The Satyricon by Petronius

First transcribed: c. 60 c.e. (English translation, 1694)

Type of work: Short fiction

Type of plot: Satire

Time of plot: First century

Locale: Italy

Principal characters

• Encolpius, the narrator
• Ascyltus, his friend
• Gito, their attendant
• Eumolpus, a poet
• Trimalchio, a wealthy vulgarian

The Story:

Encolpius rails at the growth of artificiality in modern rhetoric and the ill-prepared students who come to the school. Agamemnon, the professor, agrees with him but places the blame entirely on parents who refuse to make their children study. Weary of the dispute and far gone in drink, Encolpius flees the school. An old woman, who makes indecent proposals to him, shows him the way back to his inn.

Gito, Encolpius’s sixteen-year-old slave, has prepared supper, but the comely boy is crying: Ascyltus has made violent love to him. Encolpius is soothing the boy with caresses and tender words when Ascyltus breaks in on them. A quarrel ensues between the two friends as to who should enjoy Gito’s favors. The dispute is settled only when all three agree to pay a visit to Lycurgus, a rich friend of Ascyltus. Lycurgus receives them most cordially and introduces them to Lichas, his friend. Lichas, completely taken with Encolpius, insists that Encolpius and Gito come home with him. On the way, Tryphaena, a beautiful woman attached to Lichas’s entourage, makes surreptitious love to Encolpius, who resolves to have little to do with Lichas. When the party arrives at Lichas’s villa, Tryphaena deserts Encolpius for the bewitching Gito. Smarting under her desertion, Encolpius makes love to Doris, Lichas’s attractive wife. All goes fairly well until Gito tires of Tryphaena—she then accuses both Gito and Encolpius of making improper advances, and the two return in haste to Lycurgus’s house.

Lycurgus at first supports the two adventurers, but as the jealous Lichas increases his complaints, Lycurgus turns against the pair. At the suggestion of Ascyltus, the three set out again to seek whatever love affairs and plunder they can find. They are well supplied with gold, for Encolpius plundered one of Lichas’s ships before leaving.

A fair is in progress at a nearby small town, where they come upon a groom who is saddling a rich man’s horse. When the groom leaves for a moment, Encolpius steals the rich man’s riding cloak. Soon afterward, Ascyltus finds a bag of coins on the ground. The two friends hide the gold by sewing it under the lining of Encolpius’s threadbare tunic. Just as they finish, the rich man’s retainers give chase to recover the riding cloak. Dashing through a wood, Encolpius is separated from his friend and loses the tunic. When they meet again later at a market, they see the tunic up for sale there, with the gold pieces still hidden in the lining. They offer to trade the riding cloak for the tunic, but the bystanders become suspicious and try to make the two friends appear before a judge. Dropping the riding cloak and seizing the tunic, they flee.

After telling Gito to follow later on, they set out for the next town. Seeing the dim forms of two comely women hurrying through the dusk, Encolpius and Ascyltus follow them, unobserved, into an underground temple. There the two men see a company of women in Bacchanalian garb, each with a phallic emblem in her hand, preparing to worship Priapus. They are discovered by the horrified women and chased back to their inn.

As they are dining with Gito in their rooms, the maid of one of the women they had followed to the sacred rites comes in and begs them to listen to her mistress, who is a respectable matron. Even though Encolpius swears never to tell of the forbidden rites, the matron has the three seized and taken to her villa. The men are bound and given powerful love potions, and then all the women of the household have sex with them. After escaping from the love-maddened ladies, Encolpius has to rest for three days; Gito seems little affected.

Next the three attend a huge banquet given by Trimalchio, a rich and vulgar freedman. After hours of eating and drinking, they are glad even for the respite of storytelling. Trimalchio starts off with a boring elucidation of the signs of the zodiac, and many of the guests tell pointless anecdotes. From Niceros, however, they hear an absorbing tale. While still a slave, Niceros was staying at an inn where he was in love with the landlord’s complaisant wife, Melissa. One day he induced a soldier to go for a walk with him. When they came to a graveyard, the soldier took off his clothes and threw them beside the path. Making a magic circle around the clothes, he straightaway turned into a wolf and went howling away. When Niceros saw to his horror that the clothes had turned to stone, he hurried home to Melissa. She told him that a wolf had just come into the yard and killed some sheep. A servant drove a spear through the wolf’s neck but the animal escaped. Niceros ran back to the cemetery, where he found that the stone clothes had dissolved in blood. When he went to the soldier’s room in the morning, he found a physician there stanching the blood from a wound in the soldier’s neck.

Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Gito are finally so stuffed and bored they can stand no more. To their relief, the company moves outdoors to exercise. They learn from the conversation that another banquet is to follow, this one given by Trimalchio’s wife, and they leave hurriedly. Following another quarrel over Gito, Encolpius and Ascyltus part company. To the distress of Encolpius, Gito elects to go with Ascyltus.

After sorrowing uselessly for days, Encolpius falls in with an old man, the poet Eumolpus. When the two go to the baths to cement their friendship, Encolpius is overjoyed to find Gito acting as attendant for Ascyltus, who is in another room. Gito confesses that he really likes Encolpius better; in a happy mood, Encolpius takes the boy back to his apartment.

Later, Encolpius makes the mistake of trying to make love to Circe. As a result of his past tribulations and hardships, he has no strength for her ardors, and she suspects him of trifling with her. She raises such an outcry that Encolpius judges it wise to leave town. On Eumolpus’s advice, the comrades embark secretly at night on a ship lying in the harbor. In the morning, Encolpius discovers to his chagrin that they are aboard Lichas’s ship, and the owner and Tryphaena are also on board. Eumolpus tries to disguise Encolpius and Gito by darkening their skin with burned cork, but their subterfuge is discovered, and for a while it looks as though they will be flogged. Lichas, however, remembers his old attraction to Encolpius, and Tryphaena is smitten anew with Gito, so they are spared.

When Lichas’s ship is wrecked in a storm, the three comrades land ashore at Croton. There Eumolpus poses as a rich landowner, and Encolpius and Gito pass as his slaves. By cleverly deluding the inhabitants, the three live luxuriously as guests of the town. After a year, however, suspicion grows as to Eumolpus’s supposed wealth. Seeing an end to their pleasant stay, Encolpius and Gito escape just in time. The aroused townspeople use Eumolpus as a scapegoat, first decking him with boughs and sacred vestments and leading him through the city before hurling him from a cliff.

Bibliography

Connors, Catherine. Petronius the Poet: Verse and Literary Tradition in “The Satyricon.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Examines the thirty-two short and two long poems that are part of The Satyricon in their fictional and literary historical contexts.

Courtney, Edward. A Companion to Petronius. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Provides an introductory overview of The Satyricon, including discussion of the author’s use of first-person narrative, parody, and symbolism.

Rimell, Victoria. Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Focuses on the metaphors of corporeality in The Satyricon, arguing that Petronius uses this imagery to mirror apparent paradoxes.

Slater, Niall W. Reading Petronius. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Explores the humor of The Satyricon through an initial linear reading, a reading that focuses on various language systems, and a reading that examines Petronius’s comedic purpose, or lack thereof.

Sullivan, J. P. “The Satyricon” of Petronius: A Literary Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Discusses authorship and date of The Satyricon; Petronius’s choice of form; satire, criticism, and parody in the work; the author’s humor; and the work’s sexual themes.

Todd, Frederick Augustus. “The Satiricon of Petronius.” In Some Ancient Novels: “Leucippe and Clitophon,” “Daphnis and Chloe,” “The Satiricon,” “The Golden Ass.” Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. Contrasts The Satyricon with earlier classical romances and declares Petronius’s work to be unique in its use of common, highly individualistic characters, realistic scenes, and lack of rhetorical flourish. Notes that Petronius’s work is one of the chief sources of information about spoken Latin.

Whitmarsh, Tim, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Collection of essays about the works of long fiction produced in ancient Greece and Rome helps to place The Satyricon in historical context.