by Ronald F. Hock

Since my recent survey of scholarship on the Greek Novel and early Christian literature (see PSN 30[2000]9-11), publications have been rather scarce on the ground, although one publication will be of special interest to readers of Ancient Narrative:

Dennis R. MacDonald, ed., Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001). This volume contains eight essays by classicists and New Testament scholars, including one essay specifically on ancient fiction: Judith Perkins, "Space, Place, Voice in the Acts of the Martyrs and the Greek Romance," pp. 117-37.

Work nonetheless continues in this small but growing area of scholarship as seen in a number of papers read at sessions of the Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative Group at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in 1999 and 2000. Papers of interest to readers of Ancient Narrative are as follows (email addresses of presenters of these papers are available at the SBL website - www.sbl-site.org).

Particularly productive have been studies relating ancient fiction to Jewish narrative literature:

• Ronald F. Hock "Romancing the Parables of Jesus: Novel Insights into the Parables of the Prodigal Son, Unmerciful Servant, and Laborers in the Vineyard"

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Giuseppe Giovanni Gamba, Petronio Arbitro e I Cristiani: ipotesi per una lettura contestuale del Satyricon. BSR 141. Roma: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1998, 411pp.L. 45.000

Review by Richard I. Pervo

Gamba accepts the conventional dating of the Satyrica and specifies T. Petronius Niger as the author. Little else follows convention. Peter and Paul arrived in Rome during Nero's celebrated quinquennium and enjoyed great success, not least among the upper classes. Adherents included Seneca, Nero and Petronius. The first remained rather steadfast, but Nero's superficial faith was short lived, and Petronius eventually broke with the Christians over their strict ethical code. Gamba's "contextual reading" derives from his view that the novel is an autobiographical apologia pro vita sua. Armed with this thesis, he interprets the Satyrica as a roman à clef, to be decoded by the alleged life and views of its author. Scholars have suggested many possible and some probable references to contemporary personages and events in Petronius's work, while no less an authority than Glen Bowersock has argued for a parody of the Christian eucharist in the testament of Eumolpus (Fiction as History: Nero to Julian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), but not even the most unregulated and extravagant concoctions can compete with Gamba. The result resembles the script for a 1950's Hollywood spectacular.

Refuting works of this ilk is otiose. Specifically, for his data about Christianity the author presumes that more or less all of the New Testament was available in Latin in the 60's. Little of it was written before the final decades of the century, and none of it was fully translated until 175-200. Gamba accepts the authenticity of the fourth century correspondence between Paul and Seneca and evidently relies upon the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter. Against the grain readings and theses can be useful challenges to entrenched assumptions. I regret to say that Petronio Arbitro e i cristiani does not serve this purpose and merits a quick and merciful oblivion.

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Notes on the Tacitean Petronius (Annals 16.18-20)

by Barry Baldwin

What better topic to inaugurate the new PSN-Ancient Narrative combo? To come fresh at it, I have eschewed the handful of relevant articles inventoried by Benario and Sage in their CW/ANRW bibliographies. Furneaux followed by Syme calls the opening pauca supra repetenda sunt Sallustian. So it is (Cat. 5.9; Jug. 5.3), though not exclusively (e.g. the similar trope in Livy, pr. 5, imitated in HIS pr. 16 by the Elder Pliny). But the point is not how but why Tacitus should thus kick off? - Grant's Penguin "Petronius deserves a brief obituary" shamelessly burkes the issue. In the previous (16.17) chapter - also equipped with an opening paucos - Petronius brings up the end of a non-alphabetic line of victims. According to editorial taste, his name is prefaced by C., T., ac C., or plain ac. No more here on that weary issue. Rather, after Annaeus Mela, Cerealis Anicius, and Rufrius Crispinus, why is Petronius' praenomen (whatever it was) not given in full? A token of the man's posthumous fame? - or lack of it?

"A slight retrospect must be taken" (Furneaux' rendition). Why? The other three get the same: briefly for Cerealis and Crispinus, Mela at length; P. is in his right place here. The next sentence (though no sign of it in Grant) begins nam, said by Furneaux to be "inserted to point attention to the unique character of his career as a reason for dwelling on it," a grandiose explanation ignorning the nam that likewise begins the second sentence in ch.17 about Crispinus, whose career had no unique character at all.

Illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur. Less here than meets the eye. Seneca (Ep. 122.2) fulminates against hedonists qui officia lucis noctisque perverterint; Elagabalus in his HA Life (28.6) transegit et dierum actus noctibus, et nocturnos diebus, aestimans hoc inter instrumenta luxuriae - a Tacitean tincture? The historian liked oblectamentum, applied twice in quick succession (Ann. 14.16,21) to Nero's frivolities. Furneaux thought per somnum a distinctive twist of style for somno, but it was Ciceronian (De Div.2.126).

Habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu. If Furneaux was right that Tacitus coined the noun, no Roman had ever been called a profligator, and only Ennodius (Dictiones 18.5) would revive the term. The historian adored such sonorities, especially in the Annals (cf. Syme, Tacitus, 723). By the way, despite quod plerique pereuntium which looks right in ch. 19, has anyone proposed deleting ut plerique sua haurientium as a scribal explanation of this rarity? - the sentence would be more "Tacitean" without it. Erudito luxu may prepare the way for elegantiae arbiter - Petronius would have enjoyed Quentin Crisp's How to Have A Lifestyle.

Dicta factaque eius, quanto solutiora et quandam sui neglegentiam praeferentia, tanto gravius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur. Furneaux penned a remarkable note on this: "His words and acts seemed to have a freshness about them which commended itself to the worn-out taste of the age. This characteristic seems not unsuited to the broad humour of the Satirae." The first sentence is paradoxical, the second an unwarranted deduction - one could as easily credit the Satyricon to the equally unconventional Vestinus, who shared both characteristic and style of suicide with Petronius (Ann. 15.68-9). Syme (336 n.5) was tempted by Bogner's notion (Hermes 76, 1941, 223) that these words implied the Satyricon, dwelling on novae simplicitatis opus from the poem in ch.132 - o sancta simplicitas indeed!

Proconsul tamen Bithyniae et mox consul vigentem se ac parem negotiis ostendit. Nothing unusual here, except for the plain technicality proconsul which Tacitus (cf. Syme 343) generally avoids - how did he refer to his own Asian tenure? In Suetonius, those languid debauchees Otho and Vitellius were equally good provincial governors. Did the Younger Pliny encounter and pass on to Tactitus any Bithynian old-timers' memories of the Petronian era? A character in Anthony Powell's (who frequently mentions him) novel Hearing Secret Harmonies speculates: "Didn't Petronius serve as a magistrate in some distant part of the Roman Empire? Think if the case (sc. of Christ) had come up before him."

Adsumptus est elegantiae arbiter, dum nihil amoenum et molle adfluentia putat nisi quod ei Petronius adprobavisset. On the done-to-death topic of Petronius Arbiter, I merely observe that this "title" is but an extension of the ordinary arbiter bibendi/rex mensae. More notable is molle adfluentia, evocative of adfluentia luxu propior applied to (Ann.3.30) the similarly insouciant Sallustius Crispus.

Amicitiam Scaevini Petronio obiectans. A canny move by Tigellinus: despite his dissoluta luxu mens et proinde vita somno languida, Scaevinus was surprisingly vigorous in promoting Piso's conspiracy (Ann.15.49).

I've neither space nor need to spell out Petronius' famous suicide -why did Tacitus disdain the vase-breaking gesture recorded by Pliny, NH 37.20? Such dinner-table departures from life are not uncommon in the Annals: Libo (2.31), Vestinus (15.69), above all (for nonchalance) Valerius Asiaticus (11.3) - they help to justify Menagrius' in epulas for the manuscripts' strange (though why such a blunder?) in vias; cf. Cicero, Leg.2.63, epulas inibat. We must add, as Furneaux did not, the convicted poisoner Pontia (daughter of a P. Petronius!) from a scholiast on Juvenal 6.638 who cum largis se epulis onerasset et vino, venis incisis saltans, quo maxime studio oblectabatur, extincta est' - observe (apart from oblectabatur) venis incisis: "in our passage Tacitus has this "new expression" (Furneaux - Ritter suggested intercisas), as in the proximate Ann.16.14. And despite Tacitus' condemnatory exitu inhonesto (Hist.1.71), Tigellinus' own throat-cutting at Sinuessa spa inter stupra concubinarum et oscula deserves respectful comparison.

As to those much-discussed codicilli that Petronius sent under seal to Nero cataloguing the imperial bedmates and their sexual specialties, they (despite some modern efforts) obviously have nothing to do with Satyricon, and never would have been thought literary satire, had not Fabricius Veiento (Ann.14.50) used the title for his lampoons against priests and senators. Again, look back to ch.17: Mela employed testamentary codicils to protest against the injustice of his own fate whilst others survived - surely Petronius' own point.

Ambigenti Neroni quonam modo noctium suarum ingenia notescerent, offertur Silia … tanquam non siluisset (a pun?) quae viderat pertuleratque. I've never quite grasped Nero's surprise at Petronius' boudoir intelligence, given his inclusion and status inter paucos (THAT word again!) familiarium. And who was this haud ignota Silia? -clearly Tacitus thought his readers needed no epexegesis. Petronius' hazardous friendship with her recalls how Otho and Vestinus were imperilled in "eternal triangles" with their ladies and Nero.

I end (how else?) with the 64 thousand denarius question. WHY, if this Petronius is the novelist, does Tacitus not mention the Satyricon? - I ask as one who has been writing nearly forty years in the belief that he is (while we are at it, why does Petronius not make it into Suetonius' Nero for the exitus scene if not the novel?). Furneaux' surprised "It is remarkable that Tacitus gives him no credit for any literary talent" is more useful than Syme's (336 with n.5) cavalier "But he could not mention Seneca's pasquinade on Divus Claudius. That was alien to the dignity of history. Likewise the Satyricon." Yet the memorial plaque to Jane Austen in Winchester Cathedral erected by her brothers praises "the extraordinary endowments of her mind" - as Tacitus does for Petronius - without a word about her six novels. 19th-century England was not 1st-century Rome, but…