Satyricon (Petron)

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The Satyricon edition by Pierre Pithou, Paris 1587

Satyricon or Satyricon is preserved only in parts, satirical novel of Petronius Arbiter (around 14-66 n. Chr.) In Latin language, at the time of Nero appeared.

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Time of origin

The time of origin and the identity of the author with Petronius mentioned in Tacitus have long been controversial since the rediscovery in the Renaissance. The proposed range extends from the time under Augustus (GC Giardina 1972) to the identity of Petronius Arbiter with the Bishop of Bologna in the 5th century (Goldast 1610).

External evidence shows that the Satyricon must have been created before the year 200. Because Terentianus Maurus , who lived at the turn of the 2nd to the 3rd century, quoted in detail from two poems by Petronius (Fr 19 and 20). Around the same time, the grammarian Caper also quotes a passage from the Satyricon. But the probable use of individual bon mots by Statius († 96) and Martial († 103) suggests that the Satyricon was already available at the end of the 1st century.

Today there is broad consensus on both questions. In particular, the foundational work of Kenneth FC Rose has shown how closely Petrons Satyricon is connected to the time of Nero. Nor could a more suitable author be named for the work of Petronius Arbiter than Titus Petronius, the arbiter elegantiae Nero.

title

The oldest witness for the work's title, Gaius Marius Victorinus (* between 281 and 291; † after 363), and the oldest manuscripts unanimously name the work only Satyricon . The name may be related to the Greek satyr games , but more likely it is related to the Latin word satura lanx . This refers to a bowl filled with fruit that was offered to Ceres . The different fruits indicate the original thematic variety of satires. Although the title has already been added to Satyricon libri , others suspect Satyrica as the original title in analogy to the Greek romance novels (e.g. the Aithiopiká of Heliodor ) .

A connection with icon ("image") is also possible. Unaware of Petron's actual intention, the traditional title Satyricon should remain.

content

The preserved part begins in the middle of a conversation between the traveling student Encolpius and his teacher Agamemnon about the decline of the art of speaking. This is followed by a jealous scene with Askyltos about the boy Giton, the atonement of the Priapus priestess Quartilla. In a villa near Cumae , the "Supper of Trimalchio" (Latin cena Trimalchionis ), an uneducated, newly rich freed man, follows . After more stories of jealousy, you embark on a turbulent cruise where you meet again the Lichas and Tryphaena who were once betrayed (in scenes that are lost today). After a shipwreck, the poet Eumolp pretends to be ill and wealthy in the nearby town of Croton in order to benefit from the legacy sneaks . Meanwhile, Encolpius suffers a severe sexual defeat from the local beauty Circe, from which he only recovers at the end of the story after arduous healing treatments. The work ends with the will of the poet Eumolp, who asks his heirs to eat his corpse .

Thirty-three poems of varying lengths appear interspersed with the text. Short one-line epigrams ( Satyricon 58.8) are the poems of Troy ( Satyricon 89) and the civil war ( Satyricon 119-124) with 295 verses. There are also four short Virgil quotes in a concise place.

The quality of Petron's poems is highly praised. The well-known philologist Stowasser counts it among the best that has ever been produced in the Latin language.

Language and style

The work not only alternates prose with linked parts ( Menippeische satire ), the speeches of the individual persons are also precisely adapted to the respective speakers and their situation. Petron's virtuosity in dealing with the level of style has repeatedly aroused admiration.

The conversations of the invited guests described in the “Banquet” with their obviously high naturalism form an important source for the so-called vulgar Latin . It should be noted here that the vulgar-language parts are also largely artistically designed.

Originality and literary templates

The work as an overall composition is unique in many ways in ancient literature.

The surviving parts parody several literary genres, e.g. B .:

  • The Odyssey : Like Odysseus , the protagonist Encolpius is persecuted by the gods, but here by Priapus , the god of fertility, with impotence (initially his represented sexual preference is homosexual, later heterosexual; in the ancient conception of sex, however, bisexuality is the natural human way pleasure, the later Christian interpretation of "natural" pleasure as a purely heterosexual matter is unknown to her).
  • The common Greek romance novels: Encolpius, a good-for-nothing and parasite, has a complicated triangular relationship with the congenial Ascyltos and the former prostitute Giton, whereby all participants are not averse to other adventures.
  • The contemporary epic : The Roman civil war (alluding to Lukan ) and the destruction of Troy (possibly as a parody of a corresponding work by Emperor Nero ) are treated in two longer verses .

In addition, there are interspersed discussions on the decline of rhetoric, novellas ("The Widow of Ephesus ", "the Boy of Pergamum"), unreliable ghost stories, love letter caricatures, etc.

Satirical intention

The actual satirical intention of Petronius is still surrounded by puzzles today. Some consider the Satyricon to be “a completely amoral moral image”. Others could not see the exhortation typical of satire.

The Satyricon was also often misinterpreted as pornography or pederasty due to the sometimes quite clear scenes and its sexualized symbolism. The overarching theme is actually the recurring sexual failure of the main character Encolpius. The sexuality in the Satyricon is apparently only an image for the general failure of the protagonists.

In any case, it is certain that the Satyricon is not identical with the Petronius testament mentioned by Tacitus, in which he recorded Nero's abuses, stating the names and the respective ages of desecration. The extensive work cannot possibly have been written in one day. After all, it has been assumed that Petronius provided the key (the real name, so to speak) to the Satyricon in his will.

Due to the most varied, in some cases clear, echoes, it made sense to interpret the Satyricon (especially the figure of Trimalchio) as a mockery of Nero. However, this could hardly have gone unpunished. In contrast, the thesis has recently been put forward that it is not Nero but the Nero imitators that should be mocked. Vasily Rudich's approach that Petronius deliberately uses a “strategic irony” in his work that allows him in a dangerous environment to systematically adopt and reject any attitude at the same time also appears to go further.

Lore

Manuscripts

Only a single, greatly reduced specimen of the Satyricon survived late antiquity in the Benedictine abbey in Fleury . This handwriting ( ω ) has also not survived today. However, it evidently contained books 14-16 by Satyricon, from which practically all other Petronius texts known to us come.

The handwritten tradition is divided into four classes:

  • O : The so-called "Short Excerpts", the best representative is the oldest manuscript, the Codex Bernensis 357 and the Codex Leidensis Vossianus 4 ° 30 (both together = " B "), supposedly from the 2nd half of the 9th century, next to it Manuscripts " R " and " P " with their successors.
A more recent group of these excerpts ( δ , Renaissance manuscripts of the 15th century) consists of two subgroups:
α : Manuscripts A (Traguriensis, together with H , see below), E (Messanensis, burned in 1848), I (Indianensis), F (Leid. Voss. O.81) and K (Vatic. lat. 1671)
ξ : Manuscripts CDGQJVW (the latter was the basis for the influential print by J. Sambucus in 1565)
  • L : The so-called “Long Excerpts”, handed down through the Codices Cujacianus and Benedictinus . Descendants of Bened. were the Codices Memmianus and Dalecampianus . None of these codices has survived, the L-text is reconstructed from the copy of Cod. Scaligeranus 61 ( l ), the Memmianus manuscripts r , m and d (all probably written in the 60s / 70s of the 16th century) and the printed texts (Tournesius ( t ), Pithou ( p )) with their references to different readings. In addition, from 1562 onwards, there are individual short quotations from the L-text in J. Cujas, P. Pithou, D. Lambin and others. The commentaries on the Petrontext collected by Goldast 1610 also offer individual interesting readings, but the attribution and dating of these Notae is uncertain.
  • H : The Codex Paris. lat. 7989 olim Tragurensis , The so-called Cena Trimalchionis (only one copy has been handed down in Trau, copy of the copy probably discovered by Poggio in Cologne in 1423, which is dated to the 9th century). First published in Padua 1664.
  • Φ : The so-called Florilegia ("flower reading"), collections of quotations from the 12th-14th centuries. Century (Florilegium Gallicum) handed down in more than 30 codices. The best-known representative is the Nostredamensis 188 (= Cod. Paris. Lat. 17903).

The scattered fragments from the lost part of the Satyricon (including the manuscripts X , Y and Z ) deserve special consideration .

Original scope

From the book numbers of the surviving parts (XIV – XVI) it can easily be concluded that the work must originally have been much larger in scope.

The total amount has been estimated to be around 1000 of our current printed pages. Müller (1965, 409) has shown that the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, a work comparable to Satyricon, contained an average of 25 of our current “pages” per book, only two books have 30 or 34 pages. Measured against this, the cena trimalchionis alone, with around 53 "pages", is the size of two medium-sized books by Apuleius.

The size of a book only found its technological limit in the capacity of a scroll. But that has not yet been achieved with the Cena , it is shorter than what you could get in a "book" in ancient times. If you take the Cena not as an exception, but as a rule, the result is actually about 1000 pages, which always seemed unusually large.

However, if one assumes that the Cena is the XV. Book occupied and the other books corresponded more to the standard of Apuleius and the Greek novels, then the estimated 18 books should have had about 450-500 pages. After that, around a third of the original text would have been preserved.

Forgery and reconstruction

The incompleteness and gaps in the Satyricon repeatedly prompted us to add the missing parts.

The list of 35 fragments circulating on the Internet, “ Fragmenta Petroniana. FRAGMENTA PETRONII QVAE QVIBUS IN LOCIS REPONENDA SINT, INCERTVM EST. ”Comes in its core from the year 1610 (“ Erhard ”edition, possibly a pseudonym for Melchior Goldast or Michael Caspar Lundorp ) and is a product of the Petronius mania that began in the 17th century, grossly incorrect and full of arbitrary misspellings. You must urgently warn against uncritical dissemination of these fragments.

Especially in the wake of the sensational rediscovery and publication of the Cena Trimalchionis in 1664, there was an increased search for further fragments.

Above all, the additions by Pierre Lignage de Vaucienne (around 1610 to around 1681) (not originally intended to be fraudulent) are known, which immediately attracted a great deal of attention under the name of its publisher Nodot (Rotterdam 1692) because Nodot called them “genuine Petronius Fragments ”sold. The "Nodot text" is still used today to create a smoothly readable plot.

In 1800 the gifted Josef Marchena caused a sensation with a forged Petronius fragment that he wanted to have found in St. Gallen.

In 1889 Elimar Klebs presented a study in which he explained the ira Priapi (Petron. 139, 2, 8) as the leitmotif of Satyricon: "The anger of Priapus means for Encolpius the fate, what Poseidon's anger for Odysseus, Hera's for Heracles."

In 1922, Conrad Cichorius took up Franz Bücheler's suggestion that part of the plot must have taken place in Massilia and suggested that this place be viewed as the starting point of the story.

The most successful attempt to date at a serious reconstruction was presented by Gottskalk Jensson in 2004.

reception

The work is so diverse and fascinating that generations of scholars and artists have studied it again and again. Since the Renaissance, there have been first attempts to critically examine various traditions. Since then, the Satyricon has stimulated the imagination of the educated. Petron has had numerous admirers since the Enlightenment, and his influence on modern literature should not be underestimated.

The novel was made into a film by Federico Fellini in 1969 and was released in German cinemas under the title Fellini's Satyricon . Another version appeared under the title The Degenerate .

Editions and translations

Older prints

  • 1482: Franciscus Puteolanus, first edition Milan (reprints Venice 1499 and Paris 1520) (only "O-texts")
  • 1565: Johannes Sambucus , Antwerp
  • 1575: Tournaesius (Jean de Tournes) and Dionysius Lebeus-Batillius (Denis Lebey de Batilly) (first "L-Text")
  • 1577: Pithoeus ( Pierre Pithou ) (2nd ed. 1587) ("L-" and "O-Text")
  • 1596: Variorum edition , Raphelengius , Leiden 1596
  • 1610: "Georg Erhard" (= Melchior Goldast ), Frankfurt (2nd edition 1621)
  • 1629: Theodore de Juges, Geneva. Reprint of the Goldast edition, first edition with chapter count.
  • 1664: Padua, first printing of the cena Trimalchionis ("H")
  • 1669: Michael Hadrianides, Amsterdam (first complete edition including cena trim. )
  • 1709: Petrus Burmannus Utrecht (Rhenum), (2nd edition Amsterdam 1743) with extensive commentary collection. (Reprinted in Hildesheim and New York 1974)
  • 1773: Wilhelm Heinse "Events of Enkolp" "Rom" (Schwobach b. Mitzlar) (first German translation)

Recent editions (selection)

  • Franz Bücheler, Berlin 1862, the basic scientific edition. (6th edition by Heraeus Berlin 1922).
  • Stephen Gaselee, Cambridge Facsimile edition of the cena Trimalchionis.
  • Martin S. Smith, Oxford 1975 (Cena Trimalchionis with commentary)
  • Petronii Arbitri Satyricon Reliquiae. Edited by Konrad Müller. Extended and corrected edition of the 4th edition from 1995. Munich and Leipzig 2003.
  • Petronius: Satyricon - an ancient picaresque novel , translated from Latin and provided with an afterword by Kurt Steinmann , Manesse Verlag, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-7175-2050-4 .
  • Peter Habermehl, Petronius, Satyrica 79-141 , (first volume of an extensive two-volume commentary edition ), Tübingen et al. 2006.

Relevant for France are the editions of Ernout (from 1922), for Italy those of Cesareo / Terzaghi (from 1950).

literature

Secondary literature

  • A. Collignon: Étude sur Pétrone. Paris 1892.
  • KFC Rose: The Date and Author of the Satyricon. Leiden 1971.
  • Wade Richardson: Reading and Variant in Petronius. Studies in the French Humanists and Their Manuscript Sources (= Phoenix. Supplement. Volume 32). Toronto / Buffalo / London 1993.
  • Axel Sütterlin: Petronius Arbiter and Federico Fellini . Lang, Frankfurt / Main et al. 1996, ISBN 3-631-49311-8 .
  • Gottskalk Jensson: The Recollections of Encolpius. The Satyrica of Petronius as Milesian Fiction. Groningen 2004 (= Ancient Narrative Supplementa. Volume 2).
  • Manfred Landfester: Petronius. In: Walter Eder , Johannes Renger (Ed.): Ruler Chronologies of the ancient world. Names, dates, dynasties (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 1). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-01912-8 , pp. 451-453.
  • Luciano Landolfi: Petron (Petronius Niger, Arbiter). Satyrica. In: Christine Walde (Ed.): The reception of ancient literature. Kulturhistorisches Werklexikon (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 7). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02034-5 , Sp. 609-634.

Bibliographies

  • Ernst Lommatzsch : Roman satirists (except Horace). Report on the literature from 1930–1936. In: Bursian's Yearbooks. No. 260, 1938. pp. 89-105.
  • Rudolf Helm : Roman satirists (except Horace). Report on the literature from 1936–1940. In: Bursian's Yearbooks. No. 282, 1943. pp. 1-37.
  • Robert Muth : The research report. Petronius 1st report 1941–1955. In: Anzeiger für die Altarwissenschaft. Published by the Austrian Humanistic Society. No. 9, 1956. Col. 1-22.
  • Harry C. Schnur : Recent Petronian Scholarship. In: Classical Weekly. No. 50.10, 1957. pp. 133-136, pp. 141-143.
  • William S. Anderson: Recent Work in Roman Satire (1955-62). In: Classical Weekly. No. 57.7 and 8, 1964. pp. 297-301, pp. 343-348.
  • Gareth L. Schmeling : Petronian Scholarship since 1957. In: Classical Weekly. No. 62.5, 1969. pp. 157-164, pp. 352f.
  • JP Sullivan: Petron in Recent Research. In: Helikon. No. 17, 1977. pp. 137-154.
  • Gareth L. Schmeling, JH Stuckey: A Bibliography of Petronius. Leiden 1977 ( Mnemosyne Suppl. Volume 39).
  • Martin S. Smith: A Bibliography of Petronius (1945-1982). In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World . No. II, Vol. 32.3, 1985, pp. 1624-1665.
  • Gareth L. Schmeling: The Petronian Society Newsletter . University of Florida, Gainesville 1970 ff., Pp. 1ff.
  • Giulio Vannini: Petronius 1975-2005: bilancio critico e nuove proposte. Göttingen 2007 ( Lustrum. International research reports from the field of classical antiquity. Volume 49).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The critical remarks by Harry C. Schnur, who u. a. points out that not a single manuscript bears the art title Satyrica : Harry C. Schnur: The Title of Petronius' Novel. In: Classical Weekly. No. 53.2, 1959. p. 65.
  2. ^ Franz Ritter: Two works by Petronius Arbiter . In: Rheinisches Museum für Philologie . No. 20, 1843. pp. 561-572.
  3. ↑ Compilation of the corresponding references in KFC Rose (1971), pp. 77–79.
  4. ↑ Christoph Schubert: Studies on the Nero image in Latin poetry of antiquity . Teubner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-519-07665-9 , pp. 168-173.
  5. ^ Vasily Rudich: Dissidence and Literature under Nero. The price of rhetoricization. London / New York 1997, p. 197.
  6. ↑ E.g. in the Reclam edition translated and commented by Harry C. Schnur. Of course, the Nodot fragments are marked in square brackets (and explanations in Schnur's notes and afterword) in order to distinguish them from the actual Petronius text.
  7. ^ Elimar Klebs: On the composition of Petronius Satirae. In: Philologus 47 (= NF 1) (1889), pp. 623–635, here p. 629. The validity of this thesis is still disputed today.
  8. ^ Conrad Cichorius: Roman Studies. Historical, epigraphic, literary history from four centuries of Rome. Teubner, Leipzig / Berlin 1922, pp. 438-442 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Luciano Landolfi: Petron (Petronius Niger, Arbiter) provides an overview of the history of reception . Satyrica. In: Christine Walde (Ed.): The reception of ancient literature. Kulturhistorisches Werklexikon (= Der Neue Pauly . Supplements. Volume 7). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02034-5 , Sp. 609-634.