Gaius Petronius Arbiter, better known by the name Petronius, was a Roman writer and politician from the first century AD. There are many unresolved and obscure questions about him, starting with the doubt as to whether he is really the author of the book Satyricon.
What can be said with certainty is that the author lived during the time of Emperor Nero, which is confirmed by the work itself. In it, the society of Nero's time is represented through the style, content, culture, and interests of those who write about that period. The surname Arbiter was given to him due to his fame as an Arbiter of Elegance, a title he enjoyed in the court of the Roman emperor. His date of birth is uncertain, but it is known that he died in 66 AD.
A Latin writer and poet of refined elegance and irony, Petronio helps us understand the true values and false moralism of his time. He appears to have been a very wealthy man and to have belonged to a noble family. In his famous novel he uses the number thirty million sesterces more than once to indicate a great fortune, and it is likely that he was referring to himself. By Roman standards he was a man from whom solid achievements could be expected.
Emperor Nero's Arbiter of Elegance
Nero welcomed Petronius, after his term as consul, into his innermost circle as his Arbiter of Elegance, whose word in all matters of taste was law. This occurred in the last years of Nero's empire in a career of reckless extravagances that shocked public opinion almost more than the actual crimes of which he was guilty.
Accounts in the Annals of Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus was one of the most important Roman historians of Antiquity, born in the year 55 and died between the years 117 and 120. He also served as consul, governor, and senator during the Roman Empire. He stood out for writing several biographical, historical, and ethnographic works, including the Annals of Tacitus.
The Annals were Tacitus' final work. He wrote at least sixteen books, but books seven to ten have been lost, as well as parts of books five, six, eleven and sixgteen. Book six ends with the death of Tiberius and books seven to twelve presumably cover the governments of Caligula and Claudius. The other books deal with Nero's government, probably until his death in June 68, or until the end of that year, and then join the Histories.
The second part of book sixteen was lost (it ends narrating the events of 66). It is not known whether Tacitus completed the work or decided to finish it before other works he planned to write as he died before being able to work on the histories of Nerva and Trajan, from the period of Augustus and the beginnings of the Empire, which he had promised to write.
It is in the Annals of Tacitus that the most complete and authentic account of Petronius's life appears, an account that can be supplemented, with caution, by other sources. It is likely that his correct name was Titus Petronius Niger. Tacitus' account shows that Petronius belonged to a class of pleasure-seekers attacked by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, men who “turned night into day.” While others gained a reputation through effort, Petronius did so through idleness.
On the rare occasions, however, when he was appointed to official positions, he proved himself energetic and fully equal to public responsibilities. He served as governor of the Asian province of Bithynia and later, probably in 62 or 63, held the high office of consul, or first magistrate, of Rome.
Current scholars agree on dating his work Satyricon to the first century AD and attributing his paternity to Petronius, the one whom Tacitus cited in the Annals as an "elegant arbiter", a cultured, refined, pleasant, witty, and pleasure-loving man who, thanks to these qualities, was one of Nero's few close friends.
What made Nero appreciate him was his refinement, his aesthetic taste. He lived at court like a great lord, slept during the day and dedicated the night to rare pleasures and work, which he did not love, rather adoring luxury and elegance, but also vices. If others achieved fame through work, he acquired it through his careless life.
He did not, however, have the reputation of being unruly or wasteful, like most dissipators, but of a libertine refined in his art. His own negligence, the abandonment that was noticeable in his actions and words, gave him an air of simplicity, lending him a new value. Returning to his vices or the calculated imitation of vices, he was admitted among Nero's few intimates and became the arbiter of good taste at court: nothing more delicate, nothing more pleasant than what Petronius' suffrage recommended to Nero, always confused in choosing.
Atmosphere in Nero's court
Petronius, in Nero's court, was a character from a world full of contrasts. Among the many scholars interested in the subject there were even divergent opinions, but the most accurate opinion seems to have been that of the Italian Latinist scholar Concetto Marchesi (1878 - 1957), professor at the universities of Messina, Pisa and Padua, edited editions of Apuleius, Ovid and Arnobio; he is the author of monographs on Martial (1914), Seneca (1921), Juvenal (1922), Phaedrus (1923), Tacitus (1924), Petronius (1940) and an important History of Latin literature (1925-27):
“Petronius, in the last moments of his life, would have added a page to his novel, sending it to the emperor, fierce and unbalanced, as a gift from an aristocratic and refined victim. The philosopher Seneca sent some page of morals; Petronius, the painting, and the description of that terribly corrupt world.”
Even fragmented, what remains of the Satyricon is enough to consider Petronius's pages as a literary monument of incomparable artistic beauty and of inestimable value for the reconstruction of the private life of ancient Rome.
Tigellinus' envy
Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, also known as Tigellinus, was a Roman politician, probably of Greek descent. Although of humble origins, he became prefect of the praetorium, commander of the praetorian guard and powerful advisor to Nero. Tigellinus feared a competitor more skilled than himself in the science of voluptuousness. Knowing the emperor's cruelty, his dominant quality, he denounced Petronius, in 66, as having been implicated in a conspiracy the previous year to assassinate Nero and place a rival on the imperial throne. Then he bribed an informer among the accused's slaves.
Members of Petronius family were arrested, and he was denied any defense. The emperor was then in Campania and Petronius had accompanied him to Cumas, in southern Italy, where he was ordered to remain there. Petronius, although innocent, did not wait for the inevitable sentence and made his own preparations for death.
Unhurried suicide
Knowing that his fate was already sealed, he repelled both fear and hope, but he did not want to abruptly turn away from life. He opened his veins, then closed them, opening them again as he fancied, speaking to his friends, and listening in turn. There was nothing serious in his words, no display of courage; he did not want to hear reflections on the immortality of the soul, nor on the maxims of philosophers. He asked that only mocking verses and light poetry be read.
He rewarded some slaves and ordered others to be punished; He went for a walk, surrendered to sleep so that his death, even if provoked, seemed natural. In his will he did not flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other powerful man of the day, as did most of those who perished. But, in the name of impudent youths or lost women, he narrated the emperor's debaucheries and his refinements; he sent the writing to Nero, unopened, imprinting the signet of his ring, which he destroyed so that he would not claim victims later.
Satyricon, his splendid work
The work Satyricon, a novel that inspired Fellini's beautiful film, is a narrative poem of a much larger prose work. Comic and picaresque romance is related to several ancient literary genres. In style, it varies between the highly realistic and the consciously literary, its form is episodic.
Like Petronius' life, his work also presents numerous problems, starting from the date of composition. The Satyricon began to be cited in the third century AD, before there was consensus on attributing it to Petronius. Even the title was not unique, sometimes referred to as Saturae. With the word Saturae one can link the writing to the Menippean Satires, highlighting the mix between prose and poetry. As for the different opinions, the most credible one predicts that it is, albeit uniquely, a novel and perhaps a parody of the Hellenistic Greek novel that inverts its crude realism and sentimental aspects.
The flexible narrative structure encompasses a series of independent tales, a classic example being the famous Widow of Ephesus (Satyricon, Ch. 111-112). Other characteristics, however, are reminiscent of the Menippean Satires. These characteristics include the mixture of prose and verse in which the work is composed and the digressions, when the author exposes his own points of view on different topics that have no connection with the plot.
All of Book XV and parts of Books XIV and XVI survive. The first complete reprint of all its fragments dates from 1669. However, we know that parts of the work were known in 1420 thanks to the work of Poggio Bracciolini, who found several parts spread across Europe. In 1423 Bracciolini found in Cologne the central episode of the work, the famous Trimalchionis Scene, the best and longest episode in the surviving parts of the Satyricon. It also includes some short story insertions and some poetry passages; the longest are Bellum civili (The Civil War) and Troiae halosis (Taking of Troy).
Enccò, the protagonist of the novel, tells, in the first person, the adventures of a trip to southern Italy together with his lover Gitone and young Ascilto. Among many events, the three friends are invited to a banquet at Trimalchio's house, where they will meet other characters of the same social position and the same rudeness as the owner of the house.
The Banquet of Trimalchio
It is the description of a dinner given by Trimalchio, an immensely rich and vulgar ex-slave, to a group of friends and hangers-on. The length of the episode seems disproportionate even to the supposed original size of the work and has little or no apparent connection to the plot. The setting is a Greco-Roman city in Campania, and the guests, mostly freed like their host, come from the petit-bourgeois class.
Trimalchio is the quintessential gold-digger, a figure quite familiar in ancient satirical literature, but especially in the first century AD, when formerly enslaved people as a class were most influential. Quintessence (fifth essence) is an allusion to Aristotle, who considered that the universe was composed of four main elements - earth, water, air, and fire - plus a fifth element, an ethereal substance that permeated everything and prevented celestial bodies from falling over Earth.
Two features distinguish the Symposium from other ancient examples: its extraordinary realism and the figure of Trimalchio. It is obvious that the conversation at the table of the guests of the Banquet is based on the author's personal observation of provincial societies. The speakers are beautifully and precisely characterized and their dialogue, apart from the invaluable evidence of colloquial Latin provided by the vulgarisms and solecisms in which it abounds, is a humorous masterpiece.
Trimalchio, one of the great comic figures in literature
Trimalchio himself, with his vast wealth, his display of bad taste, his affectation of culture, his superstition, and his sentimental lapses into his natural vulgarity, is more than the figure of a typical satirist. As portrayed by Petronius, he is one of literature's great comic figures and is a fitting companion to Shakespeare's Falstaff.
Character development alone was little known in ancient literature. The emphasis was always on the typical, and the classical rules established for that character were secondary to more important considerations such as plot. Petronius, in his treatment of Trimalchio, transcended this almost universal limitation in a way that is irresistibly reminiscent of Charles Dickens, and much else in the Banquet is Dickensian – its exuberance, its turbulent humor (rare in ancient literature, where intelligence predominates), and its loving profusion of details.
The rest of the Satyricon can hardly be compared to the Banquet. To the extent that any moral attitude is discernible in the nearly complete work, it is a trivial and degraded type of hedonism. Hedonism refers to a group of theories where pleasure plays a significant role and human behavior is determined by desires to increase pleasure and decrease pain.
The aim of Satyricon was to entertain, portraying certain aspects of contemporary society. When considered as such, the book is of immense value: superficial details of the characters' speech, behavior, appearance, and surroundings are accurately observed and vividly communicated.
Characteristics of Petronius' style
As already mentioned, Petronius performs a work of satire and parody in his work. The Hellenistic Greek novel is taken as a model along with its fundamental characteristics (adventures, travels, love), but in the Satyricon everything is turned upside down. At a certain point, the two protagonists separate and from then on, the various setbacks begin in their journey until the intervention of something that brings them closer together. The simple style of the novel found favor with a large part of the public.
What is distorted by Petronius? The couple, for example, who in typical novels were chaste and heterosexual while in Petronius’s are homosexual and anything but fearful and faithful. The journey, in turn, is in the nature of Odysseus's journey, but filled with a parody of the epic world. Odysseus or Ulysses was, in Greek mythology and Roman mythology, a character from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Petronius criticizes contemporary life in any of its aspects, for example, that of the school of rhetoric which, according to the writer, did not lead students to discuss anything.
The wealth of specific allusions to people and events from Nero's time shows that the work was addressed to a contemporary audience, and certain features suggest that the audience consisted of Nero and his courtiers. The realistic descriptions of low life recall the emperor's fondness for expeditions to poor neighborhoods.
The combination of literary sophistication with polished obscenity is consistent with the desire to titillate the jaded palate of a debauched court. If Petroniu's book has a message, it is more aesthetic than moral. The emphasis throughout the account of Trimalchio's banquet is on the contrast between taste and bad taste. Stylistically, too, Satyricon is what Tacitus's account of the author would lead us to expect.
The language of the narrative and of the polite speakers is pure, easy, and elegant, and the intelligence of the best comic passages is brilliant; but the general impression, even when the fragmentary state of the text is taken into account, is that of a book written quickly and somewhat carelessly by a writer who would not take the trouble necessary to discipline his astonishing powers of invention. In his book, as in his life, Petronius achieved fame through indolence.
“We shouldn’t trust too much in pre-established plans, because luck follows its own logic, which is far from coinciding with ours” (Petronius)
Quo Vadis – Where are you going?
In my proposal to present Greek and Roman authors and their influence on Classicism, this week's text would be about Virgil; however, driven by my reading of the book Quo Vadis, it changed my plans. And you will understand why.
In Nero's Rome, young Vinícius falls madly in love with the mysterious Lígia. The two, however, belong to different worlds: he is a patrician and nephew of Petronius, one of Nero's favorites; she, Christian and daughter of a Swabian king. They can only marry if he accepts the faith of the Apostles. “Quo Vadis” is a Latin expression that means “Where are you going?” and it would have been said by Peter to Jesus, who appeared to him on the Appian Way, when he was fleeing Nero's persecution in Rome, where he would be crucified.
When narrating this love story, Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846 – 1916) takes the reader through the most important historical events of the time, from the fire that broke out in Rome to the bloody circus games, painting the entire scene of contrast between the aristocracy Roman, with its excesses and frivolities, and the first Christians, persecuted and martyred. Quo Vadis earned Henryk Sienkiewicz the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature.
As can already be seen in this text, Petronius's life has gaps, as does his work, which has come down to us in an incomplete form. What really impressed me about Sienkiewicz's book was the character Petronius and his relationship with Nero. Unlike everyone around the emperor, especially Tigellinus, Petronius does not flatter or fear speaking the truth to the egocentric emperor who considers himself a talented artist and does not admit to being questioned.
From beginning to end, Petronius maintains his behavior even when he tries to save his nephew and young Lígia from the wrath of the antichrist. He takes calculated risks and recognizes when he is defeated. He recognizes, but is not subdued even in death, a slow, noble, and haughty suicide. The letter he sends to Nero is his last act, not of rebellion but of dignity:
“I know, divine Cesar, that you wait for me impatiently and that, in the fidelity of your heart, you miss me day and night. I know that you would shower me with favors, that you would offer me the position of prefect of your guard and that you would appoint Tigellinus as guard of the mules in the lands that, after Domitia's poisoning, you inherited, a position for which it seems to have been created by the gods.
Unfortunately, however, you will have to excuse me. By Hades, and especially by the hearts of your mother, your wife, your brother, and Seneca, I swear to you that it is impossible for me to come to you. Life is a treasure, my friend, and I am proud to have taken from that treasure the most precious jewels. But in life there are things that I confess I am unable to bear any longer.
Do not think, I beg you, that the murder of your mother and your brother disgusts me, that I was outraged by the fire of Rome, that I feel outraged by the process of sending all the honest people of your empire to Erebus. ...
Well done! No, my dear grandson of Cronos! Death is a common inheritance of sublunary beings and, moreover, it was not possible to expect to see you act in any other way.
However, for many years to come, having my ears tortured by your singing, seeing your Domitian legs – your stakes – move in the puric dance, hearing you play, hearing you declaim, hearing you say poems from your authorship, poor poet from the outskirts!... Ah, honestly, such a perspective was beyond my strength.
And I felt the in constrainable need to join my parents. Rome covers its ears; the universe covers you with ridicule. And I do not want to keep blushing for you. I do not want to, nor can I! The howls of Cerberus, although like your song, my friend, will be more bearable to me, as I was never a friend of the Cerberus and therefore, I will not have the duty to be ashamed of your voice.
Take care of yourself, but leave the corner; kill, but do not make any more verses; poisons, but stops dancing; sets cities on fire, but abandons the zither. Such is the last wish and the friendly advice that sends you the
Arbiter of Elegance.”
Note that Petronius calculatedly targets Nero not because of the multitude of crimes he committed, but rather because of the mockery and condemnation of the emperor's mediocre artistic skills. Nero would indeed bear all the accusations of his crimes, but not the realistic disapproval of the only one he listened to. No less touching is the narration of his death, as can be seen in this excerpt:
“... After the anthem was finished, Petronius ordered new dishes and new wines to be offered. Then he started talking to the neighbors about the thousand puerile and enchanting things common to festivities. Finally, he called the Greek and ordered him to connect the artery, as he was sleepy and wanted to abandon himself to Hypnos once again before Thanatos put him to sleep forever. And he fell asleep.
When she woke up, Eunice's head rested, like a white flower, on her chest. He placed her on the cushion to look at her once more. And the doctor opened his artery again.
The singers sang Anacreon’s hymn again, while the lutes played quietly, so as not to drown out the words. Petronius gradually turned pale. When the last note died down, he turned to the guests:
- Friends, agree that with us he perishes...
Could not finish. In a supreme gesture, her arm wrapped around Eunice and her head fell onto her chest.
And the guests, in front of those two white forms, like wonderful statues, felt that it seemed like the last attribute of the Roman world, its beauty and its poetry.”
Eunice was his slave and devoted companion to whom he would leave all his possessions, but she refused, preferring to die with him. Die in her arms.
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