PETRONIUS AND THE ANATOMY OF FICTION Petronius’ Satyricon, long regarded as the first novel of the western tradition, has always sparked controversy. It has been puzzled over as a strikingly modernist riddle, elevated as a work of exemplary comic realism, condemned as obscene and repackaged as a moral- ity tale. This innovative reading of the surviving portions of the work shows how the Satyricon fuses the anarchic and the classic, the comic and the disturbing, and presents readers with a labyrinth of narratorial viewpoints. Victoria Rimell argues that the surviving fragments are connected by an imagery of disintegration, focused on a pervasive Neronian metaphor of the literary text as a human or animal body. Throughout, she discusses the limits of dominant twentieth-century views of the Satyricon as bawdy pantomime, and challenges prevailing restrictions of Petronian corporeality to mate- rial or non-metaphorical realms. This ‘novel’ emerges as both very Roman and very satirical in its ‘intestinal’ view of reality. is a lecturer in classics at Girton College, Cambridge, and was previously a junior research fellow at Univer- sity College, Oxford. She studied at Cambridge and London and has taught at the Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge and at the Open University. She also worked as a journalist for two years. Her published work so far has dealt with Roman elegy and satire. PETRONIUS AND THE ANATOMY OF FICTION VICTORIA RIMELL Girton College, Cambridge CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521815864 © Victoria Rimell 2002 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002 This digitally printed version 2007 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Rimell, Victoria. Petronius and the anatomy of fiction / Victoria Rimell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 81586 X 1. Petronius Arbiter. Satyricon. 2. Satire, Latin – History and criticism. 3. Petronius Arbiter – Technique. 4. Rome – In literature. 5. Fiction – Technique. 6. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PA6559.R495 2002 873´.01 – dc21 2002067382 ISBN 978-0-521-81586-4 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-03701-3 paperback Contents Acknowledgments page vii List of abbreviations ix Introduction: Corporealities Rhetorical red herrings Behind the scenes The beast within From the horse’s mouth Bella intestina Regurgitating Polyphemus Scars of knowledge How to eat Virgil Ghost stories Decomposing rhythms Conclusion: Licence and labyrinths Appendix I. The use of fundere and cognates in the Satyricon Appendix II. The occurrence of fortuna or Fortuna in the Satyricon Appendix III. Aen. at Sat. : nec venit in mentem, quorum consederis arvis? Bibliography Index of passages discussed Index of subjects v Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to thank the Department of Classics at King’s College, London, in particular Alessandro Schiesaro and Michael Silk, for their generous support, open minds and wit. I am grateful also to the King’s College London Association for the scholarship which let me work and play in London for two years, and to University College, Oxford (espe- cially my guru, Chris Pelling) for the fellowship which gave me space to write and rewrite. John Henderson has always made me think harder and offered buzzing comments on various drafts of this book, so many and heartfelt thanks are due to him. I am indebted, too, to Philip Hardie and Rhiannon Ash, and to my eagle-eyed readers at Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Finally, I would like to thank Michael Sharp, along with the other members of staff at the press, for their guidance and expertise, and last but not least my parents, for everything and more. vii Abbreviations AClass Acta Classica AJP American Journal of Philology ANRW H. Temporini, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romisc¨ hen Welt, Berlin ASNP Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies CA Classical Antiquity C&M Classica et Mediaevalia CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CR Classical Review CW Classical World G&R Greece and Rome HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology ICS Illinois Classical Studies JDAI Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaologisc¨ hen Instituts JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies JRS Journal of Roman Studies LCM Liverpool Classical Monthly MD Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici MH Museum Helveticum PCPhS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society PSN Petronian Society Newsletter REL Revue des Etudes Latines RhM Rheinisches Museum TAPhA Transactions of the American Philological Association ix x List of abbreviations TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Leipzig, – WJA Wurtzb¨ urger Jahrbuc¨ her fur¨ die Altertumswissenschaft WS Wiener Studien I have used K. Muller’¨ s edition of Petronius throughout unless otherwise stated. All translations are my own. Introduction Corporealities At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a critically aware reader approaching Petronius’ Satyricon for the first time might well feel as if she is queuing to see an overhyped film, the kind of provocative Hollywood flick designed to bait media and consumers alike with wild expectations, reactions and predefinitions. Critics have claimed repeatedly that the Satyricon is ‘singularly uninterpretable’, that it ‘presents more puzzles than any other ancient text’ or that it stands as ‘the most controversial text in all of classical literature’, an exotic ‘hothouse plant displaying all the qualities of overstimulated growth’. And although it is generally safe to say that we have moved on from times when ‘the scabrous nature of some of the episodes made a scholarly interest in the work eccentric or suspect’, the sexual ‘shock factor’ is undeniably part and parcel of the way we (are taught to) read the Satyricon, and remains an important facet of its ‘enigma’ as well as of its appeal. We cannot study Petronius without at some point coming across Fellini’s whorish adaptation and Polidoro’s soft porn, or hearing about the cryptic s publication entitled New York expurgated: A moral guide for the jaded, tired, evil, non-conforming, corrupt, condemned and the curious – humans and otherwise – to underground Manhattan Slater () . Sullivan (a) . Rudich () . Quinn () . Sullivan () . See Rose (b) for an account of such readings. As Josipovici argues (: ), ‘the ultimate play with the reader still involves curiosity, [and] that curiosity is still sexual, if we are prepared to recognise that the domain of sex is as large as Freud suggested – that is, that what is at stake is the desire to discover the meaning of one’s body’. As Connors reminds us (: ), each manuscript source for the Satyricon is in part a document of reception, a striking example of which is the O family of manuscripts, which cut out all obscene detail to transform Encolpius into a more respectable pedagogus. This film was made in , the same year as Fellini’s Satyricon. It is said to ‘capitalise on the public’s imagination of orgies under the emperor Nero’ and to be ‘unmemorable’ (Schmeling a: ). Also in , notes Schmeling, ‘the Stratford (Ontario) Festival produced a musical- comedy version of the Satyricon, which focused on the Cena and a portrait of Trimalchio and his friends in modern-day dress as boorish millionaires in the worst American tradition’ (). Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Grove Press, New York, ), penned by (who else?) ‘Petronius’. It is tempting to conclude that the relative silence of British classicists on the Satyricon may still have more than a little to do with its ‘inappropriateness’, the very quality that inspired the Bloomsbury Group to extol Petronius as the antidote to English Victorian morality. In short, we continue to be embarrassed, critically or otherwise, by a text which by all accounts ‘will neither explain itself nor go away’. Needless to say, the Satyricon comes with its own idiosyncratic bag- gage of dilemmas and obstacles to comprehension and conceptualisa- tion. Rudich plots a five-point list of the odds stacked against its modern readers, which also neatly illustrates the polarisation of organising critical rhetoric and rambling Petronianese: First is the fragmentary condition of the extant text which appears to represent (although the scholarly debate on the matter still continues) about one sixteenth of its original length. Nor can it be said with full confidence that the order of the episodes that we now possess corresponds with their progression as designed by the author. It must also be stated at the outset that the extant text is bound to contain numerous allusions whose meaning is entirely lost to us . Finally, the major difficulty derives from the author’s chosen mode of discourse – a first person account placed in the mouth of a picaresque character, an ‘unreliable narrator’ par excellence who is the subject of mockery and ridicule, and thus apparently unfit to champion any genuine authorial opinions . The difficulties only multiply if one inquires into what could be taken for the political dimension of the novel: of its writer’s dissident insights and sensibilities, if any, as traceable in the parts of the text we possess. Under scrutiny, the matter becomes increasingly elusive: there hardly seems to exist a single passage that yields an unequivocal political message. Not only has the Satyricon come to us perforated with (possible) holes and tears, or even shrunk down to a fraction of its original size, but See Schmeling (: ). According to Schmeling, no explanation is given for the author’s (or authors’) nom de plume.