Petronius' The Satyricon

The Satyricon--particularly Trimalchio's dinner is an example of "Menippean satire"(About.com). It revolves around the character, Encolpius. The Satyricon exposes the baseness of humanity--it is debauchery at its finest, and centers especially around hedonism.

The best way to describe The Satyricon is that it resembles one continuous frat party. All of the characters in the dinner scene with Trimalchio appear to be self-absorbed, drunken, silly people. However, they do not seem evil or filled with maliciousness beyond that which is exposed when they do not get what they want. For the most part, very little is done in this tale unless it is for pleasure. Fortunata is an interesting character, though she is hardly treated kindly or represented in a very kind light. She appears greedy, proud, and mildly ignorant. Her greatest personal desire in the work is to sit around kissing her girlfriends drunkenly as she shows off all of her expensive jewelry (Norton 1077). She is hardly a character to mold one's self after, and yet she brings a sort of humor to the whole scene with her presence due to the way she is described and treated by others in the work. Almost the entirety of The Satyricon is full of hypocrisy and contradictions. Up until the point where Trimalchio begins kissing the boy and she reacts negatively, Fortunata kisses her fellow girls as though there is nothing wrong with it (1077-1078). However, the moment Trimalchio kisses the boy, she insults Trimalchio as though he is disgusting, exposing a bit of a “double-standard” of behavior. Trimalchio later gives a very strange explanation for why he kissed the boy--"I kissed this very careful little fellow, not for his pretty face, but because he's careful with money..." (Norton 1080). The quote from Trimalchio that pretty much sums up the overall view in this work by the characters in it, "Believe me: have a penny, and you're worth a penny. You got something, you'll be thought something. Like your old friend--first a frog, now a king" (1081). It appears that in The Satyracon, as long as a powerful person states something, it must be so (politics?). 

Here is a clip of the film Satyricon (1969) by Frederico Fellini. It is loosely based on the work, The Satyricon, and while it is in Italian, it is interesting to get a glimpse into the world that Petronius painted.