only a part of it has come down to us, some one hundred
and ten pages in all. Its great size probably
proved fatal to its preservation in its complete form,
or at least contributed to that end, for it has been
estimated that it ran from six hundred to nine hundred
pages, being longer, therefore, than the average novel
of Dickens and Scott. Consequently we are not
dealing with a bit of ephemeral literature, but with
an elaborate composition of a high degree of excellence,
behind which we should expect to find a long line of
development. We are puzzled not so much by the
utter absence of anything in the way of prose fiction
before the time of Petronius as by the difficulty
of establishing any satisfactory logical connection
between these pieces of literature and the romance
of Petronius. We are bewildered, in fact, by
the various possibilities which the situation presents.
The work shows points of similarity with several antecedent
forms of composition, but the gaps which lie in any
assumed line of descent are so great as to make us
question its correctness.
If we call to mind the present condition of this romance
and those characteristic features of it which are
pertinent to the question at issue, the nature of
the problem and its difficulty also will be apparent
at once. Out of the original work, in a rather
fragmentary form, only four or five main episodes
are extant, one of which is the brilliant story of
the Dinner of Trimalchio. The action takes place
for the most part in Southern Italy, and the principal
characters are freedmen who have made their fortunes
and degenerate freemen who are picking up a precarious
living by their wits. The freemen, who are the
central figures in the novel, are involved in a great
variety of experiences, most of them of a disgraceful
sort, and the story is a story of low life. Women
play an important role in the narrative, more important
perhaps than they do in any other kind of ancient
literature—at least their individuality
is more marked. The efficient motif is erotic.
I say the efficient, because the conventional motif
which seems to account for all the misadventures of
the anti-hero Encolpius is the wrath of an offended
deity. A great part of the book has an atmosphere
of satire about it which piques our curiosity and
baffles us at the same time, because it is hard to
say how much of this element is inherent in the subject
itself, and how much of it lies in the intention of
the author. It is the characteristic of parvenu
society to imitate smart society to the best of its
ability, and its social functions are a parody of
the like events in the upper set. The story of
a dinner party, for instance, given by such a nouveau
riche as Trimalchio, would constantly remind us
by its likeness and its unlikeness, by its sins of
omission and commission, of a similar event in correct
society. In other words, it would be a parody
on a proper dinner, even if the man who described
the event knew nothing about the usages of good society,
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