Petronius
c. 27–66 · Ancient Rome
“For with my own eyes at Cumae I saw the Sibyl hanging in a bottle, and when the boys said to her: 'What do you want, Sibyl?' she replied: 'I want to die'.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Petronius
Drew From(2)
who shaped Petronius
via The Odyssey
- The Satyricon is a mock-epic, and the Odyssey is the thing it mocks
- Encolpius is the anti-Odysseus: hounded not by Poseidon but by the wrath of Priapus, washing up among con men instead of monsters, meeting a temptress named Circe
- Read Homer first and every parody lands — the Satyricon assumes you know the grandeur it's deflating
via The Symposium
- Trimalchio's feast is a parody, and the Symposium is the thing it's parodying
- Petronius models Habinnas's late, drunken intrusion on Alcibiades crashing Plato's banquet — knowing the original makes the joke land
- Read Plato's elegant drinking party first and the Satyricon's squalid one reads as deliberate desecration, not just chaos
Famous Quotes
“One hand washes the other.”
“He has joined the great majority.”
“The world wants to be deceived.”
“HERE RESTS G POMPEIUS TRIMALCHIO ... CONSCIENTIOUS BRAVE LOYAL HE GREW RICH FROM LITTLE AND LEFT THIRTY MILLION SESTERCES BEHIND HE NEVER HEARD A PHILOSOPHER”
About Petronius
Roman courtier and author traditionally identified as Nero's 'arbiter of elegance.' His Satyricon, surviving only in fragments, is a picaresque novel of Roman low-life featuring the famous Trimalchio's feast. It is one of the earliest surviving works of extended prose fiction in Western literature.