The Satyrica of Petronius as a Roman Palimpsest

2008

(1605), and John Dryden in "Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire," which prefaced his translation of Juvenal (1693). 2 These critics' point of view collided with the many that sought to fit the Petronian work into a novelesque genre of Greek origin. This conflict allows us to say that the first attempts to explicitly configure the genre of Menippean satire occurred around the time of the polemic that surrounded 1 Relihan (1993) 12, and Branham (2005) 10. 2 Cf. Dryden (1926) 66: "Which is also manifest from antiquity, by those authors who are acknowledged to have written Varronian satires, in imitation of his; of whom the chief is Petronius Arbiter, whose satire, they say, is now printed in Holland, wholly recovered, and made complete: when 'tis made public, it will easily be seen by any one sentence, whether it be supposititious, or genuine."

Scholia. Natal Studies in Classical Antiquity. Volume 8, pp. 152-156., 1999

2004

""While nineteenth-century scholars debated whether the fragmentary Satyrica of Petronius should be regarded as a traditional or an original work in ancient literary history, twentieth-century Petronian scholarship tended to take for granted that the author was a unique innovator and his work a synthetic composition with respect to genre. The consequence of this was an excessive emphasis on authorial intention as well as a focus on parts of the text taken out of the larger context, which has increased the already severe state of fragmentation in which today’s reader finds the Satyrica. The present study offers a reading of the Satyrica as the mimetic performance of its fictional auctor Encolpius; as an ancient “road novel” told from memory by a Greek exile who relates how on his travels through Italy he had dealings with people who told stories, gave speeches, recited poetry and made other statements, which he then weaves into his own story and retells through the performance technique of vocal impersonation. The result is a skillfully made narrative fabric, a travelogue carried by a desultory narrative voice that switches identity from time to time to deliver discursively varied and often longish statements in the personae of encountered characters. This study also makes a renewed effort to reconstruct the story told in the Satyrica and to explain how it relates to the identity and origin of its fictional auctor, a poor young scholar who volunteered to act the scapegoat in his Greek home city, Massalia (ancient Marseille), and was driven into exile in a bizarre archaic ritual. Besides relating his erotic suffering on account of his love for the beautiful boy Giton, Encolpius intertwines the various discourses and character statements of his narrative into a subtle brand of satire and social criticism (e.g. a critique of ancient capitalism) in the style of Cynic popular philosophy. Finally, it is argued that Petronius’ Satyrica is a Roman remake of a lost Greek text of the same title and belongs—together with Apuleius’ Metamorphoses—to the oldest type of Greco-Roman novel, known to antiquity as Milesian fiction. ""

Ancient narrative, 2009

Petronius' suicide nearly two thousand years ago does not seem to have killed his literary career. In the last thousand years forgeries purporting to be the lost portions of the Satyrica have been published and discredited. In addition to works purporting to be by the author of the Satyrica numerous works whose authors use the name Petronius or themes from his work to slander, moralize, satirize, or scandalize have been published each using some, often more than one, aspect of Petronius' life and work as inspiration and motivation. From the twelfth-century Petronius Redivivus and the libelous Memoirs of the Present Countess of Derby of 1797 to the 1966 guide to ‘low-life' New York, New York Unexpurgated , all of the imitations and forgeries explicitly or implicitly show their debt to Petronius through choice of subject matter and emphasis. This article examines how each imitation or forgery, whether convincing as the work of Nero's Arbiter Elegantiae or not, attempts...

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.12.52, 2012

A commentary on the Satyrica of Petronius and a new text edition, including of the fragmentary remnants of this ancient novel, have long been needed. The present volume is the first complete textual commentary in English. Although perhaps not much compared to the multi-volume Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius, it includes 730 notable pages. The least damaged third part of the text, the Cena Trimalchionis (26.7-78), which has been treated in commentaries (Friedländer, Marmorale, Maiuri, Sedgwick, Perrochat, and Smith), receives the most detailed commentary, but the importance of this publication lies primarily in covering the other two thirds of Petronius' fragments, Ch. 1-26.6 (pp. 1-81) and Ch. 79-141 (pp. 329-549). For Ch. 79-110 the authors acknowledge a debt to the new German commentary of Peter Habermehl.1 The writing began over two decades ago as the collaborative effort of J. P. Sullivan and Gareth Schmeling, longtime editor of the bibliographical The Petronian Society Newsletter. Sullivan had been working on a similar project in the sixties with his student K. F. C. Rose, who died at the age of 29.2 In 1993, soon after Schmeling joined the effort, Sullivan himself died, and the work was again interrupted, until Aldo Setaioli agreed to take over Sullivan's work on the verse. Simultaneously with the current volume Setaioli has republished his earlier studies on the short poems in Petronius.3

Studien zur klassischen Philologie

2014

Arethusa, 2013

Graeco-Latina Brunensia, 2019

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how The Pergamene Youth and The Widow of Ephe-sus episodes present a stereotypical negative view of ‚Greek tradition' in Roman culture. This analysis shall show how the narrators of these two Milesian tales entertain while the implicit author connects ethical categories and values to the different levels of the complex narrative structure. The question is not what are the Greeks like, but how the author sees the Greeks. The subject of the current study is thus not the Hellas that is open to historical research, but the ideal of Greek culture that was present in Roman minds.