The Satyricon — Complete
Petronius wrote this novel in Nero's Rome, and it feels like a roman à clef written by someone who had seen too much. The narrator Encolpius, a young man of education but no money, travels the Roman south with his companion Ascyltos, falling into misadventures that pit them against con artists, gluttons, fake philosophers, and the obscenely wealthy. The most famous episode, the Cena of Trimalchio, depicts a freedman's dinner party so lavish and grotesque it becomes a fever dream of Roman excess - a man literally buried in food, guests debating whether a dish is a dormouse or a piglet, and conversation that veers from the obscene to the philosophically absurd. But beneath the comedy lies something sharper: a portrait of an empire where corruption isn't an aberration but the operating system. The Satyricon is fragmentary - perhaps a quarter survives - yet what remains feels startlingly modern. Its form invented the picaresque novel, its satire influenced everything from Rabelais to Foucault, and its willingness to show Roman society at its most ridiculous and degraded makes it feel less like a 'classic' and more like forbidden gossip from the Julio-Claudian court.
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“Can't you see that I'm only advising you to beg yourself not to be so dumb?””
— Petronius Arbiter
“Nothing is falser than people's preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality...””
— Petronius Arbiter
“Everyone will find what he's looking for. Nothing pleases everyone: this man gathers thorns, that one roses.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“I said everything that a painful swelling in one's libido tells one to say.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“No man on earth may look on forbidden things as you have done and escape punishment. Especially here, a land so infested with divinity that one might meet a god more easily than a man.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“utres inflati ambulamus. minoris quam muscae sumus, muscae tamen aliquam uirtutem habent, nos non pluris sumus quam bullae.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“After all, I was once like you are, but being the right sort I got where I am.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“Wine there! Wine and dice! Tomorrow's fears shall fools alone benumb! By the ear Death pulls me. 'Live!' he whispers softly, 'Live! I come.””
— Petronius Arbiter
“The trader trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold;The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they're cold.But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, for succor at its hands.””
— Petronius Arbiter
