Petronius (Loeb)

Of this work, the best-known portion—the description of Trimalchio’s dinner—was hidden from the modern world until the middle of the seventeenth century and was first printed in 1664.¹

It is as difficult to grasp any structural outline in the Satyricon as it is in Tristram Shandy. Both alternate with flashing rapidity between exhibitions of pedantry, attacks on pedants, and indecency; in this, Sterne is the more successful because he is less obvious.

But Petronius, in so far as his plan was not entirely original, was following the model of Varro’s Menippean satires and had before him the libel of Seneca on Claudius, the Apocolocyntosis (The Pumpkinification). The traditional title of his work, Satyricon, is derived from the word Satura (a medley), and it signifies that he was free to pass at will from subject to subject, and from prose to verse and back again. It is his achievement that the threads of his story, broken as we hold them, still show something of the color and variety of life itself. We call his book a novel, and by doing so, we pay him a compliment that he alone of Roman writers has earned.

Petronius’s novel shares with life the quality of moving ceaselessly without knowing why. It differs from most lives in that it is very seldom dull. An anonymous writer of the eighteenth century, in Observations on the Greek and Roman Classics in a Series of Letters to a Young Nobleman,² expressed the opinion that: "You will in no writer, my dear Lord, meet with so much true delicacy of thought, in none with purer language." This judgment is...

¹ See section on the text, Codex Traguriensis.
² Published in London, 1753.