Petronius

• 1. Introduction

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  Gaius Petronius Arbiter spent his days in sleep, his nights in official duties or amusement. That was not a criticism. It was his reputation, and he wore it as a badge of distinction. In the court of the emperor Nero, this man became so famous for his dissolute life that other men of energy could not compete with him on his own terms. Tacitus called him the elegantiae arbiter, the judge of elegance, a title that played on his very name. How did a man who slept through his days become the most authoritative voice on taste in the most powerful court in the ancient world? And what happens when an arbiter of pleasure falls from imperial favor?

• 2. The Arbiter's Rise

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  Sidonius Apollinaris placed Petronius, or at least his Satyricon, in Massalia, the ancient city known today as Marseille. He may have been born and educated there before making his way into Roman political life. He served as suffect consul in 62, and later joined the senatorial class. His trajectory, though, bent away from the conventional path of civic ambition. Rather than build on his consulship, he turned toward a life of pleasure and became one of Nero's chosen intimates.

  Tacitus, drawing on his Annals, describes a man of calculated idleness who had nonetheless, during his time as a provincial governor and as consul, shown genuine vigor and capacity for affairs. Reckless freedom of speech, which most men would have guarded against in Nero's court, Petronius wore as frankness. It earned him popularity rather than punishment. His relationship to the emperor was, by Tacitus's account, something close to that of a fashion advisor. Pliny the Elder and Plutarch also took note of him, each describing the same role: a man whose judgment on matters of luxurious living carried absolute authority.

• 3. The Satyricon's World

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  In the literature of Petronius's own time, plot ruled everything. Classical rules had established what a story was for and how it moved. Characters were secondary considerations, fixed to types. Petronius discarded this arrangement in the Satyricon, giving his character Trimalchio a detailed interior life expressed through specific speech, behavior, surroundings, and appearance. This was not common practice in ancient literature.

  The novel is classified as a Menippean satire, a form that blends prose and verse to mock everything within reach. Petronius used his own taste as the only standard by which to measure what deserved ridicule. References to contemporary figures, to the economic and social conditions of the time, and to literary connections with the younger Seneca and with Lucan, have led scholars to date the work firmly to the Neronian era. The allusions suggest the novel was aimed in part at Nero's courtiers and possibly at Nero himself.

  Some scholars have speculated that Petronius's portrait of Trimalchio, the nouveau riche host whose dinner party dominates much of the novel, mirrors his depiction of Nero. The author never states his own opinion directly, but the character Encolpius criticizes Trimalchio in ways that make the implied target legible to anyone close to the court. The Satyricon was above all written to entertain, not to reform, yet its detailed representation of Roman customs and daily life makes it a document of social observation that centuries of readers have returned to.

• 4. The Long Suicide

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  Petronius was arrested at Cumae in 65 AD. The charge was treason, brought at the instigation of Tigellinus, the commander of the emperor's guard, who had grown jealous of his position. Petronius did not wait for a formal sentence.

  What followed was recorded by Tacitus in the sixteenth book of the Annals, and it reads as a final performance in the style Petronius had always cultivated. He made an incision in his veins, then bound them up again, then opened them once more while he talked with his friends. The conversation was not serious. He did not speak on the immortality of the soul, did not invoke the theories of philosophers. He listened to light poetry and playful verses. He gave some of his slaves generous gifts and others a flogging. He dined. He slept, so that death, though compelled, would look natural.

  His will contained no flattery of Nero, no attempt to soften the emperor's response. Instead, Petronius wrote a detailed account of Nero's shameful excesses, naming his male and female companions and describing their novelties in debauchery, then sent the document under seal to Nero directly. Afterward he broke his signet ring, so it could not be used to endanger others. According to Pliny the Elder, he also broke a fluorspar wine-dipper that had cost three hundred thousand sesterces, to ensure it would not pass to the emperor's table.

• 5. Authorship and Afterlife

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  None of the ancient sources who write about Petronius mention that he was a writer. Tacitus, Pliny, and Plutarch describe the courtier; they do not name him as the author of the Satyricon. The connection between the man and the text rests on a medieval manuscript written around 1450, which credited a "Titus Petronius" as the author. The identification with Petronius Arbiter has been traditional but remains speculative and disputed.

  The argument for the identification is circumstantial but substantial. The novel's internal allusions to contemporary figures and its literary ties to the younger Seneca and to Lucan place the composition squarely within Nero's reign, which was also the period of Petronius's life and influence. The legal arguments within the text and the social conditions it depicts have reinforced this Neronian date for scholars across many generations.

  Petronius's reach extended well past the ancient world. Henryk Sienkiewicz made him one of the most important characters in his historical novel Quo Vadis, published in 1895. The 1951 film adaptation of that novel cast Leo Genn in the role, bringing the courtier of Nero to a twentieth-century audience that had never encountered the Satyricon. Sidonius Apollinaris, writing centuries after Petronius died, placed him or his work in Massalia, which suggests the Satyricon circulated in southern Gaul long after the empire that produced it had collapsed.