William Young Sellar and Walter Coventry Summers

“ We might conjecture that the chief gift to which Petronius owed his social and his literary success was that of humorous mimicry. In Trimalchio and his various guests, in the old poet, in the cultivated, depraved and moody Encolpius, in the Chrysis, Quartilla, Polyaenis, &c., we recognize in living examples the play of those those various appetites, passions and tendencies which satirists deal with as abstract qualities. Another gift he possesses in a high degree, which must have availed him in society as well as in literature—the gift of story-telling ”

“ On the other hand, it is clear that the creator of Trimalchio, Encolpius and Giton had the experience, the inclinations and the literary gifts which would enable him to describe with forcible mockery the debaucheries of Nero. And the impression of his personality does in another respect correspond closely with the Petronius of the Annals—in the union of immoral sensualism with a rich vein of cynical humour and admirable taste.
The style of the work, where it does not purposely reproduce the solecisms and colloquialisms of the vulgar rich, is of the purest Latin of the Silver age. ”

“ If we can suppose the author of this work 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. ”

“ He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. ”

“ 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, in Campania. An admirable lecture on the false taste in literature, resulting from the prevailing system of education, is replied to by a rival declaimer, Agamemno, who shifts the blame from the teachers to the parents. ”

“ But we know from Tacitus that the luxury of the table, so conspicuous in Trimalchio’s Banquet, fell out of fashion after Nero (Ann 3 55) . Of the work itself there have been preserved 141 sections of a narrative, in the main consecutive, although interrupted by frequent gaps. The name Satirae, given in the best MSS, implies that it belongs to the type to which Varro, imitating the Greek Menippus, had given the character of a medley of prose and verse composition. But the string of fictitious narrative by which the medley is held together is something quite new in Roman literature. ”