After picking his teeth with a silver toothpick, Trimalchio said he had denied himself his pleasure to avoid delaying them, and would finish his game. A boy brought a terebinth board and crystal dice; instead of stones he had gold and silver denarii. While he wasted the players’ jests, a tray with a basket arrived: a wooden hen with wings spread as if brooding. Two slaves searched the straw amid music and distributed peacock eggs. Trimalchio said he feared they were already brooded; they should try whether they could still be sucked. The guests received spoons weighing half a pound and pierced eggs of rich dough. The narrator nearly threw his portion away, thinking it a chick; hearing a regular guest say “here must be something good,” he found a fat fig-bird in peppered yolk. Then the orchestra signalled and the trays were snatched away by a singing chorus. A dish fell; Trimalchio ordered the boy cuffed and the dish thrown down again. A slave swept the silver out with the refuse. Two long-haired Moors poured wine over their hands; no water was offered.
The Master Praised and the Wine
When the guests praised these refinements, Trimalchio said wind and sun must be distributed equally; therefore each had his own table, so the disgusting slaves would cause less heat. Glass amphorae sealed with gypsum were brought, labelled “Hundred-year-old Falernian of the Opimian vintage.” Trimalchio clapped his hands and said wine lives longer than man; therefore let them be merry — wine is life; he was serving genuine Opimian, though the day before he had set out a lesser one for more respectable people.
The Silver Skeleton and the Twelve Gods
The course cleared, the guests turned to wine and talk. Leaning on his elbow, Trimalchio said they must make the wine pleasant themselves; fish must swim. He asked whether they thought he was content with the meal on the tray’s lid, quoting “sic notus Ulixes?” — one must know philology while dining. He prayed his patron’s bones rest well. Nothing new could be brought to him. He then expounded the zodiac: the heaven where the twelve gods live turns into as many figures — a ram, a bull, the Twins, the Crab (under which he was born, hence he stands on many feet and owns much on land and sea), the Lion, the Virgin, the Balance, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Capricorn, the Waterman, the Fishes — and thus the circle turns like a mill, bringing mischief so that men die or are born. The turf and honeycomb on the tray were no accident: mother earth is in the middle, rounded like an egg, containing all good things like a honeycomb. All shouted “Bravo!” and swore Hipparchus and Aratus were not to be compared with him.
Trimalchio on Corinthian Bronze
Trimalchio boasts that he alone owns genuine Corinthian ware. Encolpius expects him to claim the vessels came straight from Corinth, but Trimalchio outdoes even his own shamelessness: his bronzesmith is named Corinthus, and whatever comes from a Corinthus must be Corinthian. He then explains the origin of the famous alloy—when Troy fell, Hannibal, a cunning rascal, piled all the bronze, silver, and gold statues onto one pyre and burned them into a single blended mass, from which craftsmen fashioned cups, dishes, and figurines. Corinthian bronze, he concludes, is all in one, neither this nor that. He adds that he prefers glass, which at least has no smell; were it not breakable he would rank it above gold, but as it is, it is cheap.
The Glassmaker and the Emperor
A craftsman once made a glass cup that would not break. Admitted before the emperor with his gift, he handed it over, asked for it back, and threw it on the floor. The emperor nearly died of fright. The man picked the cup up—bent like a bronze vessel—took a little hammer from his pocket, and neatly repaired it. Believing he now held Jupiter’s throne, especially after the emperor asked whether anyone else knew the method, he denied it. The emperor ordered him beheaded: had the secret spread, gold would be held as dirt.
Trimalchio’s Silver and the Dropped Cup
Trimalchio professes a passion for silver, owning about a hundred cups holding some thirteen liters each. He describes pieces: one showing Cassandra killing her sons, the dead children lying as if alive; a thousand handled bowls left by Mummius to his former master; one where Daedalus encloses Niobe in the Trojan horse; and cups depicting the battles of Hermeros and Petraites, all heavy. He would not sell his connoisseurship for any money. As he speaks, a slave boy drops a cup. Trimalchio tells him to strike himself for being a fool; the boy begs, and Trimalchio asks why he begs him, as if he would harm him, advising him to beg himself not to be a fool. Finally, moved by the guests, he pardons the boy, who runs around the table shouting “Water out, wine in!” The guests applaud, especially Agamemnon, who knew what merits earned a dinner invitation.
Trimalchio Dances
Flattered, Trimalchio drinks more merrily, near drunkenness, and asks whether no one will ask his Fortunata to dance, claiming no one dances the cordax better. He raises his hands above his head and imitates the pantomime actor Syrus while the whole household sings in chorus. He would have come forward had Fortunata not whispered in his ear—likely saying such low buffoonery did not suit his dignity. Nothing was more inconsistent: now he respected Fortunata’s displeasure, now reverted to his own nature.
The Steward’s Bulletin
A clerk interrupts by reading, as if official daily news: on the 26th of July, at the Cumae estate, thirty boys and forty girls were born; 500,000 pecks of wheat brought from the threshing floor to the granary; 500 oxen broken in. Same day: the slave Mithridates was crucified for cursing the genius of “our Gaius.” Same day: ten million sesterces deposited in the treasury that could not be invested. Same day: a fire in the Pompeian gardens, starting from the house of the steward Nasta. Trimalchio asks when the Pompeian gardens were bought for him; the clerk says the previous year, hence not yet entered in the accounts. Trimalchio flares up, decreeing that if any estate is bought for him and he does not learn of it within six months, it is forbidden to enter it in his books. Then edicts of aediles are read, and testaments of forest rangers disinheriting Trimalchio with a stated reason; lists of estate managers; a freedwoman divorced from a night watchman after being caught with a bath attendant; a steward relegated to Baiae; a treasurer charged; and a trial conducted among bedroom attendants.
The Acrobats and the Fallen Boy
The acrobats finally arrive. An extremely crude lout stands with a ladder and orders a boy to dance through the rungs, pipe songs at the top, leap through burning hoops, and hold an amphora with his teeth. Only Trimalchio admires this, calling it a thankless art. He says two things in human affairs he most gladly watches: acrobats and horn-players; the rest is pure nonsense. He has bought comic actors but prefers them in Atellan farces, and orders his Greek chorus-flute player to perform in Latin. As he says this, the boy falls.
Hermeros’s Tirade
Hermeros continues his abuse of Ascyltos, calling him a clay vessel, worse than a leather strap in water, softer, not better. He declares he prefers his own good faith to treasures, and asks whether anyone ever demanded payment from him twice. He served as a slave for forty years, yet no one knew whether he was slave or free; he came to this colony as a long-haired boy, before the basilica was built. He worked to satisfy his master, a majestic man whose fingernail was worth more than Ascyltos entirely. Household enemies tripped him up here and there, yet thanks to his master’s genius he swam out. These are true contests; being born free is as easy as saying “come here.” Giton, standing at their feet, bursts out laughing after long suppression. Hermeros turns on the boy: “You too laugh, you curly onion?” He invokes the Saturnalia, asks if it is December, and when Giton paid his five percent. He calls him cross’s morsel, crows’ food, threatens to make Jupiter angry at him and at the one who does not control him, and swears he would have given Giton his portion already were it not for respect for his fellow freedman. Like master, like servant. He barely restrains himself, though not naturally hot-tempered, but once started he does not spare even his own mother. He vows he will not grow up or down unless he throws Giton’s master into a rue leaf, and will not spare Giton even if he calls on Olympian Jupiter. He says he did not learn geometries, criticisms, and nonsense, but knows lapidary letters, divides into hundred parts for bronze, weight, and coin. He proposes a wager: “come out, I put down the money.” He poses a riddle: who runs from us and does not move from place? Who grows from us and becomes smaller? He tells Giton either to be silent or not to molest his betters, mentions Giton stealing yellow boxwood rings from his girlfriend, and says Giton will learn this iron has credit. He calls Giton’s teacher a mule, not a master. In his day they learned different things: the teacher said “are your things safe? straight home; beware looking around; beware cursing your elders.” All learning is pure nonsense; no one escapes being worth two pennies. He thanks the gods for his own craft.
Trimalchio Denounces Fortunata
Trimalchio keeps up his assault on Fortunata while she weeps and groans. He calls her a street-musician with no memory, reminds her that he rescued her from the slave-market platform and made her respectable, yet she puffs herself up like the frog of the fable and never spits in her own bosom. She is a block of wood, not a woman, he says, and one born in a hut does not dream of a palace; he vows to bring this would-be grand lady to reason. He insists he could have received ten million, and recalls how Agatho, the perfumer of the neighbouring landlady, advised him not to let his line die out — but because he is a good sheep and did not want to seem fickle, he drove an axe into his own leg. He orders Habinnas to put no statue of her on his monument, so that there will be no quarrels after his death, and declares she shall not kiss him when he is dead.
Habinnas and Scintilla Intercede
After this thunderbolt, Habinnas begs him to stop being angry, observing that none of them is faultless — they are men, not gods. Scintilla says the same, weeping, and implores him by his Genius, calling him Gajus, to relent. At last Trimalchio can hold back his tears no longer.
Trimalchio’s Defence and the Boy
Trimalchio asks Habinnas, by his enjoyment of his property, to spit in his face if he has done anything wrong. He kissed a most frugal boy — not for his beauty but because he is good: the lad divides by ten, reads book-writing without stumbling, and has bought himself a Thracian costume from his allowance, along with a chair with a curved back and two cups. Does the boy not deserve his affection? But Fortunata forbids it. He calls her a haughty person and tells her to swallow what she has cooked up and not make him angry, or she will feel his heat; what he has once decided is fixed as with a nail. He invites his friends to enjoy themselves, noting that he too was once as they are but rose through his own efficiency. It is the bit of brains that makes men, all else is trash; he buys well and sells well, and he is bursting with happiness. Calling her a snore-Liese, he says he will make her weep over her fate. He came from Asia as tall as the candelabrum, he says, and used to measure himself against it daily, rubbing his lips with lamp-oil to get a bearded beak faster. For fourteen years he was a favourite of the master, and what the master commands is no shame; he also satisfied the mistress. He keeps silent, he adds, because he is not one of the boasters.
The Rise of Trimalchio
With divine help he became master in the house and got the master in his pocket. The master made him co-heir of Caesar, and he received a very respectable fortune — though no one ever has enough. He wanted to do business: he built five ships, loaded them with wine then worth gold, and sent them to Rome; all were shipwrecked, and in one day Neptune swallowed thirty million. He did not lose courage. He built others, larger, better, luckier, loading wine, salt meat, perfumes, slaves. Then Fortunata proved her devotion: she sold all her gold ornaments and clothes and gave him a hundred gold pieces — the leaven of his fortune. In one voyage he made ten million. He bought back all the estates that had belonged to his former master, built a house, bought carriages, horses, slaves; whatever he touched rose like leaven. When he had more than his whole native town, he withdrew from trade and did money business through freedmen. A Greek astrologer named Serapa, who had come to their town, urged him on — telling him even things he had forgotten, laying everything before him, knowing his insides, and failing only to say what he had eaten the day before.
Serapa’s Prophecy and the House
Trimalchio asks Habinnas, who was present, to confirm the reading: he got his wife from that place, is not lucky with friends, has no one return him equal thanks, possesses great estates, and nourishes a snake at his bosom. Serapa gave him thirty years, four months, and two days to live, and foretold an inheritance soon to come; if he succeeds in joining his estates with Apulia, he will have gone far enough in life. Meanwhile, under Mercury’s protection, he built this house: it was a shack, now it is a temple. It has four dining rooms, twenty bedrooms, two marble colonnades, upstairs a row of slave quarters, the bedroom where he himself sleeps, the sitting-room of this viper, a very good chamber for the doorkeeper; the guest-rooms hold guests. Scaurus, when he came, preferred to lodge nowhere else, and he has an inherited seaside lodging. There is much more he will show them. Have an as, you are worth an as; what you have, that is what you count for. Their friend, who was a worm, is now a great man.
The Commentators on Trimalchio’s Table Talk
The editorial apparatus that accompanies the Cena turns its attention to the freedmen’s speeches in sections forty-two through forty-five, where the guests’ vulgar idiom and proverbial wisdom come under the philologist’s lens. The phrase about casting something into a well draws comparison with Horace, and the conjunction “ac si” is noted as a mark of freedmen’s speech, recurring elsewhere in the satire. The image of old love as a cancer is glossed both as a festering sore and as a crab’s claw that holds fast, while the proverb about remembering the living rather than the dead is traced to Cicero and to popular sayings, used here literally but later in a broader sense. The guest Phileros is carefully distinguished from the lawyer of the same name who appears later, and his boast of having grown from a single copper coin is set beside the earlier claim of rising from nothing. His readiness to pick up a coin from a dung heap with his teeth, his comparison of his fortune to a honeycomb, and his claim to have eaten a dog’s tongue are all annotated: the last reflects a folk belief otherwise unattested, and the “hard cheeks” and “tonguey” epithets are matched with Juvenal and with Trimalchio’s own later description of a quiet man. The standing comic collocation “a friend to his friend,” the phrase “with a full hand,” and the proverbial “he plucked a bad parra” — a bird of ill omen — are all catalogued, along with the image of an inheritance from which more was stolen than was left, the pun on a thief’s stake, and the contemptuous “son of earth” to whom a patrimony was bequeathed. The note closes on the saying that whoever flees his own flees far, which Varro had used as the title of a Menippean satire.
Norbanus, the Bestiarii, and the Substitute Gladiator
The commentary on chapter forty-five examines the name Norbanus, a gentilicium ending in -anus whose earliest known bearer was consul in 83 BCE, and explains the phrase “with full sails” as pointing to the coming election of duumviri and aediles, with parallels drawn from Cicero, Quintilian, Ammianus, and Jerome. The bestiarii are defined as condemned criminals thrown to beasts, untrained and therefore clumsy, unlike the professional venatores; the little horsemen “killed off from a lamp” are figures such as decorated lamp-covers, where gladiator scenes were common. The puzzling word Burdubasta is dissected: the mule (burdus) and the packsaddle (bastum) combine in a determinative sense, perhaps contemptuously describing a useless gladiator as a “mule-litter.” The tertiarius, the substitute fighter sent against the victor in place of the fallen man, is equally useless and harmless as the dead man he replaces. The Thracian fighter, the man who “fought by the book” — that is, according to fencing-school commands rather than naturally — and the phrase “to sum up” are all glossed, and the flogging implied by “all were cut afterwards” is illustrated from Horace, Ovid, Persius, Martial, and Juvenal. The editor supplies the rods and iron that must have dropped from the text, and cross-references the earlier talk of mere flight.
The Boy Cicaro and His Education
Chapter forty-six yields a cluster of notes on proverbial and linguistic matters: “hand washes hand” is paralleled in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, Epicharmus, and Menander; “argutat” stands for “argutatur”; “you are not of our stripe” occurs only here, while Persius has “of our flour.” The form “pauperorum” appears in a Christian inscription of 341 CE, and the jibe “we know you are a fool before letters” is cross-referenced to earlier sections. The weather that “pallavit” everything out of season is emended to a verb meaning “to sprout,” so that the sense becomes that the weather has made everything grow at the wrong time. The name Cicaro is a popular term for a boy, like the Greek meirakion, connected with words for “little one” and perhaps with a root meaning “beget,” so that it means “a sprout” and, at a later point, “a fool” — fitting, since Trimalchio has no children. The boy can already state a quarter, a half, and three-quarters of any number, a skill useful in the simplest life circumstances, and the freedman’s remark that if the boy thrives he will have a little servant at his side shows he has not shed the habit of feeling like a slave. The boy is mad about birds, especially goldfinches, and the editor notes the cross-reference to the earlier weasel. The phrase about “kicking Greek” does not mean giving up Greek but beginning it while pursuing Latin vigorously; the teacher who “pleases himself” is illustrated from Seneca, and the interpreter who comes asking for something to write down is both grammatista and scribe at hand. The boast that the teacher “teaches more than he knows” should not be taken as proverbial, and the “red-titled” legal books, in which the titles of laws were written in red, are explained from Jahn’s note on Persius.
Glass, Silver, and the Dance of the Household
The notes on chapter fifty-two compare the phrase about grasping Jupiter’s throne with Horace, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, and the wish that gold be held as mud with the earlier complaint that grain was going for mud. The story of flexible glass invented under Tiberius is told from Pliny: the craftsman’s workshop was destroyed lest bronze, silver, and gold lose their value, and Dio reports an unnamed architect who straightened a leaning portico, was rewarded but banished, and then killed because he swore he could never be sufficiently repaid. The furnishing of sideboards with old silver plate was a favorite luxury, and the giant cups called urnales held four congii, about thirteen liters. The clause about Cassandra is incompatible with the plural “cups,” as is the mention of Daedalus with the “bowls,” so gaps must be assumed; Cassandra here means Medea. The dead boy who lies as if alive is compared with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the name Mummius is a conjecture giving Trimalchio a patron apt after the Corinth passage. The Daedalus who made Niobe refers to Pasiphae’s wooden cow, and the silver does not show only mythological scenes but also the gladiatorial show of Laenas and the fights of Petraites. The editor notes that Trimalchio could not cite connoisseurship as a reason for owning valuable silver, so a lacuna must be assumed, and that the substantivized infinitive spread from Cicero to the half-educated. The phrase “as if I were troublesome to you” is compared with Seneca, and “nugax” with the earlier “abstinax.” The dismissal of the boy matches a later passage, and something like “with applause” has dropped out of the text.
The Editorial Commentary on Chapters 58–62
The final stretch of the scholarly apparatus turns to the textual and antiquarian problems raised by the earlier speeches, beginning with the phrase toga perversa in chapter 58. Mommsen, drawing on Seneca’s De ira, had concluded that in the popular courts of the Republic the prosecuting magistrate wore his toga turned inside out as a mark of mourning, and that “toga perversa persequi” was therefore proverbial for relentless prosecution. Against this, a colleague observes that in the contio summoned by the classicum for a capital trial it was the presiding magistrate, not the prosecutor, who donned mourning dress, and only at the pronouncement of the verdict. Valerius Maximus supplies the proof: Licinius Macer, prosecuted for extortion in 66 BCE, saw the praetor Cicero about to put on the mourning dress after the vote-collection and killed himself so as to die not as one condemned but still as a defendant. The removal or inversion of the praetexta at verdict corresponds to the donning of the black cap in English courts, and since only one who brings or announces death to another speaks and acts in toga perversa, the phrase means “usque ad internecionem.”
The enigmatic word mufrius is then traced by Bücheler to a stem equated with Greek terms for mocker or tutor, given the contemptuous sense of those words. Although Hermeros at the start of his speech had spoken favorably of Agamemnon, it is understandable that, working himself into ever greater anger, he holds the teacher responsible for his pupil’s bad behavior and tags him with a certainly contemptuous epithet. The phrase cave maiorem maledicas is compared to a later passage, and the difficult words aut nu mera mapalia nemo dupondii evadet are treated at length. Bücheler, taking them as still part of the magister’s speech, explains them as “aut numera,” so that those who live disorderly and loosely may serve as a lesson: you will see they are all not worth a single as. The author paraphrases the sense as “Those are the true maxims of life. Otherwise count—only sorry customers; no one amounts to anything.” Yet it is hard to believe that a teacher’s instructions to boys about their street behavior could themselves count as life-maxims for a Hermeros, on whose observance of them a person’s whole moral worth depended. Festus’s explanation of mapalia remains unintelligible, and Birt’s proposed reading cave mera mapalia is rejected because a teacher could say “beware of pranks,” not “beware of mere pranks.” If mera mapalia is correct in Petronius, in the same sense as Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, one cannot avoid assuming we have only corrupted remnants of a sentence whose sense might have been that anyone who knew those schoolboys well would know them all to be fools, their studies mere trifles, and that by a correct estimate none of them would amount to a single as.
The notes then gloss propter artificium meum as “for what I have learned,” and turn to chapter 59, where Ascyltos began to want to respond to the abuse. The construction coepi velle is paralleled in Cicero and Seneca, and colliberti is cross-referenced to an earlier passage. The word scordalias occurs only here, while scordalus appears elsewhere in Seneca. The section closes mid-gloss on suaviter sit.
The Commentary on Chapters 63–67
The apparatus continues with chapter 63, where the phrase tanquam copo compilatus is explained either as “like a robbed innkeeper” or “like one thoroughly beaten,” with Apuleius cited for the latter sense, possibly pointing to a known mime or Atellan figure. The word bovis is compared to Varro, and videiint alii is cross-referenced to an earlier chapter. The rare form exopinissent occurs only here, and genios vestros iratos habeam is compared to an earlier invocation of a genius. On the preface to Niceros’s tale, the editor argues that si qua fides est can only mean “if you believe me,” referring to what follows—that his hair stood on end—and since this is stated as fact, not exclamation, ut must be deleted. Niceros’s preface means he does not declare the tale unsuitable for table-talk, not that he doubts its truth.
The phrase asinus in tegulis is illustrated by prodigies and is likely proverbial for something happening against nature’s order; Bücheler interprets it as a concrete form of “things upside down,” while Otto instead sees an allusion to a fable in which an ass on a roof is mocked by a monkey, so that Trimalchio means he is the ass on the roof compared to Niceros. Both explanations suggest the epitomator abbreviated the phrase. Capillatus is cross-referenced to an earlier passage, and vitam Chiam gessi is proverbial for a soft, luxurious life. The form ipsimi nostri means “our master,” and the vulgar superlative derives from slaves calling master and mistress ipse, ipsa; Romance words presuppose ipsimus. A series of further glosses follows: delicatus, mehercules, margaritum, the likely corrupt caccitus (which Rönsch derives from a Greek word for “excellent,” comparing the vulgar saplutus), omnium numerum, misella, and tristimonio, which compares to gaudimonio.
The notes then turn to the witches, or strigae, of folk belief, who “turn things upside down” and were thought to suck children’s blood; garlic in swaddling clothes and hawthorn branches in windows served as protection. Cappadocians were typically large, strong men, often chosen as litter-bearers. On the passage where the woman pierced the Cappadocian through the middle, Wuttke’s Der deutsche Volksglaube is cited: seeing or describing an external injury on someone, one must touch neither oneself nor others at that spot, lest one contract the same ailment. The word baro is cross-referenced to an earlier chapter, and the belief that a witch’s hand caused sudden illness and inexplicable death is illustrated by a Verona epitaph of a four-year-old child mentioning the witch’s hand. The form amplexaret stands for amplexaretur, and manuciolum is explained via the Neapolitan manucolo, meaning “bundle.” The word involaverat is cross-referenced to an earlier passage, and vavatonem is derived from the vulgar Latin bava (slime, spittle), originally a natural sound for infants’ dribbling, yielding vavato; Cesareo notes vavato from vava, still alive in Sicily and Campania. The formation is anomalous, and Heinsius would read vavatorem, but that sounds too serious; Bücheler thinks vavato is a reduplication like susurro.
Main Arguments
The edition argues, first, that the Cena Trimalchionis is not an isolated comic sketch but an episode of a Roman novel of which only excerpts survive, and that its author is to be identified with the Petronius known from Tacitus—a Gaius Petronius who long belonged to Nero’s closest circle, was suspected by him, and in 66 AD preempted execution by suicide. The conjecture, suggested by the name Arbiter, is supported by the work’s evidently Neronian date and by its author’s high culture and great knowledge of the world. The novel’s content consists of events and adventures of varied kinds narrated by an Encolpius as his own experiences. Buecheler had already pointed out that the plot’s disposition included Encolpius’s contacts with Priapus in three cities he visited—Massilia, Cuma, and Croton; Elimar Klebs made it very probable that Priapus’s wrath was the guiding motif binding the loosely connected parts into a whole. This wrath, incurred by a temple desecration apparently committed at Massilia, meant for the plot what Poseidon’s wrath meant for the Odyssey. The motif’s turn into the comic, and the travestying treatment of pathos proper to epic and tragedy, followed from the whole’s comic basic character. Thus a fantastic bond encircled the vivid depictions of reality, lifting the whole from the sphere of common reality into the ideal sphere of art.
Second, the edition argues for Cuma as the setting, on the grounds already given: the town is an urbs Graeca, a Roman colony, and its chief officials are called praetors. If the novel is set in Cuma, Petronius depicted what he saw daily; for he presumably had his villa there, where he also died.
