Petronius (Loeb)

This is meant for the age of Smollett Tobias Smollett, an 18th-century novelist known for his picaresque style. and Fielding Henry Fielding, another prominent 18th-century novelist.; yet there is no question of the justice of the later remark:

“You will be charmed with the ease, and you will be surprised with the variety of his characters.”

These characters are all products of a period in history when the primary aim of the most mature civilization in the world was making money. It was this aim that drew Trimalchio from his unknown birthplace in Asia Minor to the glitter, luxury, and unnatural passions of a South Italian town. He differs from the minor characters who crowd his dining room only in the enormous success with which he has applied the arts of prostitution, seduction, flattery, and fraud. The people upon whom the novel’s action centers—Encolpius (the author’s mouthpiece), Ascyltos, and Giton—are present through the kindness of Agamemnon, a parasitic teacher of the rhetoric that ate swiftly into the heart of Latin language and thought. Giton lives by his charm; Ascyltos is little more than a foil to Encolpius, a quarrelsome and lecherous target of ridicule.

The part of the novel dealing with Trimalchio’s dinner introduces a crowd of characters and provides the most vivid picture of small-town life extant in classical literature. The pulsating energy of greed is felt in it everywhere. Men become millionaires with American-like speed, and they enjoy that status as hazardously in Cumae An ancient city in Campania, Italy. as they might on Wall Street. The shoulders of one man who wallows in Trimalchio’s cushions are still sore from carrying firewood for sale; another, perhaps the first undertaker to make a fortune from extravagant funerals—a gourmet and spendthrift—sits there composing lies to baffle his hungry creditors. Trimalchio towers above them all by reason of his more stable fortunes and his colossal impudence.