SOURCE: "Character Voices," in Reading Petronius, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, pp. 137-54.

In the following essay, Slater contends that it is the content and occasion of language more than its form that results in the sense of individual characterizations in the Satyricon.

Our initial linear experience (in the previous chapters) of Petronius's novel is over. This experience itself has been a fiction: I who write and, most likely, you who read are not first-time readers of the Satyricon. We began by attempting to forget our previous experiences of reading Petronius and strove to construct a new "first reading." While our construct will not correspond in every particular to everyone's or anyone's first reading of the Satyricon, this is a useful exercise nonetheless, for it helps us to remember and revitalize aspects of the reading experience we regularly choose to forget.

We have thus used the axis of...