The Satyricon — Volume 02: Dinner of Trimalchio
The Satyricon — Volume 02: Dinner of Trimalchio
Translated by Firebaugh W. C.
What you're holding is the earliest surviving novel in Western literature, and it still reads like something scandalous. Written in first-century Rome by a courtier to Nero, The Satyricon follows the wandering narrator Encolpius and his boy-lover Giton through a world of fleeced guests, conniving parasites, and one extraordinarily ridiculous dinner party. That feast, hosted by the freedman Trimalchio, is the most famous section: a grotesque display of wealth so ostentatious it includes a silver chamber pot, a menu written in poetry, a painted dog warning guests to beware, and an entire course served as fake eggs concealing birds. But Petronius isn't merely mocking nouveau riche bad taste. He's dissecting the entire performance of Roman identity, the desperate mimicry of class, the way wealth corrupts taste and language and love. The prose is deliberately slippery, dropping between educated Latin and street slang, between literary allusion and flatulence jokes. It's a novel that knows exactly how absurd civilization is, and refuses to let you forget it.
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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
