Читать книгу Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius - Dill Samuel - Страница 17

The motive of the work has been much debated. It has been thought a satire on the Neronian circle, and again an effort to gratify it, by a revelation of the corruptions of the plebeian world, the same impulse which drove Messalina to the brothel, and Nero to range the taverns at midnight.738 It has been thought a satire on the insolence and grossness of Pallas and the freedmen of the Claudian régime which Nero detested, to amuse him with all their vulgar absurdities. Is it not possible that the writer was merely pleasing himself—that he was simply following the impulse of genius? Since the seventh century the work has only existed in fragments.739 Who can tell how much the lost portions, if we possessed them, might affect our judgment of the object of the work? One thing is certain, its author was a very complex character, and would probably have smiled at some of the lumbering efforts to read his secret. Even though he may have had no lofty purpose, a weary man of pleasure may have wished to display, in its grossest, vulgarest form, the life of which he had tasted the pleasures, and which he had seen turning into Dead Sea fruit. He was probably a bad man in his conduct, worse perhaps in his imagination; and yet, by a strange contradiction, which is not unexampled in the history of character, he may have had dreams of a refined purity and temperance which tortured and embittered him by their contrast with actual life.

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Out of the smoke of controversy, the conclusion seems to have emerged that the Satiricon is a work of Nero’s reign, and that its author was in all probability that Caius Petronius who was Nero’s close companion, and who fell a victim to the jealousy of Tigellinus. Not the least cogent proof of this is the literary criticism of the work. It is well known that Lucan, belonging to the Spanish family of the Senecas, had thrown off many of the conventions of Roman literature, and discarded the machinery of epic mythology in his Pharsalia. He had also incurred the literary jealousy of Nero. The attack in the Satiricon on Lucan’s literary aberrations can hardly be mistaken. The old poet Eumolpus is introduced to defend the traditions of the past. And he gives a not very successful demonstration, in 285 verses, of the manner in which the subject should have been treated, with all the scenery and machinery of orthodox epic.740 This specimen of conservative taste is the least happy part of the work.

Such evidence is reinforced by the harmony of the whole tone of the Satiricon with the clear-cut character of Petronius in Tacitus. There was evidently a singular fascination about this man, which, in spite of his wasted, self-indulgent life, was keenly felt by the severe historian. Petronius was capable of great things, but in an age of wild licence he deliberately devoted his brilliant talent to making sensuality a fine art. Like Otho, who belonged to the same circle, he showed, as consul and in the government of Bithynia, that a man of pleasure could be equal to great affairs.741 After this single digression from the scheme of the voluptuary, he returned to his pleasures, and became an arbiter in all questions of sensual taste, from whose decision there was no appeal. His ascendency over the Emperor drew upon him the fatal enmity of Tigellinus. Petronius was doomed. It was a time when not even the form of justice was used to veil the caprices of tyranny, and Petronius determined not to endure a long suspense when the issue was certain. He had gone as far as [pg 124]Cumae to attend the Emperor. There he was stopped. He retired to his chamber and had his veins alternately opened and rebound, meanwhile conversing with his friends or listening to light verses, not, as the fashion then was, seeking consolation from a Stoic director on the issues of life and death. He rewarded some of his slaves; others he had flogged before his eyes. After a banquet he fell calmly into his last sleep In his will there was none of the craven adulation by which the victim often strove to save his heirs from imperial rapacity. He broke his most precious myrrhine vase, to prevent its being added to Nero’s treasures.742 His only bequest to the Emperor was a stinging catalogue of his secret and nameless sins.743

The Satiricon, as we have it, is only a fragment, containing parts of two books, out of a total of sixteen. It is full of humorous exaggeration and wild Aristophanic fun, along with, here and there, very subtle and refined delineation of character. But, except in the famous dinner of Trimalchio, there are few signs of regular construction or closeness of texture in plot and incident. Even if we had the whole, it might have been difficult to decipher its motive or to unlock the secret of the author’s character. We can only be sure that he was a man of genius, and that he was interested in the intellectual pursuits and tendencies of his time, as well as in its vices and follies. We may perhaps surmise that he was at once perverted and disillusioned, alternately fascinated and disgusted by the worship of the flesh and its lusts in that evil time. He is not, as has been sometimes said, utterly devoid of a moral sense. Occasionally he shows a gleam of nobler feeling, a sense of the lacrimae rerum, as in that passage where the corpse of the shipwrecked Lichas is washed ashore. “Somewhere a wife is quietly awaiting him, or a father or a son, with no thought of storm; some one whom he kissed on leaving. … He had examined the accounts of his estates, he had pictured to himself the day of his return to his home. And now he lies, O ye gods, how far from the goal of his hopes. But the sea is not the only mocker of the hopes of men. If you reckon well, there is [pg 125]shipwreck everywhere.”744 There is also a curious note of contempt for his own age in a passage on the decay of the fine arts. The tone is, for the moment, almost that of Ruskin. The glories of the golden age of art were the result of simple virtue. An age like the Neronian, an age abandoned to wine and harlotry, which dreams only of making money by any sordid means, cannot even appreciate what the great masters have left behind, much less itself produce anything worthy. Even the gods of the Capitol are now honoured by an offering of crude bullion, not by the masterpieces of a Pheidias or an Apelles. And the race which created them are now for us, forsooth, silly Greeklings!745

Yet side by side with a passage like this, there are descriptions of abnormal depravity so coarsely realistic that it has often been assumed, and not unnaturally, that the writer rioted in mere filth. It should be remembered, however, that there was a tradition of immorality about the ancient romance,746 and Petronius, had he cared to do so, might have made the same apology as Martial, that he provided what his readers demanded.747 That Petronius was deeply tainted is only too probable from his associations, although Tacitus implies that he was rather a fastidious voluptuary than a gross debauchee. Yet a sensualist of the intellectual range of Petronius may have occasionally visions of a better world than that to which he has sunk. Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifler may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time? Is it not possible that, along with other illusions, he had parted with the illusions of vice, and that in the “noctes Neronis” he had seen the adder among the roses? He has written one of the keenest satires ever penned on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its absurd affectations, its vanity, its grossness. May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion which so cultivated a trifler would have scorned, to reveal the abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions of the spirit was hurrying? In the half comic, half ghastly scene in which Trimalchio, in a fit of maudlin sentiment, [pg 126]has himself laid out for dead, while the horns blare out his funeral lament, we seem to hear the knell of a society which was the slave of gold and gross pleasure, and seemed to be rotting before its death.

But it need hardly be said that the prevailing note of the Satiricon is anything but melancholy. The author is intensely amused with his subject, and the piece is full of the most riotous fun and humour. It belongs formally to the medley of prose and verse which Varro introduced into Roman literature on the model of Menippus of Gadara.748 It contains disquisitions on literary tendencies of the day in poetry and oratory, anecdotes and desultory talk. But Petronius has given a new character to the old “Satura,” more in the manner of the Greek romance. There probably was no regular plot in the complete work, no central motive, such as the wrath of Priapus,749 to bind it together. Yet there is a certain bond of union in the narrative of lively, and often questionable, adventures through which Petronius carries his very disreputable characters. In this life and movement, this human interest, the Satiricon is the distant ancestor of Gil Blas, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones.

The scene of the earlier part, long since lost, may have been laid at Massilia.750 In the two books partially preserved to us, it lies in southern Italy, at Cumae or Croton, in those Greek towns which had plenty of Greek vice, without much Greek refinement.751 The three strangers, whose adventures are related, Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton, if we may judge by their names, are also Greek, with the literary culture of their time, and deeply tainted with its worst vices. At the opening of our fragment, Encolpius, a beggarly, wandering sophist, is declaiming in a portico on the decay of oratory.752 He is expressing what was probably Petronius’s own judgment, as it was that of Tacitus,753 as to the evil effects of school declamation on musty or frivolous subjects. He is met by a [pg 127]rival lecturer, Agamemnon, who urges, on behalf of the unfortunate teachers of this conventional rhetoric, that the fault lies not with them, but with the parents and the public, the same excuse, in fact, which Plato had long before made for the maligned sophist of the fifth century B.C.754 But Encolpius and his companions, in spite of these literary interests, are the most disreputable adventurers, educated yet hopelessly depraved. They are even more at home in the reeking slums than in the lecture hall. Encolpius has been guilty of murder, theft, seduction. The party are alternately plunderers and plundered. They riot for the moment in foul excesses, and are tortured by jealousy and the miseries of squalid vice. Only those who have a taste for pornography will care to follow them in these dark paths. Reduced to the last pinch of poverty, they are invited to dine at the all-welcoming table of Trimalchio, and this is for us the most interesting passage in their adventures. But, on leaving the rich freedman’s halls they once more pass into scenes where a modern pen cannot venture to follow them. Yet soon afterwards, Encolpius is found in a picture gallery discussing the fate of literature and art with Eumolpus,755 an inveterate poet, as vicious as himself. Presently the party are on shipboard off the south Italian coast. They are shipwrecked and cast ashore in a storm near the town of Croton.756 A friendly peasant informs them that, if they are honest merchants, that is no place for their craft. But if they belong to the more distinguished world of intrigue, they may make their fortune. It is a society which has no care for letters or virtue, which thinks only of unearned gain. There are only two classes, the deceivers and their victims. Children are an expensive luxury, for only the childless ever receive an invitation or any social attention. It is like a city ravaged by the plague; there are only left the corpses and the vultures.757 The adventurers resolve to seize the rare opportunity; they will turn the tables on the social birds of prey. The pauper poet is easily translated into a millionaire with enormous estates in Africa.758 A portion of his wealth has been engulfed [pg 128]in the storm, but a solid HS.300,000,000, with much besides, still remains. He has a cough, moreover, with other signs of debility. There is no more idiotic person, as our Stock Exchange records show, than a man eager for an unearned fortune. The poor fools flocked around Eumolpus, drinking in every fresh rumour about his will. He was loaded with gifts;759 great ladies made an easy offer of their virtue and even that of their children.760 Meanwhile he, or Petronius, plays with their follies or tortures their avidity. In one of his many wills, the heirs of the pretended Croesus are required not to touch their booty till they have devoured his remains before the people!761 The tales of barbarian tribes in Herodotus, the memories of the siege of Saguntum and Numantia, are invoked in brutal irony to justify the reasonableness of the demand. “Close your eyes,” the cynic enjoins, “and fancy that instead of devouring human flesh, you are swallowing a million of money.” Petronius could be very brutal as well as very refined in his raillery. The combined stupidity and greed of the fortune-hunter of all ages are perhaps best met by such brutality of contempt.

The really interesting part of their adventure is the dinner at the house of Trimalchio, a rich freedman, to which these rascals were invited. Trimalchio is probably in many traits drawn from life, but the picture of himself, of his wife and his associates, is a work of genius worthy of Fielding or Smollett or Le Sage. Petronius, it is clear, enjoyed his work, and, in spite of his contempt for the vulgar ambition and the coarseness and commonness of Trimalchio’s class, he has a liking for a certain simplicity and honest good nature in Trimalchio. The freedman tells the story of his own career762 without reserve, and with a certain pride in the virtue and frugality, according to his standards, which have made him what he is. He also exults in his shrewdness and business capacity. His motto has always been, “You are worth just what you have.” “Buy cheap and sell dear.” Coming as a little slave boy from Asia, probably in the reign of Augustus,763 [pg 129]he became the favourite of his master, and more than the favourite of his mistress. He found himself in the end the real master of the household, and, on his patron’s death, he was left joint-heir to his property with the emperor. But he had ambitions beyond even such a fortune. He became a ship-owner on a great scale. He lost a quarter of a million in a single storm, and at once proceeded to build more and larger ships. Money poured in; all his ventures prospered. He bought estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Some of his purchases he had never seen.764 He built himself a stately house, with marble porticoes, four great banqueting-halls, and twenty sleeping-rooms.765 Everything to satisfy human wants was produced upon his lands. He was a man of infinite enterprise. He had improved the breed of his flocks by importing rams from Tarentum. He had bees from Hymettus in his hives. He sent to India for mushroom spawn.766 A gazette was regularly brought out, full of statistics, and all the daily incidents on his estates;767 the number of slave births and deaths; a slave crucified for blaspheming the genius of the master; a fire in the bailiff’s house; the divorce of a watchman’s wife, who had been caught in adultery with the bathman; a sum of HS.100,000 paid into the chest, and waiting for investment—these are some of the items of news. Trimalchio, who bears now, after the fashion of his class, the good Roman name of Caius Pompeius, has risen to the dignity of Sevir Augustalis in his municipality;768 he is one of the foremost persons in it, with an overwhelming sense of the dignity of wealth, and with a ridiculous affectation of artistic and literary culture, which he parades with a delightful unconsciousness of his blunders.

When the wandering adventurers arrive for dinner,769 they find a bald old man in a red tunic playing at ball, with eunuchs in attendance. While he is afterwards being rubbed down with unguents in the bath, his servants refresh themselves with old Falernian. Then, with four richly dressed runners preceding him, and wrapped in a scarlet mantle, he is borne to the house in his sedan along with his ugly minion. On the wall of the vestibule, as you entered, there were frescoes, one of which represented the young Trimalchio, under the leadership [pg 130]of Minerva, making his entry into Rome, with other striking incidents of his illustrious career, while Fortune empties her flowing horn, and the Fates spin the golden thread of his destiny.770 The banquet begins; Alexandrian boys bring iced water and delicately attend to the guests’ feet, singing all the while.771 Indeed, the whole service is accompanied by singing, and the blare of instruments. To a great, deafening burst of music, the host is at last borne in buried in cushions, his bare shaven head protruding from a scarlet cloak, with a stole around his neck, and lappets falling on each side; his hands and arms loaded with rings.772 Not being just then quite ready for dinner, he, with a kindly apology, has a game of draughts, until he feels inclined to eat, the pieces on the terebinthine board being, appropriately to such a player, gold and silver coins.773 The dinner is a long series of surprises, on the artistic ingenuity of which Trimalchio plumes himself vastly. One course represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, of which the host expounds at length the fateful significance.774 Another dish was a large boar, with baskets of sweetmeats hanging from its tusks. A huge bearded hunter pierced its sides with a hunting knife, and forthwith from the wound there issued a flight of thrushes which were dexterously captured in nets as they flew about the room.775 Towards the end of the meal the guests were startled by strange sounds in the ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of fruit and bon-bons.776 It may be readily assumed that in such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius, one hundred years old.777 As the wine appeared, the genial host remarked with admirable frankness, “I did not give as good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished company!”

The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross [pg 131]and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a literary age, a man of Trimalchio’s position must affect some knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a Greek and Latin library,778 and pretends to have once read Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse; Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles; Helen is the sister of Diomede and Ganymede.779 One of the more refined entertainments which are provided is the performance of scenes from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version.780 He is himself an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating the Bacchic god.781 As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to no one,782 although he slyly confesses that his “real Corinthian” got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio’s most genuine taste, as he naïvely confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud horn-blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests with their monotonous performances.783 Blood-curdling tales of the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided for another kind of taste.784 A base product of Alexandria imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones spouted passages from the Aeneid, profaned to scholarly ears by a mixture of Atellan verses.785 Trimalchio, who was anxious that his wife should display her old powers of dancing a cancan, is also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the pantomimic line,786 when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her own we shall see presently.

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The company at this strange party were worthy of their host. And Petronius has outdone himself in the description of these brother freedmen, looking up to Trimalchio as the glory of their order, and giving vent to their ill-humour, their optimism, or their inane moralities, in conversation with the sly observer who reports their talk. They are all old slaves like their host, men who have “made their pile,” or lost it. They rate themselves and their neighbours simply in terms of cash.787 The only ability they can understand is that which can “pick money out of the dung-heap,” and “turn lead to gold.”788 These gross and infinitely stupid fellows have not even the few saving traits in the character of Trimalchio. He has, after all, an honourable, though futile, ambition to be a wit, a connoisseur, a patron of learning. His luxury is coarse enough, but he wishes, however vainly, to redeem it by some ingenuity, by interspersing the mere animal feeding with some broken gleams, or, as we may think, faint and distorted reflections, of that great world of which he had heard, but the portals of which he could never enter. But his company are of mere clay. Trimalchio is gross enough at times, but, compared with his guests, he seems almost tolerable. And their dull baseness is the more torturing to a modern reader because it is an enduring type. The neighbour of the Greek observer warns him not to despise his company;789 they are “warm” men. That one at the end of the couch, who began as a porter, has his HS.800,000. Another, an undertaker, has had his glorious days, when the wine flowed in rivers;790 but he has been compelled to compound with his creditors, and he has played them a clever trick. A certain Seleucus, whose name reveals his origin, explains his objections to the bath, especially on this particular morning, when he has been at a funeral.791 The fate of the departed friend unfortunately leads him to moralise on the weakness of mortal men, mere insects, or bubbles on the stream. As for medical aid, it is an imaginary comfort; it oftener kills than cures.792 The [pg 133]great consolation was that the funeral was respectably done, although the wife was not effusive in her grief.793 Another guest will have none of this affected mourning for one who lived the life of his choice and left his solid hundred thousand.794 He was after all a harsh quarrelsome person, very different from his brother, a stout, kindly fellow with an open hand, and a sumptuous table. He had his reverses at first, but he was set up again by a good vintage and a lucky bequest, which he knew, by a sly stroke, how to increase; a true son of fortune, who lived his seventy years and more, as black as a crow, a man who lustily enjoyed all the delights of the flesh to the very end.795

But the most interesting person for the modern student is the grumbler about the management of town affairs, and here a page or two of the Satiricon is worth a dissertation. The price of bread has gone up, and the bakers must be in league with the aediles. In the good old times, when the critic first came from Asia, things were very different.796 “There were giants in those days. Think of Safinius, who lived by the old arch, a man with a sharp, biting tongue, but a true friend, a man who, in the town council, went straight to his point, whose voice in the forum rang out like a trumpet. Yet he was just like one of us, knew everybody’s name, and returned every salute. Why, in those days corn was as cheap as dirt. You could buy for an as a loaf big enough for two. But the town has since gone sadly back.797 Our aediles now think only how to pocket in a day what would be to some of us a fortune. I know how a certain person made his thousand gold pieces. If this goes on, I shall have to sell my cottages. Neither men nor the gods have any mercy. It all comes from our neglect of religion. No one now keeps a fast, no one cares a fig for Jove. In old days when there was a drought, the long-robed matrons with bare feet, dishevelled hair, and pure hearts, would ascend the hill to entreat Jupiter for rain, and then it would pour down in [pg 134]buckets.”798 At this point the maundering, pious pessimist is interrupted by a rag dealer799 of a more cheerful temper. “Now this, now that, as the rustic said, when he lost his speckled pig. What we have not to-day will come to-morrow; so life rubs along. Why, we are to have a three days’ show of gladiators on the next holiday, not of the common sort, but many freedmen among them. And our Titus has a high spirit; he will not do things by halves. He will give us cold steel without any shirking, a good bit of butchery in full view of the amphitheatre. And he can well afford it. His father died and left him HS.30,000,000. What is a paltry HS.400,000 to such a fortune?800 and it will give him a name for ever. He has some tit-bits, too, in reserve, the lady chariot-driver, and the steward of Glyco, who was caught with his master’s wife; poor wretch, he was only obeying orders. And the worthless Glyco has given him to the beasts; the lady deserved to suffer. And I have an inkling that Mammaea is going to give us a feast, where we shall get two denarii apiece. If she does the part expected of her, Norbanus will be nowhere. His gladiators were a wretched, weedy, twopenny-halfpenny lot, who would go down at a mere breath. They were all cut to pieces, as the cowards deserved, at the call of the crowd, ‘give it them.’ A pretty show indeed! When I applauded, I gave far more than I got. But friend Agamemnon, you are thinking ‘what is all this long-winded chatter.’801 Well, you, who dote on eloquence, why won’t you talk yourself, instead of laughing at us feeble folk. Some day I may persuade you to look in at my farm; I daresay, though the times are bad, we shall find a pullet to eat. And I have a young scholar ripening for your trade. He has good wits and never raises his head from his task. He paints with a will. He has begun Greek, and has a real taste for Latin. But one of his tutors is conceited and idle. The other is very painstaking, but, in his excess of zeal, he teaches more than he knows. So I have bought the boy some red-letter volumes, that he may get a tincture of law for domestic purposes. That [pg 135]is what gives bread and butter. He has now had enough of literature. If he gives it up, I think I shall teach him a trade, the barber’s or auctioneer’s or pleader’s,802 something that only death can take from him. Every day I din into his ears, Primigenius, my boy, what you learn you learn for profit. Look at the lawyer Philero. If he had not learnt his business, he could not keep the wolf from the door. Why, only a little ago, he was a hawker with a bundle on his back, and now he can hold his own with Norbanus. Learning is a treasure, and a trade can never be lost.”

To all this stimulating talk there are lively interludes. A guest thinks one of the strangers, in a superior way, is making game of the company, and assails him with a shower of the choicest abuse, in malodorous Latin of the slums, interlarded with proud references to his own rise from the slave ranks.803 Trimalchio orders the house-dog, Scylax, to be brought in, but the brute falls foul of a pet spaniel, and, in the uproar, a lamp is overthrown, the vases on the table are all smashed, and some of the guests are scalded with the hot oil.804 In the middle of this lively scene, a lictor announces the approach of Habinnas, a stone-cutter, who is also a great dignitary of the town. He arrives rather elevated from another feast of which he has pleasant recollections. He courteously asks for Fortunata,805 who happens to be just then looking after the plate and dividing the remains of the feast among the slaves. That lady, after many calls, appears in a cherry coloured tunic with a yellow girdle, wiping her hands with her neckerchief. She has splendid rings on her arms, legs, and fingers, which she pulls off to show them to the stone-cutter’s lady. Trimalchio is proud of their weight, and orders a balance to be brought in to confirm his assertions. It is melancholy to relate that, in the end, the two ladies get hopelessly drunk, and fall to embracing one another in a rather hysterical fashion. Fortunata even attempts to dance.806 In the growing confusion the slaves take their places at table, and the cook begins to give imitations of a favourite actor,807 and lays a wager with his master on the chances of the green at the next races. Trimal[pg 136]chio, who by this time was becoming very mellow and sentimental, determines to make his will, and to manumit all his slaves, with a farm to one, a house to another. He even gives his friend the stone-cutter full directions about the monument which is to record so brilliant a career. There is to be ample provision for its due keeping, in the fashion so well known from the inscriptions, with a fair space of prescribed measurements, planted with vines and other fruit trees. Trimalchio wishes to be comfortable in his last home.808 On the face of the monument ships under full sail are to figure the sources of his wealth.809 He himself is to be sculptured, seated on a tribunal, clothed with the praetexta of the Augustalis, with five rings on his fingers, ladling money from a bag, as in the great banquet with which he had once regaled the people.810 On his right hand there is to be the figure of his wife holding a dove and a spaniel on a leash. A boy is to be graved weeping over a broken urn. And, finally, in the centre of the scene, there is to be a horologe, that the passer-by, as he looks for the hour, may have his eyes always drawn to the epitaph which recited the dignities and virtues of the illustrious freedman. It told posterity that “C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus was pious, stout, and trusty, that he rose from nothing, left HS.30,000,000, and never heard a philosopher.” The whole company, along with Trimalchio himself, of course wept copiously at the mere thought of the close of so illustrious a career. After renewing their gastric energy in the bath, the company fell to another banquet. Presently a cock crows, and Trimalchio, in a fit of superstition, spills his wine under the table,811 passes his rings to the right hand, and offers a reward to any one who will bring the ominous bird. The disturber was soon caught and handed over to the cook for execution. Then Trimalchio excites his wife’s natural anger by a piece of amatory grossness, and, in [pg 137]retaliation for her very vigorous abuse, flings a cup at her head. In the scene which follows he gives, with the foulest references to his wife’s early history, a sketch of his own career and the eulogy of the virtues that have made him what he is.812 Growing more and more sentimental, he at last has himself laid out for dead;813 the horn-blowers sound his last lament, one of them, the undertaker’s man, with such a good will, that the town watch arrived in breathless haste with water and axes to extinguish a fire. The strangers seized the opportunity to escape from the nauseous scene. Their taste raised them above Trimalchio’s circle, but they were quite on the level of its morals. Encolpius and his companions are soon involved in other adventures, in which it is better not to follow them.

The lesson of all this purse-proud ostentation and vulgarity, the moral which Petronius may have intended to point, is one which will be taught from age to age by descendants of Trimalchio, and which will be never learnt till a far off future. But we need not moralise, any more than Petronius. We have merely given some snatches of a work, which is now seldom read, because it throws a searching light on a class which was rising to power in Roman society. We have now seen the worst of that society, whether crushed by the tyranny of the Caesars, or corrupted and vulgarised by sudden elevation from ignominious poverty to wealth and luxury. But there were great numbers, both among the nobles and the masses, who, in that evil time, maintained the traditions of old Roman soberness and virtue. The three following chapters will reveal a different life from that which we have hitherto been describing.

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