Petronius as Massa?: Reading Virgil in Petronius' Satyricon
Susan Gorman, CTCWeb
Conclusion
Petronius does not necessarily wield any particular political or social critique, but everything does in fact become critiqued in the frenzy of the text. As a reflection of later Julio-Claudian Age, Petronius’ work shows an imperial circle jaded and in search of parodic novelty. As a product of a world in which the emperor’s position was degenerating into what culminates with Nero’s debauchery but had also passed through Caligula’s insanity, the blending of the high epic with the lower novel demonstrates the degeneration of imperial ideology in relation to Latin texts. Unable to reflect his world or society in the more expected but also more rigid genre of epic because of that society’s lack of rigidity and societal mores, Petronius has to temper his epic with something, and the free-flowing, less serious genre of novel fits his requirements. However, the importance of the empire or emperorship to Petronius’ text cannot be written out of the work altogether, so the epic remains in and is used in order to show the presence of the imperial ideology, if also to show its impotence or effeteness.
The relationship of this text to interpretation is also treated differently. First of all, however, the entire work has not been handed down, so I cannot definitively claim what the hermeneutical system of the entire text would have been. However, the “Cena” is laced with distorted ideologies and tinkered-with genres in such a way that the understanding is necessarily parodic. Massa’s mangled interpretation of Virgil can only be understood through a comparison with how Virgil would otherwise be quoted and interpreted. The ideological parody of empire that is carried out in the Satyricon can only be gleaned from how different it is from how imperial ideology was formulated and stated during the earlier Julio-Claudian Age. Interpretive structures are not sacrificed but made uneasy because of appeals to the carnivalesque and the comparative requirement that they render necessary.
Petronius’s text does not call for the immediate dismantling of empire nor is it an attempt to deal with the aftermath of empire. Instead, through parody Petronius tries to poke through the layers of propaganda and see through veils of dissimulation and imposture. As the theme of disguise is so prevalent, it is not unreasonable to think that this could have formal overtones. He veils himself in the figure of Massa. Petronius is, in a way, masking his critique of epic, and therefore empire, with the novel. He embeds the imperial parody in the longer, prose work. He disguises imperial critique under the excesses of sex, food and, ironically, trickery. My assertion is that it is most clearly through an examination of the way that Petronius manipulates genre that a critique of empire emerges from this text because the emphasis on deception in the content of his work could cloud any meaning that would emerge from there.
Petronius uses parody in many different guises. He parodies Augustan mores, literary genres and different strata of people under the Roman Empire. Petronius’s parody, Zeitlin suggests, works to distort and disorder, to cast doubt upon the ways that traditional subjects have been presented in more canonical works. Thus Petronius disorders everything; empire is simply another one of the institutions that falls victim to his parodic critique.
