The Satyricon

...at the time of the dinner, you can hardly go beyond the reign of Tiberius. Nor is it a contradiction that Opimian wine a vintage wine from the year 121 BC, the consulship of Opimius of one hundred years is placed on the table at dinner: it was naturally born in the year of the city 633 121 BC, poured into amphorae and marked with labels in the year 733 21 BC, and it was then drawn from the cellar for those about to drink, at about the same time, as I suppose, when Velleius Paterculus wrote that there was no longer any Opimian wine left. It was, however, permitted in this genre of fiction, which follows genuine festivity and is alien to morose subtlety, to mix both older and later things somewhat carelessly. For example, on page 148, 4, the travelers are said to have asked the farm manager what kind of trade the people of Croton particularly favored after their resources were exhausted by frequent wars, as if that city were even then still in its own power, and not in that of the Roman people, and all Italy had not been pacified long ago. And on page 76, 10, Plocamus boasts that as a youth he had no equal in singing except for one Apelles, a favorite of Caligula and the most famous tragedian among his contemporaries (Cassius Dio LVIII 5). And on page 86, 19, Trimalchio is said to have mangled the songs of Menecrates, if this is the same Menecrates whom Nero rewarded with the patrimony and houses of triumphal men (Suetonius, Life of Nero, ch. 30). However, he did not explicitly name Lucan, although he had been led to his memory not by chance or opportunity, but intended to attack him deliberately and accurately. It happened by an unfortunate chance that we cannot sufficiently determine the colony in which Trimalchio and Habinnas served as seviri Augustales priests of the Imperial cult, which was governed by two duoviri aediles magistrates—indeed, on page 77, 22, the chief magistrate is called a praetor leader/magistrate less accurately. The dinner of Trimalchio takes place, if I am not mistaken, on the fourth day before the Kalends of January near the town on his Cuman estate (p. 61, 1): this very appellation argues for the usual insolence of Trimalchio, who wanted his estate to be named after a distant town, not a nearby one, so that, of course, people might believe his boundaries extended all the way to Cumae. For the fact that it was not Cumae of which the guests are chatting is proven by the fact that Trimalchio declares on page 56, 4 that he saw the Sibyl at Cumae with his own eyes, as if it were a rare and remarkable thing. Therefore, they remain on the coast of Campania, since Encolpius had rented a place near the shore, private and remote (p. 96, 1), and from there, having set out (p. 120, 11), he entered a ship, situated neither far from Cumae nor further from Baiae and Capua.