Unanswered Questions About Petronius

It's relatively rare that a book is read by as many as a million people. Big-budget movies which aren't seen by millions of people, on the other hand, are flops. Federico Fellini made big-budget movies which definitely weren't flops. Although the novel is almost 2000 years aold, and the film about 40 years old, I think it is fairly safe to say that more people have seen Fellini's movie Satyricon than have read the work by Petronius on which it is based -- loosely based, Fellini has the decency to say right there in the credits.

No, I don't like Fellini's Satyricon. I don't like Fellini's movies in general. Neither did Pauline Kael. Kael made the argument, which I second, that Fellini never bothered much to develop the characters in his movies, because the main character in every Fellini movie is Fellini. If you find Fellini himself to be absolutely fascinating, as he himself clearly did, then there's a chance that you might like some of his movies almost as much as he did -- and oh, what it must be like to love a movie that much! If, on the other hand, you find Fellini to have been a fatuous egomaniac, come on ever here and have a seat by me and Pauline.

In addition to the egomania, there's the grotesquerie. Fellini loved to look at freaks, at deformed people, people who were very fat or very thin, people with huge scars or boils, etc, etc. I don't, so much. I really appreciate how, in most movies and TV shows, most of the people are ridiculously good-looking and impossibly perfect, in many cases much more perfect-looking than the actors who are skillfully altered to look that way. I get more than my fill of grotesque reality away from the screen.

So, first I saw Fellini's Satyricon, and was greatly disappointed, because I assumed that my disgust meant that I would also find Petronius' Satyricon to be disgusting. Then I read Kael's review of Fellini's Satyricon, which gave me hope that there was much in Petronius' version which I might like, which Fellini had missed. Then I began to perceive that many, perhaps most film critics disagreed with Kael, about Fellini and about a lot of other things. A while after that, I ceased to care very much what most film critics think, about Kael or about anything else. Later, I noticed that the Latin and Greek passage quoted at the beginning of TS Eliot's "Waste Land" is a quote of Trimalchio. By that time, I had begun to think somewhat less of Eliot than I once had, but diciphering that passage both made me think a little more of him again, and made me want to read Petronius. (Is the passage in Fellini's film? If so, I slept through it.) So I read Petronius.

That is to say, of course: I read what remains of Petronius. 195 pages in Konrad Mueller's corrected fourth Teubner edition of 2003.

Which brings us to some unanswered questions about Petronius and his poem. Unanswered as far as I know. As always, if you want to be sure, ask experts, and I'm not one. How long was the Satyricon when it was whole? I believe the best guesses there are: at least several times as long as those 195 pages, perhaps ten times as long, perhaps more. Which would make the Satyricon longer than War and Peace but not quite as long as the Old and New Testament together.

Who was this Petronius who wrote this novel? Yes, boys and girls, it's a novel. The novel wasn't invented by Fielding. Or by Cervantes. Or by Rabelais. Or, for that matter, by the ancient Romans. They got the idea from the Greeks. Was it the Petronius Arbiter who was the style advisor to the Emperor and would-be artist Nero, who was obliged to commit suicide in AD 66, when Nero suspected him of plotting against him? (Did Nero suspect correctly?) That Petronius was not yet 40 years old when he died -- assuming that he is our author, what more might he have written, if the rotten Nero had been wiped out first?

Oh, and by the way, just in case this wasn't already completely clear: read it, by all means read it, it's staggeringly good.

What would our author think of Fellini's film? Did Fellini understand Petronius better than Pauline and I, after all? Has my squeamishness blinded me to vast realms of aesthetic and artistic edification? Has it lead me to read a version of the novel which is pale and anemic and quite unlike the author's intent?

And by the way, here's a question which stopped me dead in my tracks over 30 years ago, and which has bothered me ever since, a question I have not been able to even begin to answer: Why do so many of us grown-ups expend so much time and energy discussing made-up stories with such fearful earnestness? How serious a question was it for me at the time? Well, it struck me as an undergraduate right in the middle of an honors English class,right in the middle of something particularly pretentious which I was saying to the professor and the class, and English was one of my double majors. So, it was, and remains, what you might call a rather dramatic existential crisis.

Onward: more questions: would we have more of the novel today, had Poggio never lived, or never learned to read? Yes, him again: Poggio discovered part of what we know of Petrobius today, in 1420. The manuscript he found was copied, and then, of course, Poggio lost it. Additional manuscript discoveries in the 16th and 17th centuries brought the text to the length it has today. Scholars continue to work on the text, and the condition of the manuscripts continues to give them plenty to do.

Are the manuscripts so scanty because Petronius wrote for a small, private audience? Did so much of the text come to light so late because there's so much gay sex in it? Yes, there's also quite a bit of hetero sex, and violence, in the story, but Christian authorities have always objected more strongly to sex in literature athan to violence, and more strong to gay sex than to heterosexuality.

And, of course, there remains that favorite question of mine: Will still more of the text come to light?