Search Results

“... after Tacitus) Turning to Caius Petronius, there are a few things about him that deserve To be remembered: he liked to sleep all day, then devote his nights To business – or pleasure. Most have to work hard To become well known, but it was idleness that propelled Petronius to fame ...”

“... this family-tree was never quite clear. Classicists have always found it easier to demonstrate Petronius’ precedence than to illustrate his influence. In contrast to that other great Latin novelist, Apuleius, who managed to create in the Golden Ass a blend of burlesque and piety that was exactly to the taste of the Early Modern European, ...”

“... of moral essays and meditative epistles; Lucan’s ranting epic on civil war; and the Satyrica, Petronius’ mutilated experimental novel on sex, drugs and the whole sick crew. These are plotted along a graph of ‘(im)moralism’. ‘The Immoral Moralist’, ‘The Moral Immoralist’, and ‘The Immoral Immoralist’ – Seneca, Lucan, ...”

“... also see why I had not chosen it. So I was grateful to him. Grateful to Martin Amis, the post-punk Petronius. Yes, Mart. I’ve heard of Petronius. You didn’t get all the education. There was some left over for the rest of us, right? Through the ostentatiously open door of the bathroom I had noticed that the bidet was full ...”

“... conventions are thrown into relief by the two Roman geniuses who parody and transcend them, Petronius and Apuleius. (New translations of the whole Greek corpus now come in a bumper volume, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by Bryan Reardon.) This is teen-romance in its salad days. Fate separates young lovers; they travel through hostile ...”

“... of wine.’ There is a good deal more of this. The various episodes contain reminiscences of Petronius, Juvenal, Plautus and other writers; but neither the dialogue nor the behaviour of the characters suggests a Roman atmosphere. The characters frequently exclaim ‘Tush’ or ‘Fie’; they often swear by Pollux or by Hercules; and their speeches are ...”

“... The demerits of the Greek romances are clear (clearer still by contrast with the Latin novel – Petronius and Apuleius – which burlesques them). Cardboard lovers, buffeted by Fate, drift on a stream of sentimental rhetoric (now mock-naive, now real-orotund), through predictable perils, to a predictable happy ending. The categories are those of the ...”

“... in the text, but I have taken 7.50.3-6, the Boy’s Own scene in which the brave centurion Marcus Petronius sacrifices himself in the disastrous battle at Gergovia. First, the Landmark edition: Marcus Petronius, a centurion of the same legion, was trying to hack out a gate when a large number of fighters overwhelmed ...”

“... of civilised banter could demonstrate class, as much as its absence demonstrated vulgarity, and Petronius’ scathing portrait of the freedman Trimalchio (the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby), who confused Cassandra with Medea and mangled the story of Ajax’s madness, tells us a lot about the sneering superiority the uneducated faced. Bloomer has in mind a ...”

“... debased and comedy no longer read only for the laughs. Cicero and Livy, less fashionable now than Petronius or Lucan, still have their devotees, but they are likely to be more interested in cultural politics or the ideology of the ruling classes than in prose style or moral edification. How easy is it, then, to rewrite the history of Latin literature in this ...”

“... haunts the whole poem’. As a footnote indicates, Wilson has read the Aeneid through the lens of Petronius’ Satyricon, which offers us a prophetess longing for a death too long postponed. Virgil’s sibyl, very differently, tries to keep Aeneas on his forward track: don’t look at dead images, she urges him. Nor, as Wilson goes on to suggest, is ...”

“... proper to the detective story and tried to unite them with a more congenial inheritance from Petronius Arbiter, Peacock and Aldous Huxley, with a soupçon of Firbank. Peter Levi, who was a friend of Connolly’s and married his widow, has brought the tale to an ending, making his task possible by briskly disposing of all the clues Connolly himself had ...”

“... various youths. Byron’s favourite was ‘Plen. And optabil.-Coit.’, an abbreviated phrase from Petronius’ Satyricon: ‘coitum plenum et optabilem’. Marchand translates this as ‘complete intercourse to one’s heart’s desire’, adding that ‘in Petronius the narrator tells how he overcame the reluctance of a ...”

“... on Apollonius of Tyre, the Aithiopika of Heliodorus, and the Latin novels of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter. She finds in these books many qualities that the arrogant English claim as their own later inventions: enough realism, enough ambiguity, enough personality – altogether a high degree of narrative sophistication. And she enlists them all in ...”

“... wisdom. His sons, who have also assumed preposterous names, are similarly outsized characters. Petronius, aka Petya, the eldest, is an agoraphobic, autistic, formidably well-read alcoholic dandy, later the inventor of some of the world’s most popular smartphone games. The middle child, Lucius Apuleius, aka Apu (a nickname that annoys his father: ‘We ...”