In the Library
Satyricon
Petronius Arbiter, 65 CE
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by W. C. Firebaugh
- Chapters
- Chapters 50
- Length
- Length 61k words
£1.99
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About the book
A young scholar named Encolpius wanders the towns of southern Italy with a runaway slave-boy he loves and a poet who will not stop reciting his own bad verse. Petronius, courtier to Nero and arbiter of taste at the imperial court, composed this sprawling prose-and-verse fiction around 65 before being ordered by his emperor to open his veins. What survives is a fragment, but the fragment includes Trimalchio's dinner: a freedman vulgarian's banquet of stuffed dormice, silver skeletons, and astrological courses, the whole evening a monument to money in the wrong hands. The plot lurches through brothels, shipwrecks, fake funerals, magical impotence cures. The picaresque is born here, in a Rome that has stopped pretending to be virtuous.