Petronius' The Satyricon

This study will examine Petronius' The Satyricon, focusing on the work as a self-reflexive text. The work is above all meant to be humorous and satirical, and it means to use that humor to critique the Roman Empire and everything in it. This critical and satirical onslaught is aimed at the literary world as well, particularly at its many conventions which Petronius clearly despises. His own style is vigorously down-to-earth, and his narrator never puts himself above the fray or above the criticism. However, the self-reflexiveness of the book is focused far more on the pompous forms prevalent at the time than upon itself.

In fact, indirectly, the dissolute narrator Encolpius deals praise to his own honesty and accessibility when he immediately

launches into an attack on the literature and rhetoric of the time in the very first lines of the book: "Aren't you professors hounded by just these same Furies of inflated language and pompous heroics? How else can you account for all that wretched rant?" (21).

The various devices and techniques Petronius uses to express his self-reflexive work all serve the larger purpose of criticizing society and everything in it in a way which exposes hypocrisy and pomposity. He certainly aims to offend any reader who brings a conservative view of life to the work, but he also wants to draw the laughter of the reader. Petronius would probably be disappointed if all he did was offend his readers, rather than make them laugh, but it is likely tha

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hat the schools teach nothing of real life, certainly he must believe such a charge in fact. At the same time, making this claim frees him to write whatever he wants to regarding his protagonist's pederastic adventures. In the name of writing about "real life," in the name of counteracting the fantasies and pretensions of "literature," Petronius allows himself to pursue any perversion he (or his protagonist) might pursue in "real life." Therefore, in considering anything the protagonist has to say in his self-reflexive text, we must keep in mind that he is involved in a self-serving activity. He disguises such self-serving claims in the form of social and literary criticism which, after all, is most often not only true but truly hilarious. Encolpius reflects that "great language . . . soars to life through a natural, simple loveliness" (22). Certainly, if Petronius is criticizing the "bombast" of what is passed off as literature in his time, then he must believe what he writes himself to be the "real" literature. This means that he believes his own writing fulfills the requirement of "great language" and that it "soars to life through a natural, simple loveliness" (22). One must wonder, then, how comfortably the following would

Category: Literature - P