| This month features Petronius, The Satyricon, Penguin, 0140444890, £8.99 |
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The Satyricon is arguably the first Cult book – of the Western world, at least.
It has certainly been one of the most influential.
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’ is a partial steal; Des Esseintes’, the anti-hero of Huysmann’s Against Nature, uses it as source material for creating his aestheticized life; Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray was influenced by both Huysmann and Petronius; T.S.Eliot took some lines from it as the epigraph to ‘The Waste Land’; Kenneth Anger’s films could hardly exist without it; Fellini, too, filmed it; Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for ‘Relax’ is ultimately derived from it; anyone anywhere having a toga party is, consciously or unconsciously, in its debt.
(As an aside, one of the footnotes in this edition casually mentions that: ‘It is almost certainly this passage which is the origin of our concept of Platonic love.’ Influential is probably understating it.)
The Satyricon is a collection of fragments. Some are quite extended, running to chapter length; others are freefloating – phrases that exist only because later writers quoted them. The bulk of the book is lost.
It was written, probably, by Titus Petronius (there remains some scholarly doubt). Tacitus has him as a proto-slacker: ‘He spent his days sleeping and his nights working and enjoying himself. Industry is the usual foundation of success, but with him it was idleness.’ He was known as the ‘Arbiter of Elegance’ to Emperor Nero. After losing Nero’s favour, he was given the chance to take the Roman way out. ‘Not that he was hasty in taking leave of his life. On the contrary, he opened his veins and then, as the fancy took him, he bound them up or re-opened them again, and all the while he talked with his friends, but not on serious topics…’ He died A.D. 66.
Of The Satyricon’s five surviving chapters, ‘Dinner with Trimalchio’ has been by far the most borrowed-from. The one thing that all the artists I mentioned above have in common is a close relationship with decadance – either as bewailers (Eliot) or as celebrants (Anger). And ‘Dinner with Trimalchio’ is the greatest of all Primers of Decadance.
The first thing to be said about the world of The Satyricon is that it is a belated one – and one that knows itself to be belated. It opens with a discussion of rhetoric, in which Encolpius (our anti-hero) is criticizing debased contemporary values. ‘Once the rules go, eloquence loses vigour and voice. In short, who since then has equalled Thucydides or Hyperides in their reputation? Why, not even poetry has shown a spark of life.’
Decadance is always an attempt to make a virtue of belatedness. ‘If we can’t be early and innocent,’ it says, ‘we’ll be late and debauched instead.’
What might seem odd, though, in terms of its status as a Primer of Decadance, is that ‘Dinner with Trimalchio’ is supposed to be a satire. Trimalchio himself is an overblown, vain, tasteless, lecherous, gluttonous, nouveau riche monster. Encolpius and his partners in crime are invited round to his house for dinner where they witness the full self-indulgent horror of what, for him, or so he claims, is a quiet night in. Wine is drunk, extravagant dishes are served, Trimalchio discusses his bowel movements, arguments break out, slaves are punished and freed, the host’s wife does a turn, yet more extravagant dishes are served, Trimalchio commissions his tomb and reads out selected highlights of his will, everyone has a bath.
I’m not sure ‘satire’ is really the right word to describe this. It is not just the case that Petronius, like all satirists, has a guilty love-hate relationship with his subject. (The hate may be moral but the love is aesthetic: satirists, like all artists, love great subjects; great satiric subjects are deeply immoral.) Even during the ‘Dinner’, Encolpius expresses a certain admiration for some of Trimalchio’s qualities, and laughs at some of his jokes.
No, it’s more that the writing is cannibalistic – it rips apart the flesh and bones of its subject, and yet, by the very fact of consuming them, it causes them to be incorporated into its own flesh and bones. What we normally define as satire would be straightforwardly murderous; it wouldn’t want to take anything of the subject into itself, it would just want to kill it and dump the body as soon as possible.
(Seen this way, Trimalchio is like an early version of John Falstaff. For whilst Falstaff is clearly a subject of satire, of mockery and, at points, contempt, Shakespeare feeds in every way off his appetites, energies, contradictions. And when Falstaff’s death is reported, the audience is moved at least as much as when Othello, Lear or Hamlet dies.)
All of the artists influenced by Petronius’ Primer of Decadance have consumed its flesh and bones – they are all, partly, Trimalchios. And so the cannibal feast of The Satyricon, which has now been in progress for almost two millenia, shows no sign of coming to an end.
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