Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Passive-Aggressive Humour and Satire, October 16, 2000
Petronius's "Satyricon" is, loosely defined, the story of Encolpius's odyssey through the Mediterranean world of the first century AD. Encolpius is a freeman and a scholar, whose distaste for popular culture, and disrespect for other people's privacy leads him into a strange, twisted, sexually disorienting series of misadventures.The action of the plot commences when Encolpius stumbles upon a secret ritual performed by followers of Priapus, the Roman god of lust. In the context of other ancient novels, I think it is extremely important to note that the god who spurs the hero's wanderings is not Eros, the god of love, but Priapus, a perhaps degenerate form of Eros. Rendered impotent by the angry god, Encolpius begins experiencing external complications as well. Encolpius's lover, the boy Giton, and his best friend Ascyltus get into repeated quarrels over Giton's preference of partner: Encolpius or Ascyltus. For a mere boy, Giton is presented throughout the "Satyricon" as its most shrewd and interesting character. He lurks on the peripheries of the main action, yet the reader can clearly perceive his manipulative actions, as he takes the side in any argument or dispute of the party most likely to win, switching camps at a moment's notice. In the dissolute moral background of Roman imperial society, Giton is shown to be the best at "doing as the Romans do". As a curse-born eunuch, Encolpius roams about with Giton and the bombastic, and epically terrible poet Eumolpus, trying to restore himself to full masculinity. Along the way, Petronius presents us with a range of different critiques. The most impressive of these episodic satires is the oft-cited chapter five, "Dinner with Trimalchio". In it, we see a largesse, a gluttony, whose perversions are so outlandish, that we join with Ascyltus in laughing at it, while we secretly revel in its unquestionable splendor. The excesses of this chapter can be seen as a model for the "Satyricon" itself: conversations begin and end on a whim; like Trimalchio, Petronius as author can be clearly felt in guiding the course of events. Trimalchio's restroom breaks are like those times in the narrative where Petronius himself seems to take breaks from the actual plot, as in Eumolpus's extended and inane epic poem on the Roman civil war. In any event, with all its literary styles, parodic forms, and its stubborn refusal to be simply categorized, the "Satyricon," even fragmentary as it is, is a fabulous text. Although some of the colloquialisms he uses are beginning to show signs of advancing age, William Arrowsmith's translation, almost fifty years after initial publication, is still lively and engaging English for a 21st century crowd.
|
|
|
29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scraps of naughty readers, June 14, 2001
The Satyricon has reached us in a particularly bad shape, but it is not the only ancient text that makes you wonder whether its author, if he could rise from the dead, would be able to identify his own work from the concoctions of modern scholarship! Often the archetype for our endeavor is already removed from the original script by many centuries, and who knows whether the authorÕs own script had been free of errors. Even on papyrus, to produce a manuscript was slow and costly. Before the invention of the codex, scrolls in some cases could be a heavy and cumbersome affair of 90 ft. in length and up to 30 pounds of weight. Once a column had disappeared in the interior of such scroll, the author would be very reluctant to go through the trouble of unscrolling, if he could help it. So for his cross-references he would rather trust his memory, and of course nobody even considered making an index, because for scrolled material it is practically useless. It makes only sense if you can go between single pages. Worst of all, we look at a book that in all likelihood had never been disseminated very widely. Most copies seem to have been private notes, taken from the text with little regard of context. Since it is a frank and unashamedly lewd text, most copyists, like naughty schoolboys, copied out only the juicy bits for God knows what use. This has saddled the modern reader with a collection of snippets in a very sorry condition, which under-represents the entire text by 90% and over-represents the sex in it by 100%. Of reportedly some 20 books, only portions of book 14, 15, and 16 have survived in loose snippets from all over Europe, but nobody has yet established an undisputed order for all the fragments. For all we know, prior to the surviving part, the story starts at Marseilles. The first person narrator Encolpius, for unknown reasons, had fallen foul of the god Priapus and goes on a quest to regain his errection. He may had been exiled from the city (after a years entertainment at public expense) or ran away from the plague, travels by sea to Italy and at some point is rescued from the gladiatorial arena in Rome. Freeloading and thieving, Encolpius moves down through Italy, until a Tarentine ship owner, Lichas, is attracted to him and picks him up. Encolpius however seduces LichaÕs wife and commits some terrible outrage on his benefactor in the porticus of Hercules at Baiae, a famous pleasure resort in south Italy. He also steals the robe and rattle of the goddess Isis from LichaÕs ship. About the same time, the famous courtesan Tryphaena becomes his mistress in a love triangle between him, her, and the handsome slave Giton. Grown jealous, Encolpius disgraces his mistress in public, and he and Giton gang up with another low life character, Ascyltus. The three are involved in the murder of a certain Lycurgus, rob his villa and saw up the proceeds in a ragged tunic. During a separation, perhaps while stealing an expensive cloak, Encolpius loses the garment with the stolen money inside. Mutual suspicions of dishonesty and jealousy over Giton shake up the trio, before it barges in into some secret Priapean rites conducted by the priestess Quartilla. Finally we find the three in Puteoli and associating as men of culture with a teacher of rhetoric, Agamemnon, who has a school there. It is here, when the surviving text opens in the middle of a discussion of the timeÕs rhetorical education. So, if the condition of the fragments is such a sorry affair, why bother at all? (For the lewd bits we certainly can substitute from our XXXX video stores.) Well, to begin with, the author obviously had been a linguistic genius with an ear for common peopleÕs speech-patterns, which in itself is highly unusual for PetroniusÕs time. For all we know, he seemed to have been an intimate member of the inner circle surrounding the emperor Nero. So all the more unusual, that such a man should care for the language in the streets. Nero together with his drinking companions, is reputed to have roamed the streets and taverns of the capital in dissolute sprees of mayhem, even after his coronation. Sometimes this got the teenage emperor in trouble with the law. If Petronius was a participant in these entertainments, he certainly had had ample opportunity for first hand observations on low life and indeed much of this material found its way into his novel. But it is an unusually rich presentation straddling the entire scale from the vulgar to the mockingly sublime, interspersed with poems and sometimes deliberately bad poetry, and with an uncanny eye for trifles and little sensations. Just notice how the eye follows a drifting bird feather, sinking down to the sea and floating there in narrow circles before being sucked under by the whirling pool of the little waves that dimple the surface - most unusual for practically the entire literature of the period, before and long after. An incredibly rich tapestry unfolds, of local customs, idiosyncratic character traits, the smells and gusto of real peopleÕs life. Tacitus reports, that PetroniusÕs involvement in PisoÕs conspiracy did force him to commit suicide in 65 Ad., but not before he spelled out his true feelings in a last letter to the Emperor. This is probably true. According to Roman custom the public reading of a deceasedÕs will was often used to settle old scores in a piece of unanswerable libel. Considering the enormous length of the novel, PetroniusÕs death may very well have left unfinished this product of a notorious night-owl. What had survived, has found in William Arrowsmith a very able translator - it is a hard act to do, and Arrowsmith gave us as good a rendition as can reasonably be expected.
|
|
|
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
great, if you know what you're doing, October 13, 1998
By A Customer
If you've seen Fellini's "Satyricon" and were utterly mystified by it like I was, it's no use reading Petronius' original to try to sort it out. If fact, it may not be much use reading the Satyricon at all. It is awfully disjointed, having been, I suppose, picked up in pieces of broken parchment off the desert floor. There are only maybe two or three stretches of it that are reasonably coherent, the only great one being "Trimalchio's Dinner," and even that can be obscure without a keen sense of humor, or in my case (being a bit dim) a brilliant and jovial Classics teacher. The reward, if you get it all, is one wonderful chapter of rich, ribald comedy, which you'll remember many years. Of the translations, Arrowsmith's (I've looked at one or two others, while cramming for Latin finals probably) seems to be about the best in flavor--merry, mock-dramatic, wicked--but one or two others are, technically, more accurate.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Juvenal
by Cornelius Tacitus
by Apuleius
by Virgil
See all 7 books this book cites
