Books about Petronius from Amazon.com

The Satyricon is the most celebrated prose work to have survived from the ancient world. It can be described as the first realistic novel, the father of the picaresque genre. It recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean in the age of Nero, encountering en route type-figures whom the author wishes to satirize. P.G. Walsh captures the spirit of the original in this new and lively translation. His introduction and detailed notes provide the reader with a comprehensive guide to the meanings and intentions of the story and the later history of its literary influence..
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Perhaps the strangest and most strikingly modern work to survive from the ancient world, The Satyricon relates the hilarious mock epic adventures of the impotent Encolpius, and his struggle to regain virility. Here Petronius brilliantly brings to life the courtesans, legacy-hunters, pompous professors and dissolute priestesses of the age and, above all, Trimalchio, the archetypal self-made millionaire whose pretentious vulgarity on an insanely grand scale makes him one of the great comic characters in literature. Seneca's The Apocolocyntosis, a malicious skit on the deification of Claudius the Clod', was designed by the author to ingratiate himself with Nero, who was Claudius' successor. Together, the two provide a powerful insight into a darkly fascinating period of Roman history..
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An adaptation of the Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius.
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Latin students will be able to both manage and enjoy this book, which features a selection of highly entertaining episodes from the Satyricon The book includes vocabulary and notes that enhance the student's enjoyment of the text.

Also available:

The Phaedra of Seneca - ISBN 0865160163
Lucretius : Selections from De Rerum Natura - ISBN 0865163995.
Price: $27.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Petronius (C. or T. Petronius Arbiter), who is reasonably identified with the author of this famous satyric and satiric novel, was a man of pleasure and of good literary taste who flourished in the times of Claudius (41–54 CE) and Nero (54–68). As Tacitus describes him, he used to sleep by day, and attend to official duties or to his amusements by night. At one time he was governor of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor and was also a consul, showing himself a man of vigour when this was required. Later he lapsed into indulgence (or assumed the mask of vice) and became a close friend of Nero. Accused by jealous Tigellinus of disloyalty and condemned, with self-opened veins he conversed lightly with friends, dined, drowsed, sent to Nero a survey of Nero's sexual deeds, and so died, 66 CE.

The surviving parts of Petronius's romance Satyricon mix philosophy and real life, prose and verse, in a tale of the disreputable adventures of Encolpius and two companions, Ascyltus and Giton. In the course of their wanderings they attend a showy and wildly extravagant dinner given by a rich freedman, Trimalchio, whose guests talk about themselves and life in general. Other incidents are a shipwreck and somewhat lurid proceedings in South Italy. The work is written partly in pure Latin, but sometimes purposely in a more vulgar style. It parodies and otherwise attacks bad taste in literature, pedantry and hollow society.

Apocolocyntosis, "Pumpkinification" (instead of deification), is probably by Seneca the wealthy philosopher and courtier (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE). It is a medley of prose and verse and a political satire on the Emperor Claudius written soon after he died in 54 CE and was deified.

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Encolpius, a soldier of fortune, despiser of pedantry, lecherous and contrary, and the beautiful Giton, who lives off his charms, are invited to a gargantuan banquet hosted by the prodigal, pompous, newly rich Trimalchio. When the feast turns into a riot, the two, joined by the down-on-his-luck poet Eumolpus, leave town quickly to avoid trouble. So begins the Satyrica, a bizarre odyssey through the carnivalesque landscape of Nero's empire.
The author of the Satyrica, Petronius, had been Nero's intimate and advisor on all matters of artistic taste and elegance but a jealous rival turned Nero against him. No longer enduring "the suspense of fear or of hope," Petronius eluded his former patron by ending his own life. His novel has lived on, preserving for centuries tales of a time when virtue and vice, power and money, human comedy and human cruelty, mixed and melded unpredictably.
The translation is accurate and contemporary. In addition, a chronology, introduction, and commentary offer the reader background on Petronius's social milieu and on the fascinating complexity of his seemingly low-brow novel's poetic structure..
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This new Satyricon features not only a lively, new, annotated translation of the text, but also fresh, and accessible commentaries that discuss Petronius' masterpiece in terms of such topics as the identity of Petronius, the transmission of his manuscript, literary influences on the Satyricon, and the distinctive literary form of this work -- as well as such hallmarks of Roman life as oratory, sexual practices, households, dinner parties, religion, and philosophy. It offers, in short, a remarkably informative and engaging account of major aspects of Imperial Roman culture as seen through the prism of our first extant novel..
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Extracts from Cicero, Nepos, Sallust, Livy, Petronius, Seneca, Pliny and Tacitus In Latin with notes and introductory material in English .
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