Abstract
F. Scott Fitzgerald was not especially well versed in the Classics. At school he performed as poorly in Latin as in most of this other subjects. In 1922, not only the appearance of a Petronian epigraph to The Waste Land, but also the defense of The Satyricon in court and the newspapers during a particularly high-profile censorship case involving his friends may have brought the novel freshly to his eyes. Fitzgeral proposed calling his novel “Trimalchio” or “Trimalchio at West Egg” before it became The Great Gatsby, for both Trimalchio and Gatsby are obsessed with wealth and death. The novel also shows affinities throughout with Virgil’s Golden Age and ghostly Underworld, and when Fitzgerald needed a moralizing figure with which to conclude, he turned to the poet who believed as firmly in the moral bedrock of Italy’s rustic past as Fitzgerald believed in midwestern America’s. The striking ending of the book recalls Aeneas’s ideal vision of Roman history in Aeneid 8 and Virgil’s striking simile of ethical struggle in the face of decay (Geo. 1.199–203).
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Briggs, W. Petronius and Virgil in The Great Gatsby . IJCT 6, 226–235 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-999-0003-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-999-0003-z