Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/754

 722 PETRONITJS of good taste, and Tacitus, in the phrase he perpetuates, may have fixed this as his designation for later Avriters. The style of the work, where it does not purposely reproduce the solecisms, colloquialisms, and slang of the vulgar rich for the most part freedmen of foreign origin is recognized by the most competent critics as written in the purest Latin of the Silver Age. Coinci dences of expression and thought with passages in the satires of Persius are not infrequent. 1 The false taste in literature and expression fostered by the false style of education is condemned by Persius and Petronius on the same grounds. When the latter speaks of the &quot; mellitos verborum globulos &quot; he may possibly have had Seneca in his eye. Again, there would have been no point in putting into the mouth of the old poet whom the adventurers pick up verses on the capture of Troy and the Civil War at any other era than that in which the Troica of Nero and the Pharsalia of Lucan were the fashionable poems. The pertinacity of the reciting poet, which is exposed with such quiet humour by Petronius, is a feature of the age, common to it with the age of Martial and Juvenal. But we learn from Tacitus that the luxury of the table, which appears so profuse and extravagant in the &quot;dinner of Trimalchio,&quot; reached its highest pitch under Nero, and afterwards fell out of fashion (Tac., Ann., iii. 55). The internal evidence based on the style and character of the work thus appears to favour the opinion that the book was written in the time of Nero ; nor is there any one more likely to have been its author than the C. Petronius whose manner of life and whose death are so elaborately described by Tacitus. The work, of which there have been preserved 141 sections or chapters of a narrative, in the main consecutive, although interrupted by frequent gaps, must have been one of great originality as regards form, subject-matter, and mode of treatment. The name Satirx, by which it is designated in the best MSS., indicates that it claims to be of the type of the original &quot; satura &quot; or &quot; miscellany&quot; to which Varro, in imitation of the Greek writer Menippus, had given the character of a medley of prose and verse composition. But, while in the title and form of the work it belonged to a familiar type, yet from another point of view it is to be regarded as the earliest extant specimen of an original and most important invention in Roman liter ature. We find in it indeed not only a medley of prose and verse composition, in which the former is much the most prominent element, but also much desultory matter, disquisitions on art and eloquence, stories and anecdotes, &c. But the novelty of form recognized in Petronius con sists in the string of fictitious narrative by which these are kept together. The original Italian satura, superseded by the Latin comedy, had developed into the poetical satire of Lucilius and Horace, and into the miscellaneous prose and verse essays of Varro. In the hands of Petronius it assumed a new and most important phase in its develop ment. The careless prodigal who gave his days to sleep and his nights to pleasure was so happily inspired in his devices for amusing himself as to introduce into Roman literature, and thereby transmit to modern times, the novel 1 E.y., compare Persius, ii. 9, 10 &quot;Osi Ebulliat patruus, praeclarum funus, et O i Sub rastro crepet argenti mihi seria dextr Hereule &quot; with Satirae 88, &quot;Alius domum promittit, si propinquum divitem extulerit, alius si thesaurum eflbderit,&quot; &c. The &quot; ebulliat patruus &quot; may be compared with a phrase in the dinner of Trimalchio, &quot; horno bellus tarn bonus chrysanthus animam ebulliit.&quot; Persius has the phrase &quot;Dives arat Curibus quantum non milvus oberrat,&quot; which is a close parallel to Petr., 37, &quot; fundos habet qua milvi volant.&quot; Again, both Persius and Petronius use the rare word &quot;baro,&quot; which occurs only two or three times elsewhere. based on the ordinary experience 2 of contemporary life, the precursor of such novels of adventure and character as Gil Bias and Roderick Random. There is no evidence of the existence of a regular plot in the /Satirx but we find one central figure, Encolpius, who professes to narrate his adventures, and to describe all that he saw and heard, while allowing various other personages to exhibit their peculiarities and express their opinions dramatically. From the nature of the adventures described there seems no reason why the book should not have gone on to an inter minable length. The fragment opens with the appearance of the hero, Encolpius, who seems to be an itinerant lecturer travelling with a companion named Ascyltos and a boy Giton, in a portico of a Greek town, apparently in Campania. Encolpius delivers a lecture, full of admirable sense, on the false taste in literature, resulting from the prevailing system of education, which is replied to by a rival de- claimer, Agamemno, who shifts the blame from the teachers to the parents. The central personages of the story next go through a series of questionable adventures, in the course of which they are involved in a charge of robbery. A day or two after they are present at a dinner given by a freedman of enormous wealth, Trimalchio, who had risen, as he boasted, &quot; from a penny,&quot; and who entertained with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance a number of men of his own rank, who had not been so prosperous in life. AVe see actually in flesh and blood specimens of those &quot; Cappadocian knights &quot; to whom we have many pointed references in Martial arid Juvenal. We witness their feats of gluttony ; we listen to the ordinary talk of their guests about their neighbours, about the weather, about the hard times, about the public games, about the education of their children. We recognize in a fantastic and extra vagant form the same kind of vulgarity and pretension which the satirist of all times delights to expose by pen or pencil in the illiter ate and ostentatious millionaires of the age. Next day Encolpius separates from his companions in a fit of jealousy, and, after two or three days sulking and brooding on his revenge, enters a picture gallery, where he meets with an old poet, who, after talking sensibly on the decay of art and the inferiority of the painters of the age to the old masters, proceeds to recite in a public portico some verses on the capture of Troy, till his audience take to stoning him. The scene is next on board ship, where Encolpius finds he has fallen into the hands of some old enemies. They are shipwrecked, and Encol pius, Giton, and the old poet get to shore in the neighbourhood of Crotona, where, with the view of attracting the attention of the inhabitants, notorious fortune-hunters, the adventurers set up as men of fortune. The fragment ends with a new set of question able adventures, in which prominent parts are played by a beautiful enchantress named Circe, a priestess of Priapus, and a certain matron who leaves them her heirs, but attaches a condition to the in heritance which even Encolpius might have shrunk from fulfilling. 3 What, then, may be said to be the purpose of the book, and what is its ethical and literary value ? It can hardly be called a satire in the ordinary, and certainly not in the Eoman sense of the word. There is no trace of any purpose of exposing vice with any wish to correct it. If we can suppose the author to have been animated by any other motive than the desire to amuse himself, it might be that of convincing himself that the world in general was as bad as he was himself. Juvenal and Swift are justly regarded as among the very greatest of satirists, and their estimate of human nature is perhaps nearly as unfavourable as that of Petronius ; but their attitude towards human degradation is not one of compla cent amusement but of indignant condemnation. They too, like Petronius, take pleasure in describing things most repugnant to all sense of delicacy with the coarsest realism, but theirs is the realism of disgust, not, like that of Petronius, a realism of sym pathy. It might have been thought difficult to sink lower in the cynical tolerance of immorality than Martial occasionally has sunk. But there is all the difference in the world between Martial and Petronius. Martial does not gloat over the vices of which ho writes with cynical frankness. He is perfectly aware that they are vices, and that the reproach of them is the worst that can be cast on any one. But further, Martial, with all his faults, is, in his affections, his tastes, his relations to others, essentially human, friendly, generous, true. There is perhaps not a single sentence in Petronius which implies any knowledge of or sympathy with the existence of affection, conscience, or honour, or even the most elementary goodness of heart, or of that amount of mutual confi dence W hich is necessary to keep a band of brigands or a circle of 2 In this respect the work of Petronius seems to have differed from the Greek romances. 3 Omnes qui in testamento meo legata habent, practer libertos meos, hac conditione percipient quse dedi, si corpus nieum in partes conci- derint et astante populo comederint (141).