from The Satyricon

PETRONIUS

Classicists and Fellini fans will already be familiar with Petronius’s first-century chronicle of the decadence of Nero’s Roman Empire, the great Satyricon. I was never a big fan of Fellini’s film adaptation; it’s dark and vulgar and lacks the mischief that a Pasolini would have given it. In fact, The Satyricon would have been a perfect Pasolini springboard: bawdy, sardonic, and class-conscious, recounting the adventures of Encolpius, a wayward thief, as he is passed from one set of probing, poking aristocratic fingers (both male and female) to another. Along the way our poor hero (whose name means “embraced”) gets assaulted by a sex-crazed hag, continually loses his boy lover Giton to a variety of competitors, manages to offend Priapus (the god of erections) who then punishes him with chronic technical difficulties, and finally goes to be “cured” by another old hag who rams a leather dildo “rubbed with oil, ground pepper and crushed nettle seed” up his anus. There’s a cure for impotence!

So as you can probably tell, The Satyricon makes a damn good read. The only problem is that four-fifths of the original text is lost, and often you’ll be set up for a really naughty bit only for the narrative to break off and start again in a different place. Talk about a tease! But the parts that remain not only chronicle the indulgence and excess that marked the declining phase of the Roman Empire but create a literary precedent for my favorite satyric and ribald tales of the Middle Ages. Without Petronius, there might have been no Boccaccio, no Chaucer, no Rabelais. With this in mind, I chose a particularly Boccaccian excerpt that details a trick for getting what you want from a reluctant lover.

“When I went to Asia . . . I lodged in a house at Pergamus, which I found very much to my taste, not only on account of the neatness of the apartments, but still more for the great beauty of my host’s son; and this was the method I devised that I might not be suspected by the father as a seducer. Whenever any mention happened to be made at table of the abuse of handsome boys, I affected such keen indignation, I protested with such an air of austere morality against the violence done to my ears by such obscene discourse, that the mother especially looked upon me as one of the seven sages. Already then I began to conduct the youth to the gymnasium; it was I who had the regulation of his studies, who acted as his monitor, and took care above all that no one should enter the house who might debauch him.

“It happened once that we lay down to sleep in the dining room (for it was a holiday; the school had closed early; and our prolonged festivity had made us too lazy to retire to our chamber). About midnight I perceived that my pupil was awake, so with a timid voice I murmured this prayer: ‘O sovereign Venus, if I may steal a kiss from this boy, and he not know it, I will make him a present tomorrow of a pair of turtle doves.’

“Hearing the price offered for the favor, he began to snore, and I, approaching the pretended sleeper, stole two or three kisses. Content with this beginning, I rose early in the morning, brought him, as he expected, a choice pair of doves, and so acquitted myself of my vow.

“The next night, finding the same opportunity, I changed my petition: ‘If I may pass my wanton hand over this boy,’ I said, ‘and he not perceive it, I will give him for his silence a pair of most pugnacious fighting cocks.’ At this promise the lad moved toward me of his own accord, and was afraid, I verily believe, lest he should find me asleep. I quieted his uneasiness on that score, and moved my hands over his entire body with all the desire that drove me. Then when daylight came, I made him happy with what I had promised him.

“The third night, being again free to venture, I leaned over his wakeful ear and said: ‘Immortal gods, if, while he is sleeping, I should be able to make the fullest and best love to him, in return I will tomorrow give the boy a fine horse, a cross between the Asturian and the Macedonian breed—so long as he never wakes.’ Never had the lad slept more soundly. First I took his lovely chest fully in my hands, then I breathed kisses from his mouth, and finally all my longings were brought to one climax. Next morning he remained sitting in his room, expecting my present as usual. It is much easier, you know, to buy turtle doves and fighting cocks than an Asturian horse, and besides, I was afraid lest so considerable a present should render the motives of my liberality suspected. So after walking about for some hours, I returned to my lodgings, and gave the boy nothing but a kiss. He looked about him on all sides, then throwing his arms round my neck said, ‘I say, master, where is the Asturian?’”

—adapted by Jack Murnighan from a
nineteenth-century translation