Satyricon Cena Gospel Parallels Essay and Table (original) (raw)
The Satyrica has long been associated with a Neronian courtier named Petronius, mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals. 1 As such, the text is usually dated to the mid first century C.E. This view is so established that certain scholars have suggested it is 'little short of perverse not to accept the general consensus and read the Satyrica as a Neronian text of the mid-60s AD'. 2 In recent years, however, there has been a groundswell of support for re-evaluating this long-held position. Laird, after comparing the 'form and content' of the text to the Greek novel, came to the 'unattractive' conclusion that the text may be second century. 3 Similarly, in two recent pieces in CQ, Roth argues that the manumission scene in the Cena establishes a new terminus post quem for the text; she suggests that the freedoms granted by Trimalchio closely parallel-and parody-descriptions of awarding ciuitas found in the letters of Pliny the Younger. 4 Indeed, the three slaves manumitted in the novel are associated with a boar (Sat. 40.3-41.4), Dionysus (Sat. 41.6-7) and a falling star (Sat. 54.1-5); likewise, the three slaves that are the subject of Pliny's letter are C. Valerius Aper (boar), C. Valerius Dionysius (god of wine) and C. Valerius Astraeus (stars). 5 Roth's argument suggests that the author of the Satyrica was not Nero's contemporary but a member of Pliny's intellectual circle, offering strong circumstantial evidence that troubles the accepted tradition on the work's authorship and date. If Laird and Roth are correct, this new designation for the Satyrica holds significant implications for the study of the Christian Gospels. Scholars have long noted parallels between the canonical Gospels and the Satyrica, including the shared topoi of ritual anointing, crucifixion, a disappearance from the cross, a cannibalistic fellowship meal, (implied) resurrection and the motif of the empty tomb. Yet, relatively little has been made of these connections in scholarship. 6 Moreover, for the vast majority of scholars who maintain Petronian authorship, it is difficult to justify how these writers
Decent Indecency The 'Roman' Image of 'Greek' Traditions in Petronius's Satyricon
Graeco-Latina Brunensia, 2019
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how The Pergamene Youth and The Widow of Ephe-sus episodes present a stereotypical negative view of ‚Greek tradition' in Roman culture. This analysis shall show how the narrators of these two Milesian tales entertain while the implicit author connects ethical categories and values to the different levels of the complex narrative structure. The question is not what are the Greeks like, but how the author sees the Greeks. The subject of the current study is thus not the Hellas that is open to historical research, but the ideal of Greek culture that was present in Roman minds.
The Satyricon of Petronius: genre, wandering and style
2008
(1605), and John Dryden in "Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire," which prefaced his translation of Juvenal (1693). 2 These critics' point of view collided with the many that sought to fit the Petronian work into a novelesque genre of Greek origin. This conflict allows us to say that the first attempts to explicitly configure the genre of Menippean satire occurred around the time of the polemic that surrounded 1 Relihan (1993) 12, and Branham (2005) 10. 2 Cf. Dryden (1926) 66: "Which is also manifest from antiquity, by those authors who are acknowledged to have written Varronian satires, in imitation of his; of whom the chief is Petronius Arbiter, whose satire, they say, is now printed in Holland, wholly recovered, and made complete: when 'tis made public, it will easily be seen by any one sentence, whether it be supposititious, or genuine."
M. P. Futre Pinheiro, J. Perkins, R. Pervo (eds.), The Ancient Novel and the Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections, pp. 139-152., 2013
Since the early twentieth century, scholars have noted that the Christian Apocryphal Acts bear a striking thematic and narrative resemblance to the ancient Greek novels. 2 The pervasive similarities and parallels between the two are not surprising given that not only do both feature the same geographic and cultural context -the late antique Hellenic world -but also that both corpora reveal as well as examine the social concerns of the period for a particular audience: the novel for urban élites, and the Apocrypha for the emerging Christians. 3 Both were often presumed to have had a predominantly female readership due to the unprecedented role women play in their narratives. 4 It is generally assumed that the Apocryphal Acts were most probably influenced by the ancient Greek novel, since the writers of these (later) Christian texts appear to have adopted and applied novelistic topoi and themes, as well as rhetorical techniques. 5 Recent scholarship on the intersec------1 I would like to thank Froma Zeitlin for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Scott F. Johnson as well as to the audience present at the 'Ancient Novel and Early Christian Narrative: Intersections' panel at ICAN IV. 2 Von Dobschütz 1902 emphasizes that the resemblances between the Apocryphal Acts and the novel are 'quite apparent', especially 'in the accounts of threatened chastity and its preservation'.
Satyr Drama in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Periods: An Epigraphical Perspective
Reconstructing Satyr Drama , 2021
From Marseille to the cities of Asia Minor, spectators enjoyed performances of Greek drama throughout the Hellenistic period, and well into the Roman imperial era.1 Overall, the number of Greek agonistic festivals increased drastically from the age of Augustus through the early third century AD, what Louis Robert called an 'explosion agonistique'.2 Leschhorn counts over 500 festivals in the Greek East in the imperial period.3 Upwards of 30 cities in the Empire are known to have had competitions in drama, and some of these cities celebrated multiple dramatic festivals.4 New tragedies, comedies, and satyr dramas continued to be performed at Greek festivals into the second century AD. Reproductions of tragedy and comedy continued into at least the early third century AD. Although the scripts of satyr drama of the late Hellenistic and Roman era do not survive, even in fragments, there is material evidence for the genre, for which the most crucial source is epigraphical. Inscribed documents pertaining to the administration and celebration of dramatic festivals reveal not only how long satyr drama persisted in the Greek world, but also how important the institutional framework of the festivals was to its survival. Before the analysis of these epigraphic sources on satyr drama, there had been doubts about whether it was performed at all in the late Hellenistic and Roman era. In 1979, Plotnick questioned why Horace had written at such length in the Ars Poetica about satyr drama, 'a currently non-existing dramatic art form'.5 In the same year, however, Steffen made a first attempt at reconstructing post-classical satyr drama on the basis of epigraphic evidence in his short Latin dissertation.6 In 1991, Ghiron-Bistagne collected some of the epigraphic evidence for Hellenistic satyr