Petronius' Satyricon has often been dubbed the most controversial and daedalic text in classical literature. The question of whether and how it should count as “satiric” has long preoccupied scholars, yet this contention is part of a broader debate about how to define a work parasitic on almost every known literary form, from the Greek romance (which it is often said to parody) to epic, historiography, New Comedy, Roman erotic elegy, the Milesian tale, and Greek and Roman mime. As Zeitlin argues, the Satyricon “seems to have been undertaken with the deliberate intention of defeating the expectations of an audience accustomed to an organising literary form.” There will always be problems involved in singling out one model or frame of expectations for such a generically complex text.

The Satyricon, or Satyrica (Greek genitive or nominative plural, with the former presuming the addition of libri, meaning “things associated with satyrs”), is an extended first person narrative told in the voice of Encolpius, a vagabond, myopic scholar who is also a protagonist in the events he recounts. The text survives fragmented: we probably have parts of (at least) books 14 and 16 and all of book 15, which likely coincided with the famous feast of Trimalchio, yet the original length remains a mystery.