About the Work
The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a work of ancient Latin prose fiction — part novel, part miscellany, part satire — that has come down to us only in fragments. Its traditional attribution is to Petronius, the arbiter of elegance at the court of Nero, and the text as we have it is a patchwork: a central narrative of wandering and misadventure, interrupted by a long set-piece banquet, studded with poems, and riddled with gaps. The translation used here is W. C. Firebaugh’s complete, unexpurgated English version, which incorporates the eighteenth-century forgeries of Nodot and Marchena as well as readings introduced by De Salas; these supplements are marked off typographically — Nodot’s additions in round brackets, Marchena’s in square brackets, De Salas’s in italics — so that the reader can always tell the genuine Petronius from the later pastiche. Firebaugh’s edition also carries a preface, an introduction, extensive chapter notes on subjects ranging from prostitution and paederastia to the “infamous finger” and the dildo, and six notes by Marchena on forbidden subjects, translated here for the first time.
The work’s own textual history is unusually tangled. Ancient glossaries show that it was divided into books, and the Traguriensian manuscript’s title states that its fragments come from books fifteen and sixteen. Fulgentius assigns one chapter to Book Fourteen; a glossary of St. Benedict Floriacensis cites another as from Book Fifteen. Firebaugh reasons that the surviving chapters may belong to Books Fourteen through Sixteen, and that the original probably exceeded Tom Jones in length — a vast comic narrative of which we possess only a broken fraction. What survives is therefore not a tidy novel but a sequence of brilliant scenes: the quarrel of Encolpius and Ascyltos, the dinner of Trimalchio, the adventures at sea, the misadventures at Croton. The reader should approach it as one approaches a ruined fresco — aware that whole panels are missing, and that what remains is vivid precisely because it is incomplete.
Context
The Satyricon belongs to the world of imperial Rome, and its author to the court of Nero. The best authorities ascribe the work to Caius Petronius, the Arbiter Elegantiarum whose death Tacitus relates; Theodor Mommsen held that the narrative’s date is settled and unsurpassed in Roman literature, and that no one doubts its author is Nero’s Arbiter. If that attribution is right, the book was written by a man who knew the imperial court from the inside — a profound psychologist, a master of realism, a storyteller, and, by the standards of his own class, a gentleman. His object, as the introduction puts it, was to amuse and to pillory the aristocracy; his cynicism lacks the malignity of Aristophanes, and Niebuhr, comparing him to Diderot and Gozzi, found in him a dramatic power of creating independent characters and, beneath the surface, a deep contempt for immorality and a heart for greatness.
The question of when the action is set has exercised scholars. Beck concluded the author lived between 6 and 34 A.D., but overlooked the possibility that he might write later of his own times while setting the action earlier. Mommsen and Haley place the scene under Augustus; Buecheler around 36–7 A.D.; Friedlaender under Nero. La Porte du Theil places it at Naples, arguing that the city must be sizable since Encolpius and Ascyltos could not find their inn and Giton marked the pillars with chalk, and that the Gulf of Naples is the only fitting coastline. Haley argues for Puteoli, with an old-town/new-town theory. Trimalchio’s remark that he saw the Sibyl at Cumae has been used as evidence for Cumae, though Firebaugh suggests it may be a copyist’s gloss or a commonplace local reference. What is not in doubt is the texture of the world the book depicts: a society of freedmen grown rich, of legacy-hunters and fortune-chasers, of slaves and masters bound together in mutual dependence and mutual contempt, of temples and brothels and baths and dinner-tables where the whole comedy of Roman life is played out.
The text we read is also a product of later centuries. The Nodot forgery of 1690, the Marchena forgery of 1768/1800, and the De Salas additions of 1629 all testify to the work’s strange afterlife — to the desire of later ages to fill its gaps, to complete what time had broken. Nodot, a French soldier of fortune, claimed to have obtained a manuscript from a Greek renegade at the sack of Belgrade; the supplements were accepted by the academies of Arles and Nîmes before skeptical scholars exposed the fraud, noting among other things a French police regulation requiring newly arrived travellers to register their names with a police officer of a first-century Italian village. Marchena, a Spaniard of Jewish extraction who fled the Inquisition and ended up on General Moreau’s staff at Basle, constructed his fragment to publish notes on forbidden subjects, translating it into French and attaching his commentary; his pastiche was so skillful that it might have succeeded had he not acknowledged it within two or three years. These forgeries are part of the book’s context as surely as Nero’s court is — evidence of how powerfully the Satyricon has compelled later readers to imagine its missing pieces.
Structure of the Book
The Satyricon as it survives is not a continuous narrative but a sequence of episodes, and the notes from the actual text reveal its real divisions. The work opens with a discussion of rhetoric and education — the narrator’s complaint that schools produce only bombast, that teachers must gibber with lunatics, that a chaste style rises by natural purity — and moves quickly into the quarrel of Encolpius and Ascyltos over the boy Giton. From there the narrative proceeds through a series of adventures: the encounter with Quartilla and the rites of Priapus, the dinner at Trimalchio’s house, the escape from the banquet, the wanderings through the town, the quarrel and separation of the two friends, the meeting with Eumolpus, the voyage by sea, and the arrival at Croton.
The most famous section is the Cena Trimalchionis, the Dinner of Trimalchio, which occupies the central portion of the surviving text and gives the work its most memorable character. Trimalchio is a freedman grown immensely rich, a man who produces everything at home — wool, pitch, pepper, even hen’s milk if asked — who has countless slaves most of whom do not know him by sight, who keeps a clock and a liveried bugler in his dining-room so he can instantly tell how much of his life has run out. The dinner itself is a series of extravagant courses and entertainments: the boar wearing a liberty cap, the thrushes flying out of the carved boar, the hog that has not been gutted and then disgorges sausages, the glassmaker who could have made a fortune had Caesar not ordered his head chopped off, the Homerists reciting while Trimalchio intones in Latin from a book, the werewolf story of Niceros, the witches’ story of Trimalchio himself, the reading of the will, the description of the monument Trimalchio wants built. Around the table sit other freedmen — Dama, Seleucus, Hermeros, Habinnas — each with his own story, his own grievances, his own pretensions. The dinner ends with Trimalchio proposing a bath, and the narrator and his companions escaping through a door that leads them into a fish-pond and then into the streets.
After the dinner, the narrative continues with the wanderings of Encolpius and Giton, the quarrel with Ascyltos, the meeting with Eumolpus the poet, the voyage, and the arrival at Croton. The notes show the work’s later sections dealing with the rites of the Persians, the voice of Circe, the use of sputum in charms, the “infamous finger,” the dildo, and the Cordax. The text as we have it ends in mid-scene, with Encolpius reflecting on the nature of love and possession as he lies on the poop of a ship, unable to sleep, while Eumolpus dozes and Giton lies beside him. It is a characteristic ending for a work that survives only in fragments — not a conclusion but a pause, the narrative suspended in the middle of a thought.
Inside the Book
The Translator’s Preface and the Problem of Slang
W. C. Firebaugh opens his complete, unexpurgated translation of the Satyricon by confessing the translator’s familiar sense of unworthiness, and by naming the deeper hazard: allusions that were plain to Petronius’s first readers have grown obscure, so a rendering can only ever be the product of its own literary moment as much as of scholarship. He points to Melmouth’s Pliny, Adlington’s Golden Ass, Golding’s Ovid and Hickes’s Lucian as versions that belonged to their epochs, and observes that because languages shift—and slang shifts fastest of all—any translation of an author whose characters speak argot must be revised again and again. Stephen Gaselee’s bibliography supplies the proof: Harry Thurston Peck’s “he’s a daisy” for bellum pomum now wants “he’s a peach,” and his “that was life” for illud erat vivere now wants “that was the life.” No rendering of such passages can be final; it must live in the slang of the hour. Firebaugh regrets that Justus Lipsius never edited Petronius, and that Laurence Sterne never made a version—Sterne would have drawn Trimalchio and his peers admirably.
The Shape of the Work and Its Author
The introduction calls the Satyricon a scintillating miscellany, traditionally ascribed to Petronius, arbiter of elegance at Nero’s court, and praises its wit, characterization, realism and style even while admitting its discrepancies, incoherences and lacunae; its author stays shrouded, compared to Shakespeare, Flaubert and Rabelais. The title itself is disputed: Heinsius and Scaliger derive it from the Greek satyr, while Casaubon, Dacier and Spanheim trace it to the Latin satura, a plate of varied foods. The text falls into three movements—the adventures of Encolpius and his companions, the digression of Trimalchio’s Dinner, and further adventures—and ancient glossaries show it was divided into books; the Traguriensian manuscript claims its fragments come from books fifteen and sixteen, and Firebaugh reasons that chapters 1–26 may be Book Fourteen, the Cena Book Fifteen, and Encolpius’s wanderings to his meeting with Eumolpus Book Sixteen. The original, he suspects, exceeded Tom Jones in length. On authorship, the best authorities name Caius Petronius, Nero’s Arbiter, whose end Tacitus relates; Theodor Mommsen calls the narrative’s date settled and unsurpassed in Roman literature. Niebuhr’s long estimate compares Petronius to Diderot and Gozzi, praises his power of creating independent characters, and finds in him deep contempt for immorality and a heart for greatness. The dating remains contested—Beck, Mommsen and Haley, Buecheler, Friedlaender all differ—and the scene is placed variously at Naples or Puteoli, with Trimalchio’s remark about seeing the Sibyl at Cumae raising its own puzzle.
The Forgeries of Nodot, Marchena and De Salas
In October 1690 the French soldier of fortune François Nodot wrote to Charpentier, President of the Academy of France, about a manuscript whose provenance ran through the sack of Belgrade in 1688, a Greek renegade, and a copy made at Frankfort. The “Nodotian Supplements” were blessed by the Academies of Arles and Nîmes, but skeptics soon exposed the fraud: the Latinity was attacked, and a French police regulation requiring newly arrived travellers to register with an officer had been smuggled into first-century Italian prose. Some editors still print them for continuity, but they distort the author and are generally bracketed or set in different type. José Marchena, a Spaniard of Jewish extraction who fled the Inquisition and reached Basle on General Moreau’s staff in 1800, allegedly constructed his fragment to publish notes on forbidden subjects, translating it into French and attaching them; another story has him producing it after a reprimand for a loose song. Its obscenity outrivals the surrounding text, yet its grammar, style and curiosa felicitas Petroniana make it an almost perfect imitation, built from words and phrases gathered across the Satyricon. The original edition is unprocurable; the Soleure reprint of 1865 ran to only 120 copies. Marchena died at Madrid in poverty in 1821, and his forgery might have succeeded had he not acknowledged it within a few years. Of De Salas, whose Petronius appeared in 1629 and was reissued in 1643, almost nothing is known; the Paris edition he claims to have used is unknown to bibliographers and supposed fictitious. The bracket code is then set out—Nodot in round brackets, Marchena in square, De Salas in italics—with thanks to Ralph Straus and Professor Stephen Gaselee.
The Decay of Oratory
The narrative proper opens with the narrator promising the story of his adventures, enlivening jolly conversation with witty tales. Fabricius Veiento has spoken on the errors committed in religion’s name, showing priests animated by a hypocritical mania for prophecy, expounding mysteries obscure to themselves. Rhetoricians cry of wounds suffered for public liberty and lost eyes, their sole gain being that in the Forum they think themselves in another world. The schools, the narrator argues, cause young men’s foolishness, offering only pirates in chains, tyrants ordering sons to behead fathers, and oracles demanding the immolation of virgins. Such a diet cannot produce wisdom; the teachers are chiefly to blame for oratory’s decay, for Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, the nine lyric poets, Plato and Demosthenes were not given to such exercises. A chaste style rises by natural purity, whereas the windy bombast imported from Asia touched youthful minds like a pestilential planet, so that none attained Thucydides or Hyperides; painting suffered too when the Egyptians commercialized it. Agamemnon then approaches and tells the narrator that his sentiments do not reflect public taste: teachers must gibber with lunatics, for unless they speak according to their pupils’ dictates they would be left alone in the schools.
Ascyltos, Giton and the Flight to Lycurgus
After surveying the whole town, the narrator returns to a little room, claims the kisses he considers rightfully his, embraces the boy and enjoys the fulfillment of their mutual vows. Before the ceremonies are complete, Ascyltos stealthily approaches the door, wrenches off the bars and bursts in on the narrator “toying” with his “brother,” filling the room with laughter and hand-clapping, pulling away the cloak and jeering about a “blanket-wedding.” He does not stop at words: pulling the strap from his bag, he lashes the narrator thoroughly, asking sarcastically whether this is how he would share with his comrade. The unexpectedness compels the narrator to endure the blows in silence and accept the abuse; he smiles at his calamity, prudently, since otherwise he would have had to fight a rival.
The Mock Wedding of Pannychis and Giton
The scene opens already in motion: Psyche has wrapped the child’s head in a bridal veil, and a torch-bearing catamite leads a long procession of drunken women who clap and follow, the bridal bed already decked with suggestive drapery. Quartilla, spurred on by the wantonness around her, seizes Giton and draws him into the bridal chamber; the boy goes willingly, and the girl shows no alarm at the name of marriage. Once the pair are shut inside, the narrator and his companions sit outside the door. Quartilla puts her eye to a purposely made chink and watches the childish dalliance with lascivious attention, then pulls the narrator to her side to share the spectacle. As both try to peep, their faces press together, and whenever she is not engrossed in the performance she purses her lips to meet his, pecking at him with furtive kisses.
A thunderous hammering interrupts. A soldier of the night-watch enters with drawn sword, surrounded by young rowdies, accusing Quartilla of making game of him with lying promises and cheating him of a promised night. At his order his companion binds Quartilla and the narrator together mouth to mouth, breast to breast, thigh to thigh, amid much laughter. The catamite, also at the soldier’s command, slavers the narrator with fetid kisses he cannot avoid, and finally ravishes him. Meanwhile the satyrion he had drunk spurs him to lust, and he begins to gore Quartilla, who reciprocates, while the rowdies laugh themselves sick at the ludicrous scene. Pannychis, unaccustomed at her tender years to Venus’s pastime, raises an outcry, attracting the soldier; she is being ravished and Giton has won a not bloodless victory. The soldier rushes upon them, seizing Pannychis, then Giton, then both in a crushing embrace. The virgin pleads her age in vain; her childish charms only fire him more. She covers her head, resolved to endure whatever the Fates hold.
An old woman—the same who had tricked the narrator when he was hunting for their lodging—comes to Pannychis’s aid as if dropped from the clouds, rushing in and swearing a gang of footpads prowls the neighborhood, invoking “All honest men” in vain, since the night-watch are asleep or carousing and nowhere to be found. Terrified, the soldier rushes headlong from Quartilla’s house; his companions follow, freeing Pannychis and relieving the rest of fear.
Escape from Quartilla’s House
Wearied of Quartilla’s lechery, the narrator meditates escape and tells Ascyltos, who is delighted, wishing to rid himself of Psyche’s importunities. Giton’s confinement in the bridal chamber is the only difficulty, since they wish to take him along, out of the way of these prostitutes’ viciousness. While they debate, Pannychis falls out of bed, dragging Giton after her by her own weight; he is unhurt, but she bumps her head and raises such clamor that Quartilla rushes headlong into the room in fright, giving the pair the opportunity to make off. They fly back to their inn and pass the remainder of the night without fear.
Next day they encounter two of their kidnappers; Ascyltos savagely attacks one, thrashes and seriously wounds him, then runs to aid the narrator against the other, who defends himself so stoutly that he wounds both slightly and escapes unscathed. On the third day, the date set for the free dinner at Trimalchio’s, battered as they are, flight seems preferable to quiet; they hasten to their inn, dress their trifling wounds with vinegar and oil, and go to bed. The ruffian they had done for still lies on the ground, and they fear detection. As they frame melancholy excuses to evade the coming revel, a slave of Agamemnon’s bursts in, asking if they know with whom their engagement is today—the exquisite Trimalchio, who keeps a clock and a liveried bugler in his dining-room so he can instantly tell how much of his life has run out. Forgetting their troubles, they dress hurriedly and order Giton, who had willingly performed his servile office, to follow them to the bath.
The Ball Game and the First Glimpse of Trimalchio
After dressing, they stroll and approach a circle of players, catching sight of a bald-headed old fellow in a russet tunic playing ball with long-haired boys. He never stoops for a ball that touches ground; a slave stands by with a bagful to supply the players. Two eunuchs flank the ring—one holds a silver chamber-pot, the other counts balls that fall to the ground. Menelaus rushes up, saying this is the man with whom they will recline, and what they see is only a prelude to dinner. Trimalchio snaps his fingers; the eunuch holds the chamber-pot while he relieves himself.
The Wealth and Household of Trimalchio
Seeking information, the narrator questions an informant about Fortunata, Trimalchio’s wife. She is described as wealthy and influential, once poor but now controlling Trimalchio’s affairs to the point where he would believe her if she claimed it was dark when it was daylight. Trimalchio is portrayed as unaware of his own wealth, while Fortunata is vigilant, temperate, sober, and full of good advice, but also has a scolding tongue and strong likes and dislikes. The informant details Trimalchio’s vast estates, piles of money, and more silver plate in his steward’s office than others have in their entire fortunes. He has countless slaves, most of whom do not know him by sight, and they are so in awe of him that they would step into a dunghill at his nod.
The informant explains that Trimalchio produces everything at home, including wool, pitch, pepper, and even hen’s milk if asked. He bought rams from Tarentum, bees from Attica for Attic honey, and sent to India for mushroom seed. His mules are sired by wild asses, and his cushions are stuffed with purple or scarlet wool. Other freedmen friends of Trimalchio are pointed out, all wealthy. One fellow reclining at the end couch is worth 800,000 and rose from nothing, once carrying faggots on his back; it is said he snatched off an Incubo’s hat and found a treasure. He still carries marks of a box on the ear and posted a notice: “CAIUS POMPONIUS DIOGENES HAS PURCHASED A HOUSE THIS GARRET FOR RENT AFTER THE KALENDS OF JULY.” Another freedman has a good front but lost heavily through speculation, cheated by rascally freedmen. He used to be an undertaker, dined like a king, but when his affairs went wrong, he advertised an auction with the placard: “JULIUS PROCULUS WILL SELL AT AUCTION HIS SUPERFLUOUS FURNITURE.”
Trimalchio’s Astrology and the Boar Course
Trimalchio interrupts the gossip, lying back on his couch, and says the wine should go down pleasantly, as the fish must have something to swim in. He boasts about the dinner and his culture, mentioning his patron wanted him to become a man among men.
Trimalchio’s Household Entertainments
Scintilla accuses one of the slaves of being a pimp and threatens to have him branded, but Trimalchio only laughs, calling it the “Cappadocian” in him and admiring that the man never cheats himself. He tells Scintilla not to be jealous, boasting that he once played at thrust and parry with his mistress Mamma until his master grew suspicious and sent him back to a stewardship. Taking this as praise, the slave pulls a small earthen lamp from his garment and impersonates a trumpeter for half an hour or more while Habinnas hums, finger pressed to his lips. He then imitates a flute-player with his pipes, and a mule-driver with whip and smock. Habinnas kisses him, pours him a drink, praises him as “Massa,” and promises him a pair of shoes.
Dessert arrives: pastry thrushes stuffed with nuts and raisins, and quinces with spines like sea-urchins. The last dish revolts the guests, who take it for a fat goose flanked with fish and birds, until Trimalchio reveals everything was made from the same stuff. The narrator concludes it was excrement or mud, citing a like artifice at Rome during the Saturnalia. Trimalchio explains his cook made it all out of a hog, praising his ability to make fish, pigeon, turtle-dove, or hen from parts of a sow. He named him Daedalus and gave him knives from Rome made of Noric steel. The knives are brought in and the guests test their edges on their cheeks.
Two slaves enter feigning a fight at the fountain, each with a water-jar on a yoke. Trimalchio arbitrates; neither abides; each smashes the other’s jar with a club. Oysters and scallops pour from the broken jars and are passed around. The cook serves snails on a silver gridiron, singing discordantly. Long-haired boys bring unguents in a silver basin and anoint the guests’ feet, binding their thighs and ankles with flower garlands, perfuming the wine-mixing vessel and pouring melted unguent into the lamps. Fortunata wants to dance; Scintilla claps. Trimalchio summons Philargyrus and Carrio to the table, calling them green faction fans, and tells them to bring Menophila. A mob of slaves crowds the dining-room. The cook sits next to the narrator, stinking of sauces and pickle, impersonates Ephesus the tragedian, and bets his master the greens will win first place at the next circus games.
Trimalchio’s Will and Monument
Delighted, Trimalchio declares slaves are men who sucked the same milk, and that they will drink the water of freedom if he lives. He frees all of them in his will: Philargyrus gets a farm and his bedfellow; Carrio gets a tenement house, his twentieth, a bed and bedclothes; Fortunata becomes his heir, commended to his friends. He has his will read aloud while the household groans. He asks Habinnas to build his monument per his plans: a little bitch at his statue’s feet, wreaths, jars of perfume, and all the fights of Petraites. He specifies a frontage of one hundred feet and depth of two hundred, fruit trees and vines around his ashes, and the notice that the monument does not descend to an heir. He will appoint a freedman custodian of the tomb to prevent the rabble from defecating there. He wants carved ships under full sail, himself in robes of office on his tribunal with five gold rings, pouring coin from a sack for the people, since he gave a dinner and two dinars per guest. He wants a banquet-hall with merry people, Fortunata on his right holding a dove and leading a little bitch on a leash, his favorite boy, large jars sealed with gypsum (one broken, a boy crying over it), and a sun-dial in the middle so readers must read his name. The inscription reads: “Here rests G Pompeius Trimalchio, freedman of Maecenas, decreed Augustal, Seviri in his absence, he could have been a member of every decuria of Rome but would not, conscientious, brave, loyal, he grew rich from little and left thirty million sesterces behind, he never heard a philosopher. Farewell Trimalchio, farewell passerby.”
Trimalchio weeps; Fortunata, Habinnas, and the whole household lament as at a funeral. Even the narrator sniffles. Trimalchio proposes living while they can, since all must die, and suggests a bath, claiming it is hot as a furnace. Habinnas agrees, saying he likes making two days out of one, and follows barefoot. The narrator asks Ascyltos what he thinks; Ascyltos suggests escaping in the crowd while they hunt for the bath. Giton leads them through the porch to a door where a chained dog’s barking startles Ascyltos into a fish-pond. The narrator, tipsy and frightened by a dog that was only a painting, is dragged into the pool trying to help. The porter rescues them, quiets the dog, and pulls them shivering to dry land. Giton ransoms himself by throwing the dinner he had saved to the barking brute, which calms and eats. The porter tells them no guest may leave by the same door he entered; some doors are for entrance, others for exit. Trapped in this labyrinth, they ask the porter to lead them to the bath.
Lost in the Night and the Quarrel over Giton
Drunk and lost in an unfamiliar district at midnight, the narrator and his companions wander for nearly an hour over flints and broken tiles, their feet bleeding, with no torch or wayfarer to guide them. They are saved by Giton’s foresight: the day before, he had marked all the pillars and columns with chalk, and these marks, visible even in the pitchy darkness, point out the way. Reaching their lodging, they find the old woman so drunk from carousing with guests that she would not notice being set on fire. They would have spent the night on the door-sill had not Trimalchio’s courier arrived with ten wagons, hammered on the door, smashed it in, and given them entrance through the breach. The narrator goes to bed with his “brother” and surrenders to sexual gratification, celebrated in a four-line verse about the purple night, soft couch, embracing, and wandering kisses.
But his self-congratulation is premature: overcome with wine, his hands relax, and Ascyltos steals the boy away in the night to his own bed, where he has unrestrained relations with a “brother” not his own, while the boy either does not notice the fraud or pretends not to. Waking and finding the bed despoiled, the narrator swears he was on the verge of transfixing both with his sword. Instead he spanks Giton awake and tells Ascyltos, with a savage frown, that since he has broken faith and severed their friendship, he should gather his things and find another bottom for his abominations. Ascyltos raises no objection; after they divide everything with scrupulous exactitude, he demands they also divide the boy.
Eumolpus Pleads for the Fugitives
Eumolpus steps forward as mediator, begging Lycas to show mercy to the runaways. He argues that the young men did not stumble into the trap by accident, since any passenger asks the captain’s name before trusting his safety aboard. Even harsh masters restrain their cruelty when penitent fugitives return, and mercy is owed to surrendered enemies. He reminds Lycas that the pair were once bound to him by friendship, and that if they had stolen or betrayed a trust, the punishment already inflicted is satisfaction enough. Can Lycas truly read slavery on their foreheads, or see self-inflicted brand-marks on the faces of free men?
Lycas refuses to let the issue be muddled. Why, he demands, did they shave their heads if they came willingly? A man who alters his features meditates deceit, not reconciliation. And if they sought peace through a mediator, why did Eumolpus hide them? He warns Eumolpus not to spoil his case by calling them well-born, and insists that because they were friends, they deserve harsher punishment still: whoever assaults a stranger is a robber, but whoever assaults a friend is little better than a parricide. Eumolpus concedes that the midnight haircut looks damning, and offers the explanation that they meant to lighten their heads before boarding, only for an unexpected wind to interrupt them; they never imagined it mattered where they began what they had already decided. Lycas presses on—why shave like suppliants unless to court sympathy, and what salamander singed off Encolpius’s eyebrows?
The Battle at Sea
Encolpius stands stricken dumb, his shaven head and missing eyebrows leaving him disfigured, while a damp sponge smears the soot across his tear-wet face. Eumolpus swears no one will humiliate well-born young men against right and law, and his hired servant and some seasick passengers back him, inflaming the quarrel. Encolpius asks no quarter for himself but shakes his fists at Tryphaena, threatening her unless she stops tormenting Giton. The ship splits into two factions: on one side a barber arms men with razors, on the other Tryphaena’s retainers ready their fists. The pilot declares neutrality but threatens to abandon the helm unless the madness stirred up by these vagabonds subsides. Many fall, none mortally; more retreat bleeding. Giton turns a razor on his own virile parts, threatening to cut away the cause of their misfortunes, and Tryphaena stops him only by promising quarter. Encolpius lifts a blade to his own throat repeatedly without any intention of using it, while Giton, holding the very razor with which he had already cut his throat, acts more convincingly. The pilot prevails on Tryphaena to act as herald, and she snatches an olive-branch from the ship’s figurehead and advances to parley.
The Treaty of Peace
Tryphaena pours out a rhapsody in verse: what fury turns peace to war, what evil was done by these hands? No Trojan absconds with a bride here, no crazed Medea stains the ship. Passion scorned becomes a power, but who courts death by drawing sword amidst the waves? The battle-line wavers and all hands are recalled to peace. Eumolpus, their commander, seizes the moment of repentance, rebukes Lycas sharply, and signs a treaty: Tryphaena foregoes all complaint of wrongs done by Giton, seeks no revenge, and must neither embrace nor kiss the boy, on forfeiture of a hundred denarii. Lycas must not annoy Encolpius with abusive word or reproachful look, nor inquire where he sleeps, on forfeiture of two hundred denarii per offense. The treaty is signed, arms laid down, and it seems well to wipe out the past with kisses.
The Storm and Lycas’s Death
Then the sea turns rough, clouds darken the daylight, and panic-stricken sailors take in sail. The gale drives the waves in no single direction, so the helmsman loses his bearings, and a black pall hides even the ship’s bow. As the fury grows, the trembling Lycas stretches out his hands and shouts to Encolpius to save them by restoring the sacred robe and holy rattle, pleading for mercy as in the past. A windsquall sweeps him into the sea and drowns him in a maelstrom. Tryphaena, by contrast, is seized by her faithful servants, placed in a skiff with most of her belongings, and saved. Embracing Giton, Encolpius laments that the gods unite them only in death, and urges the boy, if he ever truly loved him, to kiss him and snatch a last delight before dissolution. Giton strips off his garment, creeps beneath Encolpius’s tunic, puts out his head to be kissed, and passes his belt around them both, saying the sea will bear them longer joined, and if it casts them on the same shore, a passerby may pile stones over them or the drifting sand will perform last rites. Encolpius submits to the bond and awaits an end no longer dreaded. The storm strips the ship of mast, helm, ropes, and oars, leaving a water-logged derelict. Fishermen put off in boats to salvage booty, but seeing men alive and ready to defend their property, they change their predatory designs into offers of help.
Eumolpus’s Poem and the Body of Lycas
Amid the clamor a bellowing comes from beneath the captain’s cabin, as of a wild beast trying to get out. They discover Eumolpus sitting and scribbling verses on an immense sheet of parchment. Astounded that he could write poetry at death’s door, they haul him out despite his protests; he rages at the interruption, telling them to leave him until he finishes the sentence, saying the poem labors to its birth. Wet and wretched, they reach a fisherman’s hut, refresh themselves with stores from the wreck spoiled by salt water, and pass an almost interminable night. Next day, holding council on where to go, Encolpius sees a human body turning in a gentle eddy toward shore. He broods with wet eyes on the sea’s treachery, reflecting that perhaps a wife, son, or father awaits the man, and that such is the end of mortal plans. A wave turns the face toward shore, and he recognizes Lycas, so evil-tempered and unrelenting shortly before, now cast up almost at his feet. Encolpius weeps, beats his breast, and taunts him: where is his evil temper now, prey to fish and wild beasts, without a single plank of his great ship? He urges mortals to set their hearts on great ambitions and schemers to control wealth got by fraud for a thousand years; only yesterday Lycas audited his estate and reckoned his arrival home, yet how far he lies from his destination. Shipwreck is everywhere, and it does not matter how the dead body is consumed—by fire, flood, or time—since all achieve the same end. After these reflections they prepare last rites, and Lycas is burned on a funeral pyre raised by the hands of enemies, while Eumolpus composes an epitaph titled “His Fate Was Unavoidable,”
Oenothea’s Goose and the Ordeal of Encolpius
Oenothea turns on Encolpius in a fury, beating her palms, tearing her white hair, scratching her cheeks, and weeping. He has slaughtered a goose sacred to Priapus and dear to married women; should the magistrates hear of it, he will go to the cross. Her dwelling, once inviolate, is now polluted with blood, and any enemy could drive her from her priesthood. Her tears pour like a torrent when spring breaks winter’s fetters. Encolpius offers an ostrich in place of the goose, but as she bewails the bird on the cot, Proselenos arrives with materials for the sacrifice. Seeing the dead goose and learning the cause, she weeps even more violently and mourns with him as though he had slain his own father rather than a public goose.
Tiring of the lament, Encolpius asks whether he might buy immunity for a price even had he assaulted her or murdered a man, and lays down two gold pieces, saying they can buy both gods and geese. Oenothea, seeing the gold, begs forgiveness, says her anxiety was proof of love rather than malice, urges him to keep the matter quiet, and tells him to pray for forgiveness of his sacrilege. A verse passage follows on the rich man who can sail with favoring gale, marry a Danaë without Acrisius’ objection, write verse or declaim, win cases, rival Servius or Labeo, and have anything he craves, since Jove is a prisoner in his treasure chest.
Oenothea then puts a jar of wine under his hands, spreads his fingers, purifies them with leeks and parsley, mutters incantations, and throws hazel-nuts into the wine, drawing conclusions as they sink or float. The narrator notes he was not hoodwinked, since empty, air-filled shells float while heavy full kernels sink. She cuts open the goose’s breast, draws out a very fat liver, and foretells his future from it. To hide the crime she cuts up the goose, spits the pieces, and serves a delectable dinner to the man she had just condemned to death. Cups of unmixed wine go around, and the crones greedily devour the goose they had lamented. When the last morsel disappears, Oenothea, half-drunk, says they must go through the mysteries so he may regain his virility.
The Mysteries and the Flight from the Crones
Oenothea brings out a leathern dildo, smears it with oil, ground pepper, and pounded nettle seed, and forces it little by little up his anus. The merciless old virago anoints his thighs with the same decoction, bathes his genitals with nasturtium juice mixed with elixir of southernwood, and strikes his belly below the navel with green nettles. Stung horribly, he flees with the old hags in pursuit; though befuddled with wine and lust, they follow the right road through several wards, screaming “Stop thief.” He escapes though every toe bleeds. Reaching home, worn out, he seeks his couch but cannot sleep for his evil adventures, concluding no one could be so abjectly unfortunate. He cries that Fortune, always inimical, and Love have joined to ruin him; cruel Eros never dealt leniently—loved or lover, he is tortured.
He cites Chrysis, who loves him desperately and teases him, once despising him as a slave when he wore slave’s garments as her mistress’s go-between; she now would follow his lowly lot at peril of her life, swearing never to leave his side when she told him of her passion. But Circe owns him heart and soul; all others he despises. He asks who could be lovelier than she, comparing her to Ariadne, Leda, Helen, and Venus, saying Paris, had he seen her dancing eyes when umpiring the quarreling goddesses, would have given up Helen and the goddesses for her. If he could steal a kiss or embrace that divine bosom, perhaps virility would return and parts flaccid from witchcraft come into their own. Contempt cannot tire him; if flogged he will forget; if thrown out he will treat it as a joke—only let him be restored to her good graces.
A verse passage describes night’s silence, torturing Amor seizing his hair, dragging and wounding him, ordering a vigil till dawn; the god calls him heart of stone, joy of a thousand sweet mistresses, his slave. In disarrayed nightrobe he leaps to bare feet and tries to follow all paths, but no road can be discovered; one moment he hastens, the next it is torture to move; turning back irks him, shame forbids halting in mid-road. Men’s voices, streets’ roar, birds’ songs, and watch-dogs’ bark are hushed; alone he dreads both slumber and couch and obeys the great Lord of the Passions.
Circe’s Image and the Heroic Parallels
Thoughts of Circe’s charms so wrought on him that he disordered his bed embracing her image, but his efforts were wasted. The obstinate affliction wore out his patience; he cursed the hostile deity bewitching him, then recovered composure, consoled by old heroes persecuted by gods’ anger, and broke into verse: hostile gods and implacable Fate pursue not him alone; Herakles suffered heaven’s displeasure, driven from the Inachian coast; Laomedon sated two heavenly hosts; in Pelias, Juno’s anger raged.
The Editor’s Rome: A Portrait of Imperial Decadence
The commentary attached to Chapter 116 turns from Crotona to the capital itself, insisting that Petronius’s savage caricature was aimed not merely at a provincial town of legacy-hunters but at the conditions of Rome under the empire. Quoting Ammianus Marcellinus at length, the editor paints a city whose greatness was founded on an ancient alliance of virtue and fortune: an infancy spent struggling against the tribes of Italy, a youth that carried victorious arms beyond seas and mountains, and an old age that devolved government upon the Caesars like a wise parent, enjoying a peace as secure as Numa’s reign while the world adored her as queen of the earth. That splendor, the quotation laments, is degraded by nobles who assume unbounded license of vice and folly, contending in the vanity of titles and inventing lofty names for themselves. They multiply gilded statues of bronze and marble, ostentatiously display their rent-rolls, and measure rank by chariots and dress, their silk and purple robes revealing embroidered under-garments. Followed by fifty servants, they speed through the streets; matrons imitate them in covered carriages. At the baths they command insolently, embrace infamous ministers of pleasure, and decline the salutations of citizens, permitting only the kissing of hands or knees. They tour their estates, hunt, and sail from the Lucrine lake to villas at Puteoli and Caieta, comparing their expeditions to those of Caesar and Alexander, while a fly on their umbrella or a sunbeam through a chink makes them lament not being born in the land of the Cimmerians. Their households march like armies, with baggage in front, cooks and ministers following, a promiscuous crowd of slaves in the main body, and eunuchs closing the rear. In domestic jurisdiction a tardy slave gets three hundred lashes, but a murderer is mildly reproved. Hospitality has decayed; at banquets the modest and learned are seldom preferred, and parasites practice flattery, praising columns and pavements while uncommon birds, dormice, or fish are weighed and notaries attest the marvel. Gaming offers another road to wealth, nobles abhor study, libraries are sealed like sepulchres, and costly theatrical instruments resound in palaces where sound is preferred to sense. Avarice drives a gouty senator to Spoleto for an inheritance; husbands and wives summon lawyers to declare contradictory intentions; extravagance reduces the great to humiliating borrowing and then to tragic declamation when paying, while a sycophant charges poison or magic against creditors who sign discharges. Puerile superstition accompanies vice, with haruspices reading entrails and many consulting astrology before bathing, dining, or appearing publicly, even among sceptics who doubt a celestial power.
Captatores and the Ancient East
A second note on the same chapter defines captare as getting the upper hand, captari as being duped, and captator as a succession of such undertakings, citing Martial’s verses against the inheritance-hunting Marianus and Pliny the Elder’s scathing attack on those who pay court to old people for legacies, saying childlessness conferred authority and influence became insidious. Ammianus Marcellinus remarks that some grovel before rich men, old or young, childless or unmarried, or before wives and children, to influence them by finesse; the editor notes this profession is not lost, citing “undue influence” in modern courts alongside Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “husband,” refined cruelty, injunctions, separate maintenance, and heart balm. A note on Chapter 119 turns to the Persian rite of castration, practiced from antiquity as a feature of harem life in the Levant, with Semiramis accused of first ordering the emasculation of boy slaves. Claudianus is quoted on Assyrian and Parthian luxury fostering boyish bloom, and Ammianus describes eunuchs from old men to boys, pale and hideous, making one detest Semiramis. The Old Testament shows the Hebrews knew the abomination, though no mention of eunuchs in Judea appears before Josiah, and Deuteronomy forbade the mutilated to enter the assembly.
The Skoptzi and the Seal of Purity
The appended material pursues the subject into modern Russia, where a sect called the skoptzi took its name from the practice. First mentioned in connection with a monk who came to Russia about 1001, and noticed repeatedly across the centuries, the sect became prominent in 1721–1724. Members called themselves “white doves,” divided into congregations called “ships” led by a “pilot” and a female “pilot’s mate,” and provided two degrees of emasculation: the fully emasculated received the “royal seal,” the partially emasculated reached the “Second Degree of Purity.” The operation used a red-hot knife or hot iron, called “baptism by fire”; female converts had breasts amputated with red-hot knife or shears, which also checked haemorrhage and infection, while another method seared the vagina so scar tissue contracted it against male entrance. Members included bankers, civil service officials, and navy and army officers. Leroy-Beaulieu says they preferred boys and youths, convincing them of “killing the flesh”; boys of fifteen sometimes resorted to self-mutilation, and they used violence or deceit, ensnaring victims by equivocal speech and revealing the real meaning only at the last moment. A Moscow anecdote describes an old man with a sallow, unnaturally smooth face telling a young man that only virgins stand before the Most High, that adulterers cannot enter Heaven, and that one must kill the flesh to become like disembodied angels and “white as snow.” The old man led him to a cellar with lights, some fifteen white-robed men and women, a stove with fire, and prayers and dances like the Flagellants’. The young man was seized, gagged, blindfolded, stretched out, and stamped with the “seal of purity” by a red-hot knife. This happened to a peasant named Saltykov, who fainted and, on waking, was offered the choice between secrecy and death. Catherine II signed the first edict against the sect in 1772; prosecutions became vigorous in 1871, with many sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, and many emigrated to Roumania, taking the name “Lipovans.” Women, especially Anna Romanovna, had a great share in inventing and spreading the doctrine, often transforming men to angels with their own hands. Numbers reached about 3000 in 1871 and 5444 in 1874, including 1465 women; in 1847, 515 men and 240 women were transported to Siberia. The sect still holds its own in Russia, and its members are millennarians, believing the messiah will not come until they number 144,000. Antiquity knew three varieties of eunuch: Castrati, with scrotum and testicles amputated; Spadones, with testicles torn out; and Thlibiae, with testicles destroyed by crushing.
Spittle, the Infamous Finger, and the Nubian Dancer
A note on Chapter 127 praises the passage on the sweetness of her voice for ethereal beauty, comparing Horace’s ode to Calliope and a passage in Catullus.
Main Arguments
The Satyricon does not argue in the manner of a treatise, but it makes a series of claims about the world it depicts, and those claims are the substance of its satire. The first is that education has become hollow. The narrator’s opening complaint — that rhetoricians cry of wounds suffered for public liberty and lost eyes, that their sole gain is that in the Forum they think themselves in another world, that schools show only pirates in chains and tyrants ordering sons to behead fathers — is not merely a literary grumble. It is an argument that the training of the young has been severed from any real purpose, that style has replaced substance, that the windy bombast from Asia has touched youthful minds like a pestilential planet. Agamemnon’s reply — that teachers must gibber with lunatics, that unless they speak per their pupils’ dictates they would be left alone in the schools — concedes the point while shifting the blame to the audience. The argument is that a whole culture has learned to prefer the sound of wisdom to its substance.
The second claim is that wealth, in the hands of those who have recently acquired it, produces not dignity but a grotesque and self-defeating display. Trimalchio is the great exemplar. He produces everything at home, he has more silver plate in his steward’s office than others have in their entire fortunes, he owns estates near Terracina and Tarentum which he has never seen, he considers adding Sicily to his holdings so he can sail along his own coasts to Africa. Yet his culture is a patchwork of half-understood fragments: he knows the twelve labors of Hercules and Ulysses and the Cyclops from Homer, he has three libraries, one Greek and two Latin, but his verdict on a legal case is that if that is the case there is nothing to dispute, and if not it amounts to nothing. His astrology is a farrago of nonsense; his account of the origin of Corinthian bronze is a fantasy; his taste in glass is defended on the grounds that it does not stink. The argument is not that Trimalchio is stupid — he is shrewd enough about money — but that wealth without cultivation produces a man who can buy everything and understand nothing.
The third claim is that love and friendship, in this world, are as unstable as fortune. The quarrel of Encolpius and Ascyltos over Giton, the boy’s choice of Ascyltos when given his freedom, the narrator’s meditation on how the name of friendship lives only as long as expedient — these are not incidental. They are the work’s demonstration that in a society where everything is for sale, the deepest human ties are also subject to the market. Giton chooses the stronger when he sees two armed men; Ascyltos abandons a comrade in a strange town; Encolpius himself, in the passage that closes the surviving text, reflects that he desires no possession unless the world envies him for possessing it. The argument is that love, like everything else, has been contaminated by the logic of competition and display.
Key Concepts
Several specific motifs recur throughout the Satyricon and give it its distinctive texture. The first is the Cena Trimalchionis itself — the dinner as a total social fact, a scene in which food, wealth, status, entertainment, and death are all mixed together. The dinner is not just a meal; it is a performance of social position, and every course is a claim about who Trimalchio is and what he can do. The boar with the liberty cap, the thrushes flying out of the carved boar, the hog that disgorges sausages, the pastry thrushes stuffed with nuts and raisins, the quinces with spines like sea-urchins — each dish is a small essay in the aesthetics of excess. The dinner is also a memento mori: Trimalchio reads his will aloud, describes his monument, weeps, and proposes a bath, and the whole scene hovers between comedy and funeral.
The second concept is the satyricon itself — the word from which the work takes its title. Heinsius and Scaliger derive it from the Greek satyr; Casaubon, Dacier, and Spanheim derive it from the Latin satura, a plate of varied foods, citing Porphyrion. The ambiguity is productive: the work is both satyr-play and mixed dish, both a drama of lust and a medley of styles. The notes show the text divided into books, with the Traguriensian manuscript claiming fragments from books fifteen and sixteen, and Fulgentius assigning a chapter to Book Fourteen. The work is a miscellany in the deepest sense — a collection of scenes, poems, stories, and digressions held together by the wandering narrator and the thread of his adventures.
The third concept is the rite of Priapus and the associated imagery of fertility, obscenity, and initiation. Quartilla’s household, the shrine where the women brandish emblems of Priapus, the bridal-chamber with its suggestive drapery, the satyrion the narrator drinks — these are not merely decorative. They are the work’s way of marking the boundary between the respectable and the forbidden, and of showing how porous that boundary is. The notes on the “infamous finger,” the dildo, and the Cordax belong here: they are the specific signs of a world in which sexual license is both a religious practice and a social game.
The fourth concept is the forgery — the Nodotian supplements, the Marchena fragment, the De Salas additions. These are not part of Petronius, but they are part of the book as it has come down to us, and they raise the question of what authenticity means for a text that survives only in fragments. The Marchena fragment, composed of words and expressions from various parts of the Satyricon with the Petronian turn of phrase, is an almost perfect imitation; the Nodot supplements, accepted by the academies of Arles and Nîmes, were exposed only by the Latinity and the anachronism of a French police regulation. The concept of the forgery is thus a comment on the work itself: the Satyricon is a text that invites completion, and every completion is a kind of forgery.
Themes
The deepest theme of the Satyricon is the instability of identity in a world where everything is for sale. Encolpius is a wanderer, a lover, a student of rhetoric, a fugitive from justice; Ascyltos is his rival, his comrade, his betrayer; Giton is a boy who is passed from hand to hand, who chooses the stronger when he sees two armed men, who is at one moment a “brother” and at the next a prize to be divided. Trimalchio is a freedman who has become rich, who produces everything at home, who frees all his slaves in his will, who wants his monument to show him pouring coin from a sack for the people. None of these identities is stable; each is a role, a performance, a mask that can be dropped when the page turns. The verse that closes Chapter 80 makes the point explicitly: the strollers act farces on a stage — father, son, rich man — until the page turns, the masque drops, and the make-ups disappear. The Satyricon is a book about people who are always acting, and about a world in which there is no offstage.
A second theme is the relationship between culture and appetite. The Satyricon is full of food, sex, and money, but it is also full of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. The two are not opposed; they are intertwined. Trimalchio has three libraries and a cook named Daedalus; Eumolpus recites poetry in the baths and is pelted with stones; the narrator complains about the decay of oratory and then spends the rest of the book pursuing boys and dodging creditors. The theme is not that culture is hypocritical — though it often is — but that culture and appetite are both expressions of the same social world, and that the same person can be a connoisseur of silver plate and a glutton, a reciter of verses and a lecher. The Satyricon refuses to separate the life of the mind from the life of the body, and in that refusal it is more honest than the moralists it satirizes.
A third theme is the proximity of death. The dinner at Trimalchio’s is full of reminders of mortality: the silver skeleton, the reading of the will, the description of the monument, the story of the Sibyl at Cumae who wants only to die. Trimalchio’s clock and bugler measure out his life; his epitaph declares that he never heard a philosopher; his monument is designed to keep his name before the eyes of passersby. The Satyricon is a comic work, but its comedy is shadowed by the awareness that the feast will end, the wine will run out, and the guests will go home to die. The theme is not morbid but satiric: it exposes the vanity of a world that tries to buy immortality with monuments and dinners, and it suggests that the only honest response to death is the one Trimalchio himself proposes — to live while you can, since all must die.
The Author’s Conclusions
The Satyricon does not conclude in the way a novel concludes, because it does not survive in a complete form. The last notes show Encolpius on the poop of a ship, unable to sleep, reflecting on the nature of love and possession. He has received Eumolpus as a comrade and rival more formidable than Ascyltos, and the thought tortures him until reason puts uneasiness to flight. He tells himself that it is unfortunate the lad has taken their friend’s fancy, but asks whether nature’s every masterpiece is not common to all: the sun shines on all alike, the moon with innumerable stars lights even wild beasts to their food, and water, more beautiful than anything, flows for common use. He asks whether love alone should be stolen rather than regarded as a prize to be won, and says he desires no possession unless the world envies him for possessing it. The passage breaks off in the middle of a sentence — “A solitary old man can scarcely become a serio” — and that is where the surviving text ends.
If the Satyricon has a conclusion, it is not a moral but a mood: the mood of a man who has lost everything and is trying to persuade himself that loss is a kind of freedom. Encolpius has been separated from Ascyltos, betrayed by Giton, thrown together with Eumolpus, and now finds himself on a ship bound for Croton, reflecting that the sun shines on all alike and that water flows for common use. The argument is not that he believes this — the whole passage is a struggle between jealousy and reason — but that he is trying to believe it, and that the attempt itself is the book’s final gesture. The Satyricon ends not with a verdict but with a question: whether love can be shared without being diminished, whether possession is the same as enjoyment, whether a man who has nothing can still want nothing. The text breaks off before the answer, and that is perhaps the most honest ending a book like this could have.
Significance
The Satyricon has been read and misread for centuries, and its significance lies partly in the uses to which it has been put. It has been treated as a scandal, a curiosity, a mine of information about Roman daily life, a masterpiece of comic realism, and a forgery-riddled puzzle. Firebaugh’s introduction compares its author to Shakespeare, Flaubert, and Rabelais; Niebuhr compares him to Diderot and Gozzi; Gaselee notes that no rendering of its slang can be final, since it must be in the slang of the hour. The work has influenced the novel as a form — its picaresque structure, its mixture of verse and prose, its use of a wandering narrator who is both participant and observer — and it has provided later ages with some of their most vivid images of Roman life: the dinner of Trimalchio, the werewolf story of Niceros, the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar.
Its significance for the modern reader is twofold. First, it is a document of a world that is at once utterly alien and uncomfortably familiar: a world of freedmen and legacy-hunters, of dinner parties and brothels, of rhetoric and appetite, of people trying to buy immortality with monuments and dinners. Second, it is a demonstration of what happens to a text when it survives only in fragments. The Satyricon is not a complete work; it is a collection of brilliant scenes, held together by the thread of a narrative that we can only partly reconstruct. The forgeries of Nodot and Marchena, the additions of De Salas, the notes on prostitution and paederastia and the “infamous finger” — all of these are part of the book’s significance, because they show how later ages have tried to complete what time has broken. The Satyricon is a book about a world in which everything is for sale, and it has itself been bought and sold, forged and supplemented, read and misread, for two thousand years. That is its significance: not that it tells us what Rome was like, but that it shows us what we have wanted Rome to be like, and what we have been willing to invent in order to have it.
