The Wrath of Priapus

The “Satyricon” of Petronius has always been an alluring commodity, even--perhaps especially--for those who have never read it. Fellini’s movie version in 1969 offered a near-psychotic costume romp through the wilder aspects of impotence, castration, hermaphroditism and the Italian sexual revolution. One British critic credited him with the invention of a new perversion, fellinatio. Fellini also offered a singularly grungy and orgiastic version of the “Satyricon’s” best-known episode, the extravagant dinner party hosted by Trimalchio, a billionaire ex-slave. For many, too, Petronius himself is identified with Leo Genn’s portrayal in the 1951 movie “Quo Vadis,” needling Nero (Peter Ustinov, complete with emerald eyeglass) in a silkily aristocratic English accent.

Sarah Ruden’s translation is, by my count, the sixth “Satyricon” to be published since 1953 (and the first ever by a woman): The last two versions came out, more or less simultaneously, only four years ago. Clearly this fragment of a 1st century AD Roman picaresque novel commands a steady market. Just why is not quite so obvious as one might suppose. The sex alone, which lacks charm, seems an unlikely seller, as does the parodic literary element.

To begin with, we possess perhaps less than a tenth of the work’s complete text, and what survives is full of baffling gaps and allusions to earlier episodes now lost, largely as a result of chancy manuscript transmission. In fact, Trimalchio’s dinner is the only segment offering even a semblance of continuity.

Our peripatetic trio of literary freeloaders--the narrator Encolpius (“Crotch”), his companion Ascyltos and the sexy teenager Giton for whose favors they are in hot competition--is glimpsed at various points on their seemingly pointless hegira round the coastal resorts of South Italy. What this picaresque romp is about we’re never certain. How had they earlier offended Lichas and his wife Tryphaena? In what city do we first meet them? Who is Quartilla, and why does she have so scarifying an erotic agenda with the narrator? Where is Lichas’ ship headed, and do the shipwrecked trio end up in Croton by accident or design? How are we supposed to fill in the innumerable lacunae? Why hasn’t someone commissioned Gore Vidal to stitch this whole tattered tapestry together, orgies and literary witticisms included?

Further, let’s face it, the sex is pretty dull stuff. One leitmotif among many that remains puzzling is the wrath of Priapus, the lustily ithyphallic garden god that our heroes have in some not quite clear way offended (and whose anger they then compound by killing one of his sacred geese). Appropriately enough, this deity’s revenge is to inflict what advertising now dignifies with the title of erectile dysfunctionalism. Despite this, we do get occasional descriptions of sex acts both homo and hetero, but these are mild by, say, modern movie standards, and their effect, almost every time, is either ludicrous or (as Judge Woolsey said of “Ulysses”) emetic, or both.

Try using oil, ground pepper and nettle seeds the way Oenothea does, and the result is not going to produce a happy camper, much less an erotically aroused one. As pornography, in short, the “Satyricon” is a nonstarter and, if anything, is anti-aphrodisiac in its message. Those who want titillation will have to look elsewhere.

Another fact seldom stressed is that a great deal of our surviving text, not to mention the attention of its central characters, is devoted to discussion, analysis, criticism and lengthy citation (often parodic) of poetry. Here was a society with none of our modern methods of instant communication, where books were expensive and organized in rolls that made cross-referencing a nightmare; a world in which rhetoricians, with their mastery of the spoken word, reigned supreme. Apart from the basics--eating, drinking, fighting, working, having sex, running a family--you talked, argued, debated, told tales: thus “Satyricon’s” dinner party segment produces, inter alia, some nervous yet gripping anecdotes about magic and the ribald story of the Ephesian widow that gave Christopher Fry his plot for “A Phoenix Too Frequent.” It was as colorful as TV and a good deal more lively. Literature, its forms, canons, traditions, persuasiveness and presentation, was central to even semi-educated life.

This obsession Petronius catches with mind-numbing accuracy. In the “Satyricon,” everyone (with the possible exceptions of Giton and Hermeros) is bookish. Trimalchio may mangle Greek myth into a surreal olla-podrida, but he’s desperately earnest about its importance.

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The very first surviving paragraph presents a violent tirade by Encolpius against the bombastic cliches and unreal exercises of the rhetorical schools: hyped-up rodomontade, far-fetched situations such as “oracles commanding the sacrifice of ten or a dozen virgins as a remedy for the plague,” the kind of stuff that Shakespeare was later to stigmatize as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It puts young folk off literature altogether, Encolpius cries, and we begin, uneasily, to sense modern parallels. But no, replies Agamemnon, the elderly (and pretentiously named) litterateur: It’s the parents’ fault, dictating the curriculum to the teachers, sacrificing their children for short-term advantage. Some men are crippled for life because of this “perverse and sloppy education.”

Haven’t we heard all this before? Are we surprised when Agamemnon rounds off his speech with a soggy chunk of didactic verse? We are not.

The running argument about literature and education recurs, in one form or another, throughout our surviving text. People haul off and quote poetry in the middle of sex, during a shipwreck, to provide snappy explanatory captions for wall paintings. Encolpius spins an impromptu running verse commentary on Oenothea’s humble kitchen. Even Hermeros, though he pushes law books at his son, has a certain respect for Roman poetry as a mark of the cultured man. Trimalchio, at the height of the feast, wants to know how Cicero compares with Publilius Syrus the mime-writer.

Of course, this is apples and oranges, but our attention is caught: In a foggy way Trimalchio is backing Publilius’ “solider values” against Cicero’s orotund eloquence. “Eloquence shivers in frost-bitten rags,” declaims one old poet, anticipating Juvenal by nearly half a century. Bread may be the staff of life here, but poetry and literary debate are its universal relish, just as sex forms its vivifying central thread. What causes outrage is the exploitation or platitudinizing of something that really matters.

What rivets a contemporary reader of the “Satyricon,” though, is its vivid and artful air of realism. Considering how obsessed the Romans were with verisimilitude in art, its rarity in literature is surprising. Petronius has a uniquely sharp ear for the staccato rhythms, vernacular shorthand, comfortable cliches and offbeat non sequiturs of actual conversation, such as not even those popular playwrights Plautus and Terence ever quite achieved.

Better still, he displays something even rarer, a genuinely modernist eye for visual detail. With most Roman authors, one gets the impression that they disregard their surroundings as being socially inferior and culturally negligible: Even Catullus gives us no hint of what Lesbia looked like, how she dressed or what kind of house she had. But Petronius reveals an almost Dickensian eye for detail, as here at Trimalchio’s front door: “Inside the entrance there was a doorkeeper dressed in a chartreuse tunic and a cherry-colored belt, shelling peas on a silver tray. A gold cage hung over the threshold, and the spotted magpie inside greeted us. . . .” Here is a text which, uniquely, lets us glimpse the actual texture of daily life in southern Italy two millenniums ago.

This is where Ruden scores over the competition. Her footnotes may be absurdly brief, her background studies may read like polished-up student essays, her bibliographies may be short on substance, but she has caught, better than any translator known to me, both the conversational patterns of Petronian dialogue (finding her way with some skill and only intermittent prolixity, through a difficult vernacular vocabulary and a singularly corrupt text) and the camera-sharp specificity and color of the “Satyricon’s” descriptive passages. If, as she hopes, this version becomes a school text, it won’t be for the background aids but because of the translation itself, a quite extraordinary achievement against heavy odds.