Some historical concepts-Satyricon

Question

What is a satire?

How is the Satyricon satirical?

How is the Satyricon a value to historians?

Who was Petronius and when was the Satyricon written?

Answer 1

Satire is a literary practice. It makes fun of something the writer finds wrong, immoral, ridiculous or objectionable in some way. The essential manner is mocking. Satire often pretends to affirm that which it wants to criticize so as to reveal its ludicrousness or parodies the original by exaggerating some facet. Irony or sarcasm are its most frequent modes. Horace and Juvenal are two other Roman satirists. Thackeray is a British satirical novelist. Mark Twain satirizes middle class frontier life in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn._ Al Yankovich's parodies of Michael Jackson, etc. satirize their originals.

The Satyricon makes fun of the vulgar, indulgent, ignorant, decadent practices of ancient Rome. It reports straight-faced, through an uninvolved, naive, and consequently objective eye what goes on. The party that Trimalchio gives is a catalog of grossness and immorailty that the openly inexperienced narrator reports, apparently first hand, with no critical judgment. Just the facts. The difference between his candid account and the implicit criticism of the author Petronius creates the irony. To the narrator this is simply what happened; the reader is appalled.

The work is valuable to historians because it gives a full picture of the life of a wealthy parvenu. It shows how his career cuts across social strata and reveals what every day life was like as well as what practices and interactions obtained in that period. It is like _The Great Gatsby_ (which mentions Trimalchio in one chapter): it is a full picture of a country at one point in time.

Not much is known about Petronius. He lived, I have read, from 27 to 66 and may have been a courtier in the time of Nero, but there is no independent biography of the man, so everything has to be derived from the very work that makes one want to know who he is. There are a lot of Greek references in the Satyricon (the icon of satire, or satyrs?), so maybe Petronius lived in the south of Italy, but that is really speculation.