method of Horace in his Satires when we read the dramatic description of the shipwreck in Petronius.  The blackness of night descends upon the water; the little bark which contains the hero and his friends is at the mercy of the sea; Lichas, the master of the vessel, is swept from the deck by a wave, Encolpius and his comrade Giton prepare to die in each other’s embrace, but the tragic scene ends with a ridiculous picture of Eumolpus bellowing out above the roar of the storm a new poem which he is setting down upon a huge piece of parchment.  Evidently Petronius has the same dread of being taken too seriously which Horace shows so often in his Satires.  The cynical, or at least unmoral, attitude of Petronius is brought out in a still more marked way at the close of this same passage.  Of those upon the ill-fated ship the degenerates Encolpius, Giton, and Eumolpus, who have wronged Lichas irreparably, escape, while the pious Lichas meets a horrible death.  All this seems to make it clear that not only does the subject which Petronius has treated inevitably involve a satire upon contemporary society, but that the author takes a satirical or cynical attitude toward life.

Another characteristic of the story is its realism.  There are no marvellous adventures, and in fact no improbable incidents in it.  The author never obtrudes his own personality upon us, as his successor Apuleius sometimes does, or as Thackeray has done.  We know what the people in the story are like, not from the author’s description of them, but from their actions, from the subjects about which they talk, and from the way in which they talk.  Agamemnon converses as a rhetorician might talk, Habinnas like a millionnaire stone-cutter, and Echion like a rag-dealer, and their language and style are what we should expect from men of their standing in society and of their occupations.  The conversations of Trimalchio and his freedmen guests are not witty, and their jests are not clever.  This adherence to the true principles of realism is the more noteworthy in the case of so brilliant a writer as Petronius, and those of us who recall some of the preternaturally clever conversations in the pages of Henry James and other contemporary novelists may feel that in this respect he is a truer artist than they are.

The novel of Petronius has one other characteristic which is significant, if we attempt to trace the origin of this type of literature.  It is cast in the prose-poetic form, that is, passages in verse are inserted here and there in the narrative.  In a few cases they are quoted, but for the most part they are the original compositions of the novelist.  They range in length from couplets to poems of three hundred lines.  Sometimes they form an integral part of the narrative, or again they illustrate a point, elaborate an idea in poetry, or are exercises in verse.