Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

PROSE SATIRE
mittedly of some length), Petronius a coherent, if often discursive, narrative.
That difference is decisive: emulation of Varro cannot alone account for
Petronius' enterprise.
Petronius presents the adventures of a hero, or anti-hero, Encolpius, a
conventionally educated young man, without money or morals, and his
catamite, Giton, handsome and unscrupulous. Other characters come and go
and reappear, amongst them Quartilla, priestess of Priapus, and Eumolpus,
poet, teacher, and reprobate. How importantly any of these subsidiary characters
figured in the whole work it is impossible to tell. Encolpius, as narrator
and observer, holds the story together. He is a ludicrous victim of fortune's
whims, raised up and thrown down, living for the day; he is a voyeur plagued
with impotence, a swashbuckling coward, querulous, aimless, and neurotic.
In the Greek romances hero and heroine are wont to be buffeted by fortune;
their perils and escapes are dire and astonishing; but in the end true love
obtains its reward. Petronius burlesques this kind of plot. His homosexual
lovers are faithless and unfortunate. Virtue tested and triumphant is replaced
by vice rampant and frustrated. But no moral is intended: Petronius seeks
only to subvert or mock or suggest comic resemblances. He finds ample
material, in epic as in romance. Encolpius, an unheroic wanderer, is pursued
by Priapus' wrath, as Odysseus was by Poseidon's and Aeneas by Juno's.
Like Odysseus he meets a Circe (izyff.), like Aeneas he sallies forth to wreak
vengeance (82. 1—2). Petronius writes for a highly literate audience, able
to recognize widely scattered allusions. Thus, for example, Habinnas' entrance
at Trimalchio's party (65.36".) is based on Alcibiades' in Plato's Symposium.
His exploitation of many poets and prose-writers has encouraged the opinion
that Petronius of set purpose blended diverse genres, romance, satire, epic,
elegy, mime, diatribe, and declamation, to produce an amalgam both original
and anti-classical. But a less revolutionary explanation will account for the
evidence: for his theme, Petronius' obligation is principally to romance,
sentimental or picaresque, and his own inventiveness, for the form adopted,
partially perhaps to Varro, while all debts to other genres are incidental.
These other genres inform his treatment of episodes or individuals, but not
his whole work. Ovid's variation of treatment in his Metamorphoses is somewhat
analogous. 1
Two longer poems included in the Satyrica (89 and 119—24), Troiae halosis,
'The capture of Troy', consisting of 65 iambic verses, and De bello civili,
'On the civil war', consisting of 295 hexameters, pose teasing difficulties of
interpretation, the latter particularly. What is Petronius here attempting: to
show how epic should be written, to parody Lucan, or something more subtle?
Parody may be discountenanced: Lucan's thoughts and expressions are not
1
I owe this point to Professor Kenney.
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