splendour of his rhetoric but are the very essence of that splendour. The kind of sardonic grandeur that was
achieved fitfully by Lucan was attained with full assurance by Juvenal. Political circumstances made men sour;
literary circumstances demanded a new kind of poetry. Juvenal was the one poet, as Tacitus was the one
historian, who found a theme and tone which answered to both the social and literary conditions of his age.
The Novel
Prose fiction was conventionally regarded as a very low form of art. Not one of the literary critics of antiquity
thought it worth his consideration. Tacitus treated the life and death of Petronius in his Annals without deigning
to mention that the man had written a novel; such things were below the dignity of history. We have seen that the
poets who continued to work in the traditional or 'classic' genres were always liable to fall under the curse of
academic art and become competent but lifeless. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find in the novel, the
most despised of all genres, unfettered by literary convention, unencumbered by the legacy of great predecessors,
a new sparkle and vitality. An ancestry can, it is true, be found for the Roman novel; in 'Milesian tales', stories of
erotic or supernatural adventure; in Menippean satire, a genre which mixed prose and verse, as does Petronius;
and, in the case of Apuleius at least, the Greek love romance. But all that we know about these often obscure
ancestors suggests that our two surviving specimens of Roman novel-writing went far beyond them; they are
gloriously original and uninhibited works, as unlike anything else in antiquity as they are unlike each other.
Petronius' date and identity have been disputed. Most scholars, though not all, believe him to be identical with
Nero's 'arbiter elegantiae', compelled by the Emperor to take his own life in A.D. 66, and that is the assumption
made here. Only one episode of the Satyrica (to give what is commonly called the Satyricon its correct title) has
come down to us entire: this is what has become known as the Cena Trimalchionis, 'Trimalchio's dinner-party'.
The rest of the Satyrica survives in very patchy fragments only. If it was written on the same scale as the Cena, it
must have been an enormous work, far longer than any other novel of antiquity; but it is possible that the dinner
party was a centre-piece, like the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' Golden Ass, developed in far more detail
than any other part of the story.
Since so much is lost, any account of the work as a whole has to be somewhat vague. The story is narrated by
one Encolpius, thief, pervert, parasite, and man of the world. The novel charts his wanderings, along with his
faithless catamite, the boy Giton, and his rival Ascyltus (all three names have sexual connotations): we find them
by the Bay of Naples, on shipboard, and at Croton in the far south of Italy. A recurrent theme appears to be the
hero's persecution at the hands of Priapus, the god of sexual potency. It has been suggested that the whole work
is a kind of burlesque epic, with Encolpius as a disreputable Ulysses or Aeneas, and the ithyphallic Priapus
taking the role of the more dignified gods Neptune or Juno.
Encolpius himself, cultivated and depraved, is scarcely a character in the modern sense but a pair of hard clever
eyes through which we view an extraordinary comic world. Part of the Satyrica's fascination lies in its
combination of low life with literary wit and social satire, all set out with a cold brilliant detachment. Some of
the scenes are obscene, even monstrously obscene. There are grotesque inventions, as when Eumolpus, turning
metaphor into actuality, decrees that his legatees must first eat the flesh of his corpse; but we also meet the
rhetorician Agamemnon, who elicits from Encolpius a fruity declamation against declamation, while Eumolpus,
for his part, is depicted as an obsessed versifier. Several times incidents are compared to scenes from mime, and
there is something of the quality of pantomime, too, when members of the cast step out of character for the better
entertainment of the audience. Encolpius, by turns rogue and literary gentleman, cynical and soft-hearted, is a
protean figure who adapts to whatever role is suggested by the convenience of the moment; the blundering