Petronius as Massa?: Reading Virgil in Petronius' Satyricon
Susan Gorman, CTCWeb
Quoting Virgil
Virgil’s Aeneid is often quoted and his lines put into the mouths of some of the characters shown to be most degenerate in Petronius’s text. During the “Cena”, Massa, the slave of Habinnas, a freedman friend of Trimalchio’s, quotes Virgil in order to entertain the banqueters. Petronius describes the scene, writing in chapter 68:
The servant who was sitting at the feet of Habinnas, having been ordered, I think, by his master, proclaimed suddenly in a song-like voice: “Meanwhile, Aeneas was holding the middle in the fleet.” No sound more bitter ever hit my ears; ...so that for the first time Virgil bothered me.
At once, there are two different possible readings of Petronius’s usage of Virgil’s epic in this passage. On the one hand, Encolpius claims that this was the first time that Virgil ever offended his ears, thus suggesting that perhaps he holds Virgil in high esteem and therefore may respect the epic tradition. On the other hand, a slave of a traveling partygoer quotes the first line of Book 5 of the Aeneid. Not only is this person reciting the epic, but Massa also mixes his own verses in with Virgil’s, thereby making the lines almost unbearable. There is a large distinction between how Virgil was seen as presenting a lofty expression of Roman ideals and how recitation of his text has been turned into a party trick. In this paper, I explore the use and parody of Virgil by Petronius. I claim that this mixing of genre parallels Petronius’s own mixing of genre in this text.
Why would Petronius, ironically or otherwise, associate his own textual project with that of this reciting slave? Excluding certain audience members and close control over a wide distribution of a text, became a practice of maintaining imperial control for the Roman Empire, as Thomas Habinek claims in his The Politics of Latin Literature. An oral performer of Latin literature in the Julio-Claudian Age would offer an authorized interpretive framework that dictated the interpretation of a work for his audience, particularly of works with charged political value such as the Aeneid. Petronius’s ironic usurpation of the oral performer’s position skews the effect of his text on the audience and undermines an imperially authorized reception. This paper investigates how audience is manipulated by this text, and how this text parodies imperial attempts to control literary interpretation.
