Petronius as Massa?: Reading Virgil in Petronius' Satyricon
Susan Gorman, CTCWeb
A Bad Performance
Returning now to the example of the slave Massa who mangles Virgil’s verses, I find links between the slave-singer and the author. Catherine Connors, in Petronius the Poet, claims that this episode with Massa is the most important example of “destroying and refashioning” epic. By mixing in his own inferior verses with Virgil’s highly crafted ones, Massa creates a new version of the Aeneid that is recognizable as such, but in a highly degenerate form. Petronius is, in a sense, doing the same work as Massa with his text. He combines different forms of epic and epic traditions into a new textual structure. Joining a degenerated epic and his own (for Petronius, novelistic prose) work, Petronius is another “author” like Massa. Inside this scene, Massa’s recitations are purely for entertainment purposes; however, Petronius’s own recrafting of the Aeneid, because of its intrinsic political implications, has a different purpose. Through treating the epic genre in this way and mixing it with something considered less appealing and not highly appreciated, the novel form, Petronius, like Massa, creates something new.
African authors sometimes include in their texts griot performers with whom they ally themselves as new storytellers. Petronius, similarly, invites a viewing of himself as this mutilating slave-performer through his usage of genre. I believe that, as with all depictions in the Satyricon, irony and parody hold the key to understanding this positioning. Deception and the taking on of disguises occur so frequently in this text as a primary goal of its main characters that the idea of dishonesty takes center stage. Perhaps Petronius is using that concept of trickery in order to create a safe position from which he may offer his assessment of contemporary institutions. If he is a degenerate performer, he may not be seen as actually making a dangerous critique of political organizations. Perhaps it is only in the guise of a debased clown that he can safely make his comments.
