Revisiting Satire and Petronius’ Satyrica

The relationship between Petronius’s Satyrica and the Satires of Horace’s second book has been long noted in scholarship (e.g. Sandy 1969, Beck 1982). How precisely to characterize this relationship remains an important question for any appreciation of the Satyrica and its status as an important chapter in the post-Horatian evolution of the genre. Satire can either be considered just one of many sources of generic ornamentation for Petronius’ omnivorous sensibility, or it can be regarded as the key genre for interpreting the text. Inevitably, this question of the role of satire in Petronius is intertwined with the old question of whether or not to read the Satyrica through the lens of moral diatribe (Highet 1941, Sullivan 1967, Walsh 1974). The question of satire as a model therefore goes to the heart of the most important issues in the interpretation of this beguiling text.

Once recognized, the use of a literary model must be plotted somewhere between the poles of emulation and parody, with the recognition this is to some extent a false dichotomy, since admiration and mockery often coexist. As Conte points out (1996), the interpretation of literary models in Petronius is complicated by a further consideration: when do we speak of a model as being employed directly by the author, and when is it better to speak of it as being imposed by the “mythomaniac” narrator’s overactive literary imagination? The question bears directly on whether or not we think Petronius himself is parodying his literary models, or only mocking his narrator’s failed application of literary models to his experience.

This paper proposes to use Horatian satire to test whether we can consistently distinguish the narrator from the author along the lines suggested above. Trimalchio’s dinner, the longest continuously preserved portion of the Satyrica, employs Horace’s Cena Nasidieni as its primary model, with Encolpius and company striving to fulfill the role of Varius Rufus and Fundanius. However, as the night progresses, the freedmen begin to flip the script on the pretentious laughter of the novel’s protagonists: Ridet! Quid habet quod rideat? (57.4). On the one hand, we can read this moment as the umpteenth collapse of Encolpius’ pretentions; he is, after all, no Varius Rufus. However, we cannot quite content ourselves with saying that Encolpius is molding random experience to a literary model, since the text’s author directly employs Horace on the deepest structural level in this episode. It is possible, then, that in addition to mocking the protagonist, this moment subverts the shared derision between author and reader so often constructed in traditional satire, thereby driving the reader to reexamine his or her complicity in the “satirical” laughter the episode seems designed to elicit. A close reading of this passage in the Cena can therefore help us better understand not only the relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist in the Satyrica, but also the fundamental literary and social outlook of the text.