Petronius - The Satyricon

Revised edition

Translated by
J. P. SULLIVAN
Introduction and Notes by
HELEN MORALES

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This translation first published 1965

Reprinted with revisions 1969

Reprinted with revisions 1974

Reprinted with The Apocolocyntosis 1977

First published in Penguin Classics 1986

This edition, including new editorial matter, first published in Penguin Classics 2011

Translation copyright J. P. Sullivan, 1965 1969 1974 1977 1986

Editorial material copyright Helen Morales, 2011

Cover: Cave Canem (Beware of the dog), threshold mosaic from Pompeii, 1st century AD (photograph akg-images/Erich Lessing)

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ISBN: 978-0-14-196975-6

PENGUIN CLASSICS

TITUS PETRONIUS ARBITER is reputedly the author of the Satyricon. Historical and literary evidence strongly suggests that he is the same Petronius whose character and strange death in AD 66 are so graphically described in Tacitus Annals. As governor of Bithynia and as consul Petronius showed vigour and ability, but his chief talent lay in the pursuit of pleasures, in which he displayed such exquisite refinement that he earned the unofficial title of the Emperor Neros style expert (arbiter elegantiae). Court rivalry and jealousy contrived to cast on Petronius the suspicion that he was conspiring against the emperor, and he was ordered to commit suicide. He gradually bled to death, opening his veins, binding and reopening them, passing his last hours in social amusement and the composition of a catalogue of Neros debaucheries.

J. P. SULLIVAN was Professor of Classics at the University of California at Santa Barbara when he died in 1993. He previously held posts at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Texas, Buffalo, Minnesota and Hawaii. He was the author of many works, including The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study and Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero.

HELEN MORALES is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is co-editor of the journal Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Latin Literature, author of Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon and Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, and editor of the Penguin Classic Greek Fiction.

The Satyricon is generally agreed to have been written by a courtier of the Emperor Nero, his style expert or arbiter elegantiae. The best introduction to him is that given by the Roman historian Tacitus, who describes Petronius downfall and death during Neros reign of terror (Annals 17.1819):

18. Petronius deserves a brief obituary. He spent his days sleeping, his nights working and enjoying himself. Others achieve fame by energy, Petronius by laziness. Yet he was not, like others who waste their resources, regarded as dissipated or extravagant, but as a refined voluptuary. People liked the apparent freshness of his unconventional and unselfconscious sayings and doings. Nevertheless, as governor of Bithynia and later as consul, he had displayed a capacity for business.

Then, reverting to a vicious or ostensibly vicious way of life, he had been admitted into the small circle of Neros intimates, as Arbiter of Taste: to the blas emperor nothing was smart and elegant unless Petronius had given it his approval. So Tigellinus, loathing him as a rival and a more expert hedonist, denounced him on the grounds of his friendship with Flavius Scaevinus. This appealed to the emperors outstanding passion his cruelty. A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius. No defence was heard. Indeed, most of his household were under arrest.

19. The emperor happened to be in Campania. Petronius too had reached Cumae; and there he was arrested. Delay, with its hopes and fears, he refused to endure. He severed his own veins. Then, having bound them up again when the fancy took him, he talked with his friends but not seriously, or so as to gain a name for fortitude. And he listened to them reciting, not discourses about the immortality of the soul or philosophy, but light lyrics and frivolous poems. Some slaves received presents others beatings. He appeared at dinner, and dozed, so that his death, even if compulsory, might look natural.

Even his will deviated from the routine death-bed flatteries of Nero, Tigellinus, and other leaders. Petronius wrote out a list of Neros sensualities giving names of each male and female bedfellow and details of every lubricious novelty and sent it under seal to Nero. Then Petronius broke his signet-ring, to prevent its subsequent employment to incriminate others.

(Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (Penguin: 1956, revised edition 1996))

Tacitus refers here to C. (i.e. Gaius) Petronius, while most manuscripts of the Satyricon refer to the author as Petronius Arbiter, or simply Petronius; and Plutarch and Pliny mention a Titus Petronius. This confusion over his name, and Tacitus failure even to mention the Satyricon, have caused scholars some anxiety about identifying the author with Neros courtier, but the arguments for strongly outweigh those against. Language and style, as well as historical and economic references, all point to a first century AD date. If we agree on identifying Tacitus Petronius with the author of the Satyricon, we can date the novel with some precision to between AD 63 and 65. Of course, Tacitus account is biased, and might be no more accurate a portrait of the real Petronius than Leo Genns performance in the 1951 movie Quo Vadis, in which the hounding to death of the noble courtier by Peter Ustinovs sinister Nero recalled and criticized the ongoing McCarthy witch-hunts against Hollywood. Nonetheless, it is irresistibly attractive to read Tacitus Petronius in light of the Satyricon, and vice versa, and for us to ask: for this author, to what extent did art imitate life?