The Satyricon, written by the emperor Nero’s arbiter elegentiae (judge of style), Petronius, in the first century B.C.E., is one of the most interesting pieces of realistic fiction that has survived from antiquity. The work, estimated to be the size of a modest modern novel, is highly fragmentary so that the plot as a whole can only be loosely reconstructed. The narrator, an amoral yet educated man named Encolpius, has done something to offend the Roman god of sexuality and fertility, Priapus, and as a result has been stricken with a horrible case of impotence. He travels around Italy with his companion and young lover Giton looking for a cure, for the Roman equivalent of Viagra. The work has been described as a satire, as a mock epic, and a picaresque novel; it is lewd, it is bawdy and it is funny.

The Satyricon, however, also has an underlying moral message and a serious side for which William Arrowsmith argues in his seminal paper, entitled ‘Luxury and Death in the Satyricon.’ The central episode of the novel, which is also the most extant part of the work that has survived, is the Cena Trimalchionis—‘Trimalchio’s Dinner.’ Encolpius and Giton, along with a third friend they pick up somewhere along the way named Ascyltus, are invited to an elaborate dinner at the home of a ridiculously wealthy freedman named Trimalchio. The themes of luxury and death are meticulously and deftly blended together in the dinner party scene during which Trimalchio’s ostentatious wealth is fully on display alongside his obsession with his own mortality. He is rich enough, for instance, to hire a trumpeter that does nothing all day but sound his horn on the hour. He has a water clock in his dining room, a very expensive and rare item for a Roman, which also marks time for him. And the symbol, for me, that best displays the juxtaposition of the wealth and death is Trimalchio’s elaborate fresco that depicts the fates measuring and cutting the thread of his life—Trimalchio’s thread, of course, is painted in gold.

Written in Latin in 65 A.D. and widely translated into English since the 17th Century. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg here