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Was Petronius a Moralist?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

P. G. Walsh
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Extract

Saul bellow's book Mr. Sammler's Planet documents contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster of homo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , October 1974 , pp. 181 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1974

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References

page 182 note 1 Stuckey, Joanna, ‘Petronius the “Ancient”: his reputation and influence in Seventeenth Century England’, Riv. Stud. Class. xxi (1972), 3 ff.Google Scholar; cf. Rose, K. F. C., ‘The Petronian Inquisition: an Auto-da-Fé’, Arion v. 3 (1966), 275 ff.Google Scholar

page 182 note 2 See Cameron, Averil M., ‘Myth and Meaning in Petronius’, Latomus xxix (1970), 399.Google Scholar

page 182 note 3 Sat. 48. 8.Google Scholar

page 182 note 4 Ibid. 126. 9.

page 183 note 1 Virginia Quarterly Review (1958), 276 ff.Google Scholar

page 183 note 2 ‘Luxury and Death in the Satyricon’, Arion v. 3 (1966), 304 ff.Google Scholar = Essays on Classical Literature, ed. Rudd, Niall (Cambridge, 1972), 122 ff.Google Scholar

page 184 note 1 ‘Petronius the Moralist’, TAPA lxxii (1941), 176 ff.Google Scholar

page 184 note 2 Ann. xvi. 18.Google Scholar

page 184 note 3 Rose, K. F. C., The Date and Author of the Satyricon (London, 1971).Google Scholar

page 185 note 1 See the references in Walsh, , The Roman Novel (Cambridge, 1970), 72 f.Google Scholar

page 185 note 2 Policr. iii. 8Google Scholar. For the main references to mimic situations, see The Roman Novel, 24f.Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Sat. 81, 82, 126 ff.Google Scholar

page 186 note 2 Hor. Sat. ii. 8Google Scholar; see Sullivan, J. P., The ‘Satyricon’ of Petronius (London, 1968), 126 ff.Google Scholar

page 187 note 1 Ovid, , Am. iii. 7Google Scholar; Virgil, , Aen. vi. 469Google Scholar. On the wholly literary preoccupations of Petronius in the treatment of sexual themes, see the penetrating analysis of Gill, Christopher, CPh lxviii (1973), 172 ff.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 It is strange to find so sensible a critic as Averil Cameron quoting this whimsy with approval (Latomus [1970], 410)Google Scholar; still stranger is her suggestion that the farcical death-bed scene in which Eumolpus demands that his inheritors devour his body (Sat. 141. 2)Google Scholar is likewise to be taken seriously as an extension of the theme of cannibalism, so that for Petronius Croton is ‘a hateful, dead place’ where such practices are appropriate.

page 188 note 1 Essays on Classical Literature (above, p. 183 n. 2), 151 ffGoogle Scholar. In this paper Sullivan makes the point more clearly than in his book on Petronius.

page 188 note 2 TAPA cii (1971), 631 ff.Google Scholar

page 190 note 1 See Sullivan, , The ‘Satyricon’ of Petronius, 193 ff.Google Scholar