Word: petronius
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...SATYRICON OF PETRONIUS (218 pp.) -Translafed by William Arrowsmith-University of Michigan...
Refined Voluptuary. The Satyricon-whose title may refer both to satire and to the customary activity of satyrs-is probably the work of Gaius Petronius. Nero's "arbiter of elegance." of whom Tacitus wrote: "He spent his days in sleeping, his nights in the enjoyment of life. That success which most men achieve by dint of hard work, he won by laziness. Yet unlike those prodigals who waste themselves and their substance alike, he was not regarded as either a spendthrift or a debauchee, but rather as a refined voluptuary...
...Petronius' story follows the happenstance progress of three impure pilgrims: the freeloader Encolpius (whose name means, roughly, "the crotch''); the effeminate boy Giton. who is Encolpius' "brother" ("frater" to Romans had a double meaning of homosexuality); and Ascyltus. who lusts after Giton. With a straight face. Petronius defended the propriety of his romance...
...verse-its deft rendering into English is typical of Latinist Arrowsmith's translation-is. of course, sheer nonsense. The Satyricon is as impure and guileful as anything in literature, and Petronius was mocking Roman bluenoses when he pretended to deny it. But the great gaiety of the work, and the sharpness with which Petronius satirizes esthetes, pedants, bad poets, the nouveau riche and the rapacious poor, lift this gutter odyssey well above the merely pornographic. The fragment that remains of the original huge manuscript is a mixture of prose, poetry and puns, fustian rhetoric and sweaty argot...
Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...