Abstract
In comparing Petronius with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, I do not wish to propound the rigid view that similar states of society produce similar artists, (though this has something to do with the question), or that any of the three Twentieth Century authors was dominated by a direct literary influence of the First Century A. D. though it is clear that all were to some degree affected by it. Joyce took Homer as his model, and so did Petronius.1 Fitzgerald took Petronius as his model for The Great Gatsby,2 and produced something as much Homeric as Petronian. Proust was, in his early days, called a “Pétrone ingénu” by Anatole France,3 but we cannot discern how detailed the comparison was intended to be. Yet “Petronian” characteristics are observable in all three, both in their lives (taking Tacitus’ account of Petronius4 as our main biographical text about the ancient author) and in the character of their works.5
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Notes
J. F. Killeen, “James Joyce’s Roman Prototype”, Comparative Literature, Vol. IX, 1957, No. 3, 193–203. E. Klebs, “Zur Composition von Petronius Satirae” Philologus 47, 1889. 623–35. Cf for other source material of Ulysses: Attila Fäj, “Byzantine and Hungarian Models of ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake,” Arcadia, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 3, 1. 1968, 48–72.
Paul MacKendrick, “The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio,” Classical Journal 45, 7, 1950, 307–314.
In the preface to Marcel Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les Jours.
Tac. Annales XVI, 18, 1–195 De C. Petronio pauca supra repetenda sunt. nam illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu. ac dicta factaque eius quanto solutiora et quandam sui neglegentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur. proconsul tarnen Bithynia et mox consul vigentem se ac parem negotiis ostendit. dein revolutus ad vitia seu vitiorum imitatione inter paucos familiarium Neroni adsumptus est elegantiae arbiter, dum nihil amoenum et molle adfluentia putat nisi quod ei Petronius adprobavisset. unde invidia Tigellini quasi adversus aemulum et scientia voluptatum potiorem. ergo crudelitatem principis cui ceterae libídines cedebant, adgreditur, amicitiam Scaevini Petronio obiectans, corrupto ad indicium servo ademptaque defensione et maiore parte familiae in vincla rapta. Forte Ulis diebus Campaniam petiverat Caesar, et Cumam usque progressus Petronius illic attinebatur; nec tulit ultra timoris aut spei moras. Neque tarnen prae-ceps vitam expulit, sed incisas venas, ut libitum, obligatas aperire rursum et adloqui amicos, non per seria aut quibus gloriam constantiae peteret. audiebatque referentis nihil de immortalitate animae et sapientium placitis, sed levia carmina et facilis versus, servorum aliis largitione, quosdam verberibus ad fecit, iniit epulas, somno induisit, ut quamquam coacta mors fortuitae similis esset, ne codicillis quidem, quod plerique pereuntium, Neronem aut Tigellinum aut quem alium potentium adulatus est, sed flagitia principis sub nominibus exoletorum feminarumque et novi-tatem cuiusque stupri perscripsit atque obsignata misit Neroni. fregitque anulum, ne mox usui esset ad facienda pericula.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis esp. 27–30, but he draws attention (32) to the absence of a serious social or economic background to the characterisation.
Cf. Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties, London 1913: a portrait of a period, the ‘‘Nineties’’ of last century, which was deliberately conceived as a set piece of “decadence” by the historically and critically sophisticated intellectual group. It was an era that regarded Petronius as one of its literary ancestors (107, ed. 2. 1931)
Sullivan, 119, is cautious about making comparisons between Petronius and, for example, such writers as Kerouac, on the grounds that the Roman writer is far less ideological, and this chimes with the point of view expressed by Erich Auerbach, Mimesis trans. Trask, Princeton 1953, 47, where he says of a comparison between Petronius and Proust, “but such comparisons with works of modern realism are never quite to the point, because the latter contain far more in the way of serious problems.” Auerbach’s view (32) is that ancient society did not have to be explained, but was accepted. The suggestion is, that when we come to compare a work like the Satyricon with a modern novel, be it of Proust or Kerouac, a whole dimension is missing. I cannot myself subscribe to this differentiation: what is missing is a knowledge of ancient society which is as comprehensive as our knowledge of our own; an author’s awareness of his society, or his tendency to reflect aspects of it in sensitive records is a different matter; “the beats” are certainly less well equipped with ideology than were ancient Cynics, and their chosen art form is literature: see Frank A. Butler’s rather hostile article “On the beat nature of Beat,” American Scholar vol. 30, 1961, 79–92. Beats are “ideologically” non-ideological and anomic: Elwin H. Powell, note 8, below.
Arnold M. Rose (ed.), Human Behaviour and Social Process; an interac-tionist approach, London 1962: Elwin H. Powell, ch. 19 Beyond Utopia: The Beat Generation as a challenge for the sociology of knowledge, stresses the absence of ideology in this movement (361) (as against Sullivan’s view note 7 above), and paints a not un-Petronian picture of “reason held in abeyance” and “the pursuit of long-range goods is abandoned for the pleasures and the anguish of the moment.”.
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, California 1951 ch, I and II, on the loosely realised psychological textures of Homeric heroes. The personae of the epos are clearly neither literate, nor were they in their pre-Homeric form (if we may postulate this) originally the productions of a literate society. Reading silently in the modern sense was scarcely known in the ancient world, in which the spoken word predominated: though this is not to say that there was little literacy. On the importance of oral presentation of works of literature: F. G. Kenyon, Books and Readers in the Ancient World, Oxford 1932 12–16-but books were widely used in Classical times: 22–24. See further, W. B. Stanford, The Sounds of Greek, California 1967, ch. I “The Primacy of the Spoken Word;” E. Norden, Die Antike Kunstprosa I Einleitung, (referred to by Stanford, 20, n 4, and many other works on the subject ad loc.). It may be recalled that the whole point of the Acontius/Cydippe story in Catullus 65 is that Cydippe should read the inscription on the apple aloud and not tacite. Cf. the quotation from Beckett in note 10 below.
A monistic approach to literature of a predominantly or partly oral transmission is implied by Marshall McLuhan in his Understanding Media, 1964. Plato’s doubts about the ontological status of literature and drama are also suggestive in this connection, also earlier “magical” views of poetry etc. R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire, Princeton 1960, esp. 128; S. Beckett, on Joyce’s “work in progress”: “Examination” etc. London 1937 P. 14, “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read, or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.” However, it has been agreed that Joyce’s Ulysses, unlike Homer’s epos, is not organised in memory and unfolded in time, but both organised and unfolded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning: Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett, The Stoic Comedians, London 1966, 35.
Probably it seemed worthy of suppression only after its author fell into disfavour. Books of disapproved authors could be burned: Tac. Agr. 2; Pliny Ep. VII, 19, 5, on the preservation of an exemplar of Helvidius’ book by his wife; Tac. Annales IV 346. Cremutius Cordus’ work was burned: F. A. Marx, “Tacitus und die Literatur der exitus illustrium virorum,” Philologus Bd. XLVI, 1937, 83–103, 87 f; Holbrook Jackson, The Fear of Books, London 1932, chs. I and II. See also: G. W. Clarke op. cit. esp. references in notes 7, 8, 9. Clarke argues that the practice had its remote origin in sympathetic magic.
See George Gellie, “A Comment on Petronius,” A.U.M.L.A. 10, 1959, 89–100, 98; B. E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins, California 1967, 187, stresses that there is no need of a precedent for Petronius’ work when one can point to the Margites.
Tacitus does not allude to Seneca’s tragedies as such, presumably because they are irrelevant in his view to his political analysis of Seneca’s life. He mentions carmina (Annales XIV 52, 3. obiciebant etiam eloquentiae laudem uni sibi adsciscere et carmina crebrius factuare, postquam Neroni amor eorum venisset.) because they can be related as a motive for Nero’s jealousy of Seneca, but nothing more specific. R. Syme has suggested in his Tacitus, Oxford 1958, 336, that Tacitus’ phrase dicta factaque in his biography of Petronius, may include a reference to the Satyricon, but this is doubtful. Pliny N.H. 37, 20: T. Petronius consularis moriturus invidia Neronis, ut mensam eius exheredaret, trullam myrr-hinam HS CCC emptam fregit.
A consensus of views now places the Satyricon in the time of Nero. The late K. F. C. Rose has argued strongly for a date of composition late in Petronius’ life span (as near as possible to 65 A. D.) in “The Date of the Satyricon” Classical Quarterly NS XIII, 1, 1962, 166–8; also his “Time and Place in the Satyricon,” Transactions of the American Philological Association XCIII, 1962, 402–9. A. Collignon, Étude sur Pétrone, Paris 1892, 172, 391–5, indicates correspondences between Petronius and Martial which he admits (391) are not conclusive in settling which poet influenced the other, or which preceded in time. E. V. Marmorale places the Satyricon after 180 A. D., but is equally dubious about the evidence of priority provided by a comparison of texts of these authors: La Questione Petroniana, Bari 1948, 263–40; also, Rose “The Petronian Inquisition, An Auto-da-Fé,” Arion, 1966, 275–301.
Sidonius Apollinaris, 23, 157: the basis of a theory of P’s Massilian origin: C. Cichorius, Römische Studien, Berlin 1922: “Petronius und Massilia.”
Macrobius, in somnium Scipionis I, 2, 8.
Johannes Lydus, de magistratibus I, 41.
A. Rini, Petronius in Italy, New York 1937, 1–2.
For the widespread occurrence of related themes: Otto Rank, “Die Matrone von Ephesus, ein Deutungsversuch der Fabel von der Treulosen Witwe,” Imago I, 1913, 50–60.
Petronius appears as a commonplace stage villain in Nathaniel Lee’s The Tragedy of Nero (1675). The reign of Nero interested Seventeenth Century dramatists: Mathew Gwinne’s Nero (1603); the anonymous Nero (1624); Thomas May’s Julia Agrippina Empress of Rome (1628).
S. Gaselee, “The Bibliography of Petronius.” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society vol. 10, London, 1910, 141–233.
À Rebours, edit. Paris 1926, 40–42. For Joyce’s knowledge of Huysmans’ novel: J. S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake, London 1959, 257.
Tac. Annales XVI, 18, 1. 2: De C. Petronio pauca supra repetenda sunt. nam illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua haurientium, sed erudito luxu.
Richard H. Barker, Marcel Proust, a Biography, New York 1958, 182.
G. D. Painter, Marcel Proust a Biography, Vol. II London 1965, passim: the conversation reported beteen Proust and Gide (313) has something of the flavour of Petronian naïveté.
Sullivan, Ch. VII, also “The Satiricon of Petronius, Some Psychoanalytical Considerations,” American Imago 18, 4, 1961. 352–369.
The episode in which Françoise intrudes upon “Albertine” and “Marcel”: Cf. J. P. Sullivan, “The Satiricon of Petronius, Some Psychoanalytical Considerations.” American Imago Vol. 18, 4, 1961, 353–369. esp. 361.
Painter II 362–3, Lauris (on seeing Proust dead): “never was so much goodness accompanied by so much intelligence.”
This is exclusive of the question of how much vulgar or colloquial usage may occur in the Satyricon: (see W. Suess, De eo quem dicunt inesse Trimalchionis Cenae vulgari sermone. Dorpat 1926).
Depending upon the Ulysses but less elaborately worked, and consequently more immediate is the passage in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, 1929, which describes W. O. Gant’s thoughts on returning home after a period of wandering in the West of the United States.
R. Ellmann, James Joyce, New York 1959, 534–535. E. Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur, Paris 1931, 22–3, speculates on Browning and Dostoievsky as predecessors and inventors in this medium, and adduces the analogy of cinematic techniques: 47–8.
Painter II Ch. 5. S4 Painter II Ch. 99.
P. Brandt; Parodorum Epicorum Graecorum, Lips. 1888; P. Maas, s.v. Parodos in R.E.; Schmid-Stählin, Griechische Literaturgeschichte, I, i, 227, 401, 642, 644.
Killeen 199; W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme Oxford 1962; H. Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, London 1955, 182.
For authors alluded to in the Satyricon: A. Rini 159; cf. E. Courtney, “Parody and Literary Allusion in Menippean Satire,” Philologus 101 1/2 1962, 86–100.
See Painter’s comments op. cit. II 102–3.
Ulysses, passim, but especially the so-called Aeolus passage, and throughout Finnegans Wake e.g. 172. 5 “Johns is a different butcher. Next place you are up town pay him a visit etc.”
S. Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses, London 1930, 189–305. R. Ellmann, James Joyce, New York 1959, 489–90.
num alio genere furiarum declamatores inquietantur, qui clamant: “haec vulnera pro libertate publica excepi, hunc oculum pro vobis impendi; date mihi (ducem) qui me ducat ad liberos meos, nam succisi poplites membra non sustinent?” haec ipsa tolerabilia essent, si ad eloquentiam ituris viam facerent, nunc et rerum tumore et sententiarum vanissimo strepitu hoc tantum proficiunt, ut cum in forum venerint, putent se in alium orbem terrarum delatos: Satyricon 1.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brothers’ Keeper, London 1958, 160.
Killeen, 194.
Oliver St. John Gogarty, The Collected Poems, London 1951, 195.
(continued) Proconsul of Bithynia Who loved to turn the night to day Yet for your ease had more to show than others for their push and go Teach us to save spirit’s expense And win to fame through indolence.
As the name ‘Buck Mulligan” in Joyce’s Ulysses itself testifies, Joyce saw Gogarty as resembling the Eighteenth Century Anglo-Irish “Buck” (such as Buck Whaley): Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St. John Gogarty A Poet and his Times, London 1964, 38.
Killeen 199, 198–203.
Stanford, Ulysses Theme 213; “Ulyssean Qualities in Leopold Bloom,” Comparative Literature 5, 1953, 125–136, esp. 126.
Killeen 194.
J. M. Synge’s “The Shadow of the Glen” was strongly criticised in Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman Oct. 17th, 1903, for representing a version of a story of Roman decadence based on Petronius. In a history of the controversy: D. H. Greene, “The Shadow of the Glen and the Widow of Ephesus” PMLA 1947–238, indicates wider influences upon Synge’s play. Further, see Otto Rank, note 19 above.
Ellmann, 78–9; Atherton 257; Finnegans Wake 346–8.
“Tibet, India and Malaya as sources of Medieval Western Technology,” Lynn White Jr. American Historical Review LXV, 3, 1960, 515–526: Slaves and other less identifiable media conveyed important inventions to the west: he concluded (526): “despite difficult communication, Mankind in the Old World at least has long lived in a more uniform realm of discourse than we have been prepared to admit.”
Killeen 201; Ellmann 142–3, quoting from Stanislaus Joyce’s Diary: “He has a distressing habit of saying quietly to those with whom he is familiar the most shocking things about himself and others.” Cf. note 53 below.
Tac. Annales XVI, 18, 2: ac dicta factaque eius quanto solutiora et quandem sui neglegentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur.
In: A Portrait of the Artist: Killeen 201.
Killeen 201.
G. Highet “Petronius the Moralist,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 72, 1941, 176–194; O. Raith, Petronius ein Epikureer, Diss. Erlangen 1963. J. P. Sullivan, “Petronius, Artist or Moralist?” A rion VI, 1. 1967, 71–87; Syme 553.
W. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas, Yale 1957; Raith: op. cit.
Satyricon 1–3.
Cf. Joyce’s use of the “dead” but still persistent “classical” tradition or rhetoric in Dublin: Hugh Kenner argues that Joyce parodies this tradition at the same time as he uses it: Dublin’s Joyce, London 1955, 16: “There is no directness in Dublin; no Parnell now acts out of middle-heart; the great orators are dead, the live ones degraded. Every phase of thought and action has a received analogue or a bookish correspondence. So Joyce’s task was to take account of the patterns that lie just outside of the corporeal citizen and his empirical city. He solved it by being as indirect as they, coming at them by means of their analogues, parodying the models according to which they behaved, his attention focused on the invisible point of coincidence between half-living people and half-real literature, opera, oratory, and music.” Cf. 214, where Kenner connects Bloom with Cicero Cf. also (especially) the first three chapters of the surviving Satyricon, on which this passage makes fine commentary.
H. D. Rankin, “On Tacitus’ Biography of Petronius” Classica et Mediaevalia XXVI, 1–2 1965 233–245.
S. Joyce, op cit. 160–161. “There is a young fellow named Joyce Who possesses a sweet tenor voice. He goes down to the kips With a psalm on his lips And biddeth the harlots rejoice.”
Gellie, op. cit.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London 1930, “Traveller’s Library” Edit. 133, 281; H. Gorman, James Joyce, New York 1939, no. Viking Press Edit. 117, 297.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 281; Ellman 365, points out that the proverb was borrowed from the Fuge — Late — Tace of one of Balzac’s characters in Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes.
Paul MacKendrick, “The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio,” Classical Journal 45, 7, 1950, 307–314.
MacKendrick 313; Petronius’ detachment is sufficiently indicated in Tacitus’ Annales XVI, 18–20.
MacKendrick, 314.
MacKendrick, 312: “For Gatsby is Fitzgerald, and the novel is a condition contrary to fact in past time — Gatsby’s story might have been Fitzgerald’s if This side of Paradise had not made the author enough money to marry Zelda Sayre.”
“A system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a butter manufacturer,” quoted from This Side of Paradise; MacKendrick 312: Cf. Tennessee Williams Camino Real (Block 6) where Kilroy is forced by Gutman to accept employment as a “Patsy.”
Tac. Annales XVI, 19, 1–3: nee tulit ultra timoris aut spei moras, neque tarnen praeceps vitam expulit, sed incisas venas, ut libitum, obligatas aperire rursum et adloqui amicos, non per seria aut quibus gloriam constantiae peteret. audiebatque referentis nihil de immortalitate animae et sapientium placitis, sed levia carmina et facilis versus.
Possibly “Gatsby” is a “significant” name suggesting “son of a gun” terrae filius? It would suit his “epic” character.
71, 1: et servi homines sunt et aeque unum lactem biberunt, etiam si illos malus fatus oppresserit.
48, 5: quid est pauper?
52, 10–11; Cf. 37, 4–8.
Cicero ad Atticium II 1. 7; Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939, 44–45; 162–75.
MacKendrick 310: “he ‘Gatsby’ devoted his whole corrupt life to the realising of his uncorruptible dream.”
78, 5–6.
Since he does not accept the notion of death at all: 78, 3–4, statim ampullam nardi aperuit omnesque nos unxit et “spero” inquit “futurum ut aeque me mortuum iuvet tamquam vivum”; for a different view: W. Arrowsmith, “Luxury and Death in the Satyricon,” Arion V. 3, 1966, 304–31.
75, 11.
76, 2.
76, 10.
Cf. Ernest Hemingway’s comment on the notion of the “very rich who are different from you and me” — “Yes, they have more money,” — a response which hits off the attitudes of Trimalchio and his friends.
This simplicitas was an assumed persona of old-fashioned simplicity, an archaic good quality: H. Stubbe, Philologus suppl. 25, 150–151. H. Bogner, Hermes 1941, 223–4; E. Bickel, Rheinisches Museum XC, 1941, 269–72.
Ezra Pound expresses this attitude of majestic simplicity very well: Canto XXVII, 1. “An” that year, Metevesky went over to America del Sud (and the Pope’s manners were so like Mr. Joyce’s got that way in the Vatican, weren’t like that before)” Joyce’s artistic persona is not firmly in place in his letters to his wife from Dublin in 1909, which range from hysteria to ecstacy in their tone: Letters of James Joyce, edit. Ellmann, London 1966: Vol. II.
e.g. the mixture of evil and charm in Catilina, as remarked by Cicero, Pro Caelio 12–13.
Tender is the Night: Bodley Head edit. Vol. II London 1959, 91.
It is not easy to agree with Sullivan, 257, that there is no evidence of Petro-nius’ discontent with Nero’s court, or of Angst: both the biography of P. in Tacitus, and the Satyricon itself seem to imply something different.
Sullivan’s theory (note 26 above) entails some identification of Petronius with Encolpius.
Joyce’s letters to his wife: note 84 above.
Ellmann, 120–1.
See the list of themes under this heading: P. A. Spalding, A Reader’s Handbook to Proust, London 1952, 170–171; Petronius’ doubts about the validity of human friendship are well expressed in the verses of Satyricon, 80.
On Fitzgerald’s sense of sexual inadequacy and anxiety: E. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, London 1964, chs. 17, 18, 19, esp. p. 171. F’s “classical” pessimism is well expressed in a letter to his daughter (1936): “1 feel it is your duty to accept the tragedy, the sadness of the world we live in, with a certain esprit.”
Stanford, Ulysses Theme, 67.
Averbach, op. cit., Sullivan, 261–9.
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Rankin, H.D. (1971). Notes on the Comparison of Petronius with Three Moderns. In: Petronius the Artist. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3231-5_5
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