Satyricon
Based on Wikipedia: Satyricon
The Wildest Novel You've Never Read
Imagine a story where the narrator crashes an obscenely wealthy man's dinner party, witnesses a fake funeral, escapes a shipwreck, gets cursed with impotence by an angry god, and narrowly avoids being eaten by legacy hunters. Now imagine this story was written nearly two thousand years ago, in Latin, and that most of it has been lost to time.
This is the Satyricon.
Written by Gaius Petronius sometime during the reign of Emperor Nero in the first century AD, the Satyricon stands as one of the most remarkable literary survivals from ancient Rome. It's bawdy, satirical, surprisingly modern in its sensibility, and completely unlike anything else that has come down to us from antiquity. What we have today is only a fraction of the original work—perhaps a few chapters from what may have been a sprawling epic that some scholars compare in length to Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
The fragments we possess run to about 140 pages in modern translation. The complete work might have been thousands of pages long. We'll never know for certain.
What Makes It So Unusual
The Satyricon belongs to a peculiar literary tradition called Menippean satire, named after the Greek philosopher Menippus who pioneered it. Unlike the verse satires of Roman poets like Juvenal or Horace, which directly mock social vices in formal poetry, Menippean satire mixes everything together. Prose and poetry. Comedy and seriousness. High culture and obscenity.
This mixing has a technical name: prosimetrum, meaning a blend of prose and verse within a single work. Characters in the Satyricon will suddenly break into poetry, sometimes to show off their pretensions, sometimes to comment on the action, sometimes seemingly just because Petronius felt like it.
Classical scholars often call the Satyricon a "Roman novel," though they're careful to note this doesn't mean it's directly related to the modern novel as we know it. The only other Roman novel to survive intact is The Golden Ass by Apuleius, written about a century later. But where that work tells a coherent tale of a man transformed into a donkey, the Satyricon as we have it is fragmented, episodic, and deeply strange.
Meet the Characters
Our narrator is Encolpius, a moderately educated man who seems to come from a respectable background but has fallen on hard times. Very hard times. He travels through the Greek-influenced cities of southern Italy with a rotating cast of companions, getting into and out of trouble with remarkable consistency.
His primary companion and love interest is Giton, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy. Their relationship is explicitly sexual, which shocks modern readers but would have been unremarkable to Roman audiences. Giton may be Encolpius's slave, though the text is ambiguous on this point. What's clear is that multiple characters throughout the story compete for Giton's affections, and the boy proves remarkably fickle in his loyalties.
Then there's Ascyltos, a friend and rival of Encolpius. The two share adventures but also share jealousy over Giton, leading to arguments, reconciliations, and eventual separation.
Later, Encolpius befriends Eumolpus, an aging poet who is poor, lecherous, and prone to reciting his own verses at inappropriate moments. Rich men supposedly hate poets like him, we're told. You can see why.
Various other figures drift through the narrative: enemies from past adventures, women who fall for Encolpius (often with frustrating results for everyone involved), servants, innkeepers, and legacy hunters hoping to inherit wealth from dying men.
The Dinner Party to End All Dinner Parties
The most famous surviving section of the Satyricon is the Cena Trimalchionis—the Dinner of Trimalchio. It has been called one of the great comic set-pieces in all of literature, and it fully earns that reputation.
Trimalchio is a freedman. This means he was born a slave but earned or bought his freedom, then accumulated enormous wealth through business dealings. In Roman society, this made him simultaneously rich beyond imagining and forever socially inferior to those born free. He compensates by throwing lavish parties where he can show off everything he has.
Encolpius and his companions get invited to one of these dinners, and what follows is a sustained assault of vulgarity, pretension, and excess. Course after course arrives, each more elaborately disguised than the last. Food is made to look like other food. Dishes are arranged to represent zodiac signs. Trimalchio constantly interrupts proceedings to remind everyone how wealthy he is and how learned he is—though his learning is full of errors that his educated guests notice but dare not correct.
At one point, Trimalchio excuses himself to use the toilet. He's incontinent. While he's away, the other guests—mostly freedmen themselves—chat about everyday concerns. They gossip about neighbors. They complain about the weather and the hard times. They discuss gladiatorial games and the education of their children. Petronius captures their speech patterns with remarkable precision, giving us one of our best windows into how ordinary Romans actually talked.
When Trimalchio returns, he grows philosophical. He mentions casually that he once saw the Sibyl of Cumae—a legendary prophetess granted immortality by Apollo but not eternal youth. She had shriveled with age until she fit inside a glass flask, hanging there forever, and when children asked her what she wanted, she replied only that she wanted to die. This eerie detail would resurface nearly two millennia later as the epigraph to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
The dinner includes ghost stories about werewolves and witches. Trimalchio dictates instructions for his own tomb. Eventually he stages a mock funeral for himself, complete with horns and music. The local fire brigade, hearing the commotion, breaks down the doors thinking there's an emergency. Encolpius and his friends use the chaos to escape.
Adventures on Land and Sea
After the dinner party, the story fragments into episodes that are harder to follow because so much text is missing between them.
We know that Encolpius quarrels with Ascyltos when he discovers Giton has slept with his rival. Giton chooses to stay with Ascyltos. Devastated, Encolpius plots revenge but is disarmed by a soldier before he can do anything.
In an art gallery, he meets Eumolpus, and they bond over shared misfortune. Eumolpus tells the story of how he seduced a boy in Pergamon while employed as the boy's tutor, only to have the tables turned when the youth's sexual appetite exceeded his own. It's played for comedy, though modern readers may find it simply disturbing.
Eventually Encolpius, Giton, and Eumolpus board a ship together, along with a servant named Corax. Too late, Encolpius realizes the captain is Lichas, an old enemy. Also aboard is Tryphaena, a woman connected to their past misadventures. From hints in the text, we can piece together that Encolpius had seduced Lichas's wife, robbed his ship, and somehow become intimately familiar with Lichas himself.
After failed attempts at disguise, the travelers are recognized. Fighting breaks out. Peace is eventually made, and to smooth things over, Eumolpus tells the tale of the Widow of Ephesus. This story-within-a-story has become famous in its own right: a widow who swore to starve herself to death in her husband's tomb is seduced by a soldier guarding crucified criminals nearby. When one of the corpses is stolen on his watch, she offers up her husband's body as a replacement to save her new lover from punishment.
The ship is wrecked in a storm. Lichas drowns. The survivors wash up near Crotona, a city infamous for its legacy hunters—people who cultivate the elderly and sick in hopes of being named in their wills.
Eumolpus hatches a scheme. He'll pose as a wealthy, childless, dying man. Encolpius and Giton will pretend to be his slaves. The legacy hunters will lavish attention on them, hoping to inherit the fictional fortune.
The Curse of Priapus
The remaining episodes take place in Crotona, and they center on a problem that's both comic and genuinely pitiful: Encolpius becomes impotent.
This isn't a random affliction. Throughout the Satyricon, Encolpius has been cursed by Priapus, the god of fertility, for some offense committed before the surviving text begins. Priapus was depicted with an enormous permanent erection, so the irony of his curse rendering Encolpius unable to perform is pointed.
A beautiful woman named Circe—her name deliberately evokes the sorceress from Homer's Odyssey—desires Encolpius. He desires her back. But when they try to consummate their attraction, his body refuses to cooperate. She's furious. He's mortified. They exchange reproachful letters.
Encolpius tries various cures. He sleeps apart from Giton, thinking perhaps he's exhausted himself. He visits an elderly enchantress named Proselenos for magical treatment. He prays at Priapus's temple. A priestess named Oenothea attempts further magic, but Encolpius is attacked by the temple's sacred geese and kills one, creating an additional religious offense.
What follows is one of the more explicit passages in ancient literature, involving various folk remedies and ritual preparations that would make a modern reader blush. Eventually Encolpius flees from his would-be healers.
Somehow—the text is fragmentary here—he recovers his potency. The details are lost.
A Cannibal Ending
The final surviving passage is darkly comic. The legacy hunters of Crotona are growing impatient. Eumolpus's promised wealth hasn't materialized. He appears to have died—or perhaps the Crotonans only believe he has.
His will is read aloud. The legacy hunters learn they can inherit only on one condition: they must consume his corpse.
The text breaks off as historical examples of cannibalism are cited, presumably to encourage the would-be heirs. Did they go through with it? We'll never know.
What Came Before
Tantalizing hints throughout the surviving text let us glimpse adventures that must have occurred earlier in the complete work.
Encolpius mentions having to face the arena. Scholars debate whether this means he was condemned as a criminal to fight as a gladiator, or feared being condemned, or had actually been a professional gladiator at some point. Ascyltos once called him a gladiator as an insult, which might be evidence for any of these readings.
The encounters with Lichas and Tryphaena clearly build on extensive prior history—seductions, thefts, scandals. Lichas identifies Encolpius by examining his groin, suggesting an intimacy between them that the surviving text never explains.
One theory, based on fragments preserved by other ancient authors, is that the story originally began in Massilia—modern Marseille—where Encolpius volunteered to be a scapegoat during a plague. In this ritual, a poor man would be fed at public expense for a year, then ceremonially expelled from the city, symbolically carrying its sins away. If Encolpius started his wanderings this way, it would explain his outcast status and his sense of being pursued by divine wrath.
Some scholars believe the complete work might have followed Encolpius all the way to Egypt, which features prominently in other ancient novels. A poem attributed to Petronius contains an oracle predicting travels to the Danube and to Egypt, though whether this relates to the Satyricon is uncertain.
Who Wrote It and When
The author is identified in manuscripts as Petronius, sometimes with the first name Gaius, sometimes Titus. This is almost certainly the same person as the Petronius described by the historian Tacitus: an aristocrat in Nero's court who served as the emperor's "arbiter of elegance," advising him on matters of taste and luxury.
This Petronius eventually fell from favor and was forced to commit suicide in 66 AD. According to Tacitus, he did so with characteristic style, opening his veins at a banquet while chatting with friends about light poetry rather than philosophy, then binding his wounds to continue the party before finally letting himself bleed out. Even in death, he allegedly sent Nero a letter detailing the emperor's sexual practices, naming names.
The connection between this historical figure and the author of the Satyricon was debated for centuries. Some scholars proposed dates as early as the first century BC or as late as the third century AD. But a consensus has emerged that the work dates from Nero's reign, based on references to specific entertainers of that period and the social conditions it depicts.
The title itself is ambiguous. "Satyricon" seems to derive from the Greek word for satyrs—those lustful, goat-like companions of Dionysus—combined with a Latin ending suggesting stories or tales. "Satyrlike Adventures" captures the sense. Some manuscripts call it "Satyricon liber" (The Book of Satyrlike Adventures) or simply "Satyrica."
Why It Matters
The Satyricon gives us something almost no other ancient text does: a view of Roman life from the ground level.
Most Latin literature that survives was written by and for the educated elite. It deals with wars, politics, philosophy, mythology. The common people appear mainly as types or as masses to be moved. But in the dinner party of Trimalchio, we hear freedmen talking like freedmen actually talked. We learn what they worried about, what they found funny, how they misremembered mythology and mispronounced Greek words they were trying to use to sound sophisticated.
Linguists treasure these passages because they preserve vulgar Latin—not vulgar in the sense of obscene (though there's plenty of that too) but in the original sense of "of the common people." This is the Latin that was actually spoken in the streets and shops, which would eventually evolve into Italian, Spanish, French, and the other Romance languages. Formal literary Latin, the kind taught in schools, was already somewhat artificial by Petronius's day.
Beyond linguistics, the Satyricon reveals attitudes toward sexuality, slavery, social class, and death that are alien to modern sensibilities but clearly meant something to Roman readers. The work is explicit in ways that would have gotten it banned for most of the Christian era. It treats the sexual use of slaves as unremarkable. It mocks religious cults while taking seriously the idea that gods might curse you.
And it's genuinely funny. Across two millennia, the humor translates. Trimalchio's pomposity, Eumolpus's bad poetry, the escalating absurdity of the dinner party—these still work as comedy.
The Long Shadow
The Satyricon's influence has been profound, if often indirect. The dinner of Trimalchio inspired the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald's working draft of The Great Gatsby, which was called "Trimalchio in West Egg" before his editor convinced him to change it. The connection between Gatsby's lavish parties and Trimalchio's grotesque displays of wealth was clearly on Fitzgerald's mind.
T.S. Eliot used the Sibyl passage as the epigraph to The Waste Land, one of the twentieth century's most important poems. The image of the immortal prophetess suspended in her flask, wanting only to die, sets the tone for that poem's meditation on spiritual exhaustion in the modern world.
Federico Fellini made a film adaptation in 1969 called Fellini Satyricon, deliberately fragmentary and dreamlike, capturing something of the disorienting effect of reading the surviving text with its gaps and lacunae.
The Widow of Ephesus has been retold countless times, appearing in medieval joke collections and modern short stories alike. Its cynical view of grief and fidelity clearly struck a nerve.
Reading It Today
Modern translations of the Satyricon face an impossible challenge: how do you render Latin prose that shifts constantly between registers, now elevated and poetic, now colloquial and crude? How do you capture the specific humor of freedmen trying to sound educated while making obvious mistakes?
Various translators have tried various approaches. Some aim for period flavor, making it sound vaguely eighteenth-century. Others go for contemporary earthiness. The Arrowsmith translation, considered one of the best in English, tries to match Petronius's tonal shifts with equivalent English moves.
However you encounter it, the Satyricon rewards reading. It's strange, sometimes offensive by modern standards, often confusing because of what's been lost. But it's also vivid, human, and surprisingly alive after nineteen hundred years. The characters feel like people rather than types. Their adventures, however exaggerated, have the texture of real experience.
We'll never have the complete work. Whatever vast picaresque Petronius actually wrote has been reduced to tantalizing fragments, like a mosaic with most of the tiles missing. But what remains is enough to suggest what we've lost—and to be grateful for what we still have.