Reseña del libro de Natalie Breitenstein, Petronius, Satyrica 1-15

Exemplaria Classica, 2021

There has been a long interval between the publication of the first and the second volume of the commentary by Peter Habermehl (hereafter PH) on the latter half of Petronius’ novel (i.e. the chapters subsequent to the Cena Trimalchionis). The first volume appeared in 2006 and the author’s original intention was to finalise his project in two instalments only, and to skip chapters 119-24.1 (the Bellum Civile). By now, however, the commentary has grown considerably: the current volume covers no more than eight chapters (instead of twenty-six, if we do not count Eumolpus’ poem), PH has changed his mind about the omission of the Bellum Civile, and it is likely that the commentary as a whole will consist of four volumes totalling at least some 1700 pages. Thus we are dealing here with a huge enterprise which, nowadays, is usually tackled by a team of scholars; PH himself (p. IX) refers to the Groningen Apuleius project (1977-2015, nine volumes). If, on the other hand, we are looking for an individual scholar’s work of comparable size and character, we may recall the commentary on Tacitus’ Annals by Erich Koestermann (1963-1968, four volumes), that on Thucydides by Simon Hornblower (1991-2008, three volumes) or that on Livy’s Books 6-10 by S.P. Oakley (1997-2005, four volumes).

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. ""

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

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

2014

2008

The studies of Petronius presented in this book discuss three different perspectives that, despite being independent, aim at giving a general approach to the Satyricon. The first chapter explores the relation between the novel and Menippean satire: basing itself on the evolution, from Renaissance to modern times, of the various theories of Menippean genre and mode, it seeks to prove that, according to the theory of modern satire, the title of Varro’s "Saturae Menippeae" may be understood as an expression of genre, and also that Petronius tried to adapt some Menippean generic features to his own work. The second chapter argues that the relationship of the anti-heroes of the "Satyricon" with the surrounding world is developed within a system of wandering, marked by constant escapes and immanent demands. However, this random and erratic movement does not prevent the anti-heroes from coming into contact with cohesive and intrinsically consistent systems. Among these systems are especially highlighted the "Cena Trimalchionis" and the city of Croton, an urban space that also configures a dystopia. The last chapter focuses primarily on the characters of Giton and Eumolpos, who are two of the most curious Petronian inventions. The analysis of their behaviour and style provides us with a clarifying example of the care taken by Petronius in the construction of the main characters of the "Satyricon" and of the different levels of reading that he intentionally created, through the confluence in a single character of multiple lines deriving from literary and cultural tradition.

Phoenix – Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 1998

Classical quarterly, 2009

It is commonly known that Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is set apart from the other ancient Greek novels by its narrative technique. 1 It is the only extant Greek novel in which the story is narrated by the protagonist himself. 2 The novel's prologue is set in Sidon, where an anonymous narrator beholds a painting of Europa's abduction by Zeus and gives a lengthy description of it (1.1.2-13). The painting is simultaneously viewed by a young man who turns out to be Clitophon, the hero of the novel, and the two men begin a conversation about the power of eros. Clitophon is invited by the primary narrator to tell about his own experiences with eros. Once Clitophon has started his narration (1.3.1), the primary narrator never intervenes, and the frame narrative in Sidon is apparently never resumed. 3 This note contributes to the wider issue of narrative structure in Achilles Tatius. I argue that Clitophon's portrayal of Leucippe at the end of the first book (1.19) contains a deliberate reference to the frame narrative and thus constitutes an example of the narratological device of metalepsis, defined by G. Genette as 'a deliberate transgression of the threshold of embedding'. 4 Metalepsis, then, is the slippage between different levels of narration, or, in M. Fludernik's words, 'the move of existants or actants from any hierarchically ordered level into one above or below'. 5 In SHORTER NOTES 667 8 We are very grateful to Rhiannon Ash, Mikolaj Szymanski, and CQ's referee for suggesting various improvements. 1 The novel is usually dated in the early second half of the second century A.D. See OCD 3 s.v. Achilles Tatius and E. Bowie, 'The chronology of the earlier Greek novels since B.E. Perry: revisions and precisions', Ancient Narrative 2 (2002), 47-63, at 60-1, who proposes A.D. 164 as a terminus ante quem. 2 On the uniqueness of this homodiegetic narration in the novelistic corpus, see, among others,

2016