Petronius Satyricon.(Review)

Petronius Satyricon, translated & with commentaries by Sarah Ruden. Hackett, 256 pages, $9.95 paper

The Satyricon is the Ulysses of Roman literature. It is a comic novel intoxicated with language, with the power of verbal craft. As Joyce deploys Hamlet, so Petronius uses the Aeneid--the master text of the literature telling a high tale that is both imitated and parodied by the later text. And, in addition, behind both the Satyricon and Ulysses lies the Odyssey of Homer, the breezy and sublime tale of wandering that informs all Western literature.

The Satyricon is a product of the age of Nero (regnavit A.D. 54-68). Its author, most probably, was an aristocrat who, Tacitus tells us, returned from a vigorous proconsulate in Bithynia to Nero's court, where he held the unofficial title of "elegantiae arbiter." The Satyricon -- produced by 66, when Petronius committed suicide--recounts the misadventures around the Mediterranean of one Encolpius. These seem the product of the anger of Priapus against him (an echo of Odysseus's victimization by Poseidon). All that survives, it appears, are chunks of books 14, 15, and 16, where Encolpius and his boy friend, Giton, are in pleasure resorts in south Italy; his adventures may have begun in Marseilles and taken him through Rome.

Sex and poetry are the leitmotifs of the Satyricon. There occur in our text two set pieces that allow Petronius's genius room to wander. First, the dinner party thrown by the nouveau riche freedman Trimalchio. At it, the culture of the Greco-Roman world is hurriedly and confusedly appropriated by the eager, greedy showmanship of the flamboyant Trimalchio. In this episode (modern parallels spring quickly to mind), Petronius's targets range all the way up to Seneca, Nero's rich tutor, a stoic philosopher and a playwright. Seneca was also the author of a comic satire, the Apocolocyntosis ("The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius"), which is the other zany, rich work of comedy that the mad, hectic, laughing, lethal court of Nero produced. Secondly in the Satyricon, there is Petronius's creation of the epic poetry and the poetic criticism of the old fraud Eumolpus who offers a view and a sample (at some length) of Neronian poetry--the target here is Lucan--in a way still not understood. John Sullivan, for example, says that Eumolpus "gives us a very good idea of Petronius's views on literature." Does he? Or does he rather give us a very good idea of Eumolpus's views? At any rate, the tones and flavors of Petronian comedy--from soup to nuts, from gourmandise to sex--are endlessly enjoyable.

Translations of Petronius have reflected the culture's apprehension of the work. For a long while, Petronius was sold, so to speak, in pink bindings and under the counter, like something in The Big Sleep. The Satyricon was seen and enjoyed as antique porn. A version published in 1902 in Paris was attributed, incorrectly but fittingly, to Oscar Wilde. Such was the company Petronius was thought fit for.

Then came modernism. Petronius was quoted by T. S. Eliot, admired by Joyce, and read by everybody. "Trimalchio in ...