The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  By the time of Claudius' accession in 41, most of the family traits were firmly entrenched. Although an accomplished scholar, Claudius was every bit the profligate host, gambler, drunk, glutton, lecher, and audience for torture as his forebears. He was an inveterate vomiter and issued an edict encouraging flatulence at table, "quietly or noisily." His charms were complemented by a tendency to foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose when upset. He is largely held to have been poisoned with tainted mushrooms at a family meal, allegedly by his wife, Agrippina, on behalf of her son by a previous marriage, sixteen-year-old Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Whatever the circumstances of Claudius' death, young Lucius, under his adoptive name Nero, was acclaimed emperor in 54.

  It will be fairly clear by now that Nero descended from a champion line and was destined to fulfill the promise of his ancestors. His natural father, Domitius, who killed one of his own freedmen "for refusing to drink as much as he was ordered," accurately predicted that nothing good could be hoped of the offspring of such parents. His mother had the foresight to prevent him from studying philosophy, which she considered a burden to any future ruler. Just to make certain, she entrusted his early education to a dancer and a barber - and sure enough, Lucius was equal parts artist and cutthroat. His later tutor, Seneca, for all his moral stature and carefully crafted Epicurean brand of stoicism, could do nothing with him and let him run wild in the deluded hope that the boy would burn himself out. Again, too much has already been said of Nero's crimes. What else, after all, could be expected from a self-anointed musical genius whose three favorite songs were "Orestes the Matricide," "The Blinding of Oedi­pus," and "The Frenzy of Hercules"?

  It might be useful even so to look into the annals of Nero's home life and hospitality, in which he perfected and surpassed the clumsy beginnings of his predecessors. Like them, he reveled in a good poisoning, which, like them, he preferred to witness firsthand at the dining table. Thus, he watched impassively as his brother Britannicus died horribly at a family luncheon. The good prefect Burrus, who had been highly instrumental in his accession to empire, he dispatched with a toxic throat medicine, replacing him with the venomous Tigellinus. At the dining table he murdered friend and foe alike - "a number are known to have been slain all together at a single meal along with their preceptors and attendants." Three attempts were made to poison his mother, with whom he was rumored to be incestuously involved; when these failed, he sought to drown her in an elaborately booby-trapped ship, and when she managed against all odds to swim safely to shore, he lost all patience with her and had her run through with swords. When the opened veins of his first wife, Octavia, failed to kill her fast enough, she was suffocated in a hot vapor bath. In a fit of pique, he kicked his pregnant second wife, Poppaea Sabina, to death, then regretfully honored her memory by castrating the slave boy Sporus (who bore an unfortunate resemblance to the martyred woman) and marrying him ceremoniously. Thus, Nero could proudly claim the fourfold portfolio of parricide, fratricide, matricide, and regicide. It is hardly any wonder that, like Augustus, he considered himself the living incarnation of Apollo.

  Almost as atrocious as his crimes against family and hospitality were those he committed against music. He scandalized all of Rome not only by his appearances on the professional stage but also by his dreadful voice and mediocre lyre playing, which he inflicted on all and sundry, proudly and indiscriminately, in public and private settings alike. Tacitus says in wry understatement that his poems "lack vigour, inspiration, and homogeneity." He competed in musical competitions with apparently sincere trepidation, although no one was permitted to win but him and the statues of previous victors were torn down and dragged away. As it was forbidden to leave any theater while Nero played, women were known to give birth during his performances, while others risked life and limb by leaping from the closed gates or feigned death in order to escape. It was probably not hyperbolic for Cassius Dio to claim that everyone "regarded the dead as fortunate."

  This, then, was the history and reality of the imperial household to which Petronius found himself summoned from the depths of Asia Minor in the year 60. As an educated and erudite man, he was certainly intimately familiar with that history. As an aristocrat with impeccable social connections, he must have been well informed of all of the gossip and known most of its subjects personally, including the emperor. As a worldly slave-owner, he had had ample opportunity to indulge in many of the same luxuries and vices. As a former soldier, he was no stranger to bloodshed, betrayal, and intrigue. On all these counts, it is impossible not to believe that he knew just what he was getting into and the kind of people he would have to deal with when he set out to make himself indispensable to Nero. In fact, it may even be fair to say that he should have been able to foresee the fate that awaited him. He could undoubtedly have avoided it by maintaining a low profile and safe distance from the court; he was wealthy and accomplished enough not to need to put himself in the way of such dangerous patronage. And yet, by all evidence, he plunged headlong into the lion's den and eagerly sought out its darkest recesses. Why did he do it? What could he possibly have had to gain when he had so much to lose?

  The brief but incisive portrait of Petronius by Tacitus is full of telling contradictions. On the one hand, he was said to be a man who spent his days in sleep and his nights in self-indulgence; on the other, he is reported to have been an energetic and canny administrator in Bithynia. "Indolence had raised him to fame, as energy raises others," but he cannot possibly have achieved his meteoric rise as Nero's confidante and guide merely by the example of his indolence - he must have worked hard and cunningly to do it. He was "erudito luxu"- learned in luxury, a delicious oxymoron - but was never ranked among the herd of debauchees and spendthrifts, "like most of those who squander their substance." He somehow managed to set himself apart from and above the common sycophants and self-seekers - most pointedly and at manifest risk from the thuggish Tigellinus and still cultivate a reputation for casual and catholic charm. "His talk and his doings, the freer they were and the more show of carelessness they exhibited, were the better liked, for their look of natural simplicity." From Tacitus emerges the picture of a complicated and clever man who succeeded in placing self-gratification and aesthetic principles at the service of his political ambitions. Unlike Tigellinus and other political operatives of Nero's household, whose lusts and ruthlessness are nakedly exposed for all eternity, Petronius remains opaque in his motives and ultimate beliefs and convictions. The otherwise gimlet-eyed Plutarch could not see beyond his superficial charge against Petronius as a mere flatterer, while, for all his insight, Tacitus is completely stumped as to whether the arbiter was indulging a true taste for vice or merely affecting it. Petronius may have imagined that such opacity guaranteed his safety as one of Nero's favored guests and companions.

  In Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz portrays Petronius - whom he calls Gaius - as a self-serving, world-weary cynic without morals or conviction. Unfortunately, Petronius' principal function in the story is to serve as a foil to his nephew Vinicius as he undergoes a soul-shattering conversion to Christianity. The last thing I would want to do is to impugn the early Christian martyrs, but in his zeal to contrast them to the unredeemed pagans, Sienkiewicz got Petronius all wrong, including his given name.

  The entire subject of Petronius' inner soul would be sterile had he not left a testament to himself. Some historians believe that the Satyricon was written at the height of his influence as a kind of unpublished amusement for the members of the court. This is unlikely for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that it could not have failed to incur the imperial wrath had it come to Nero's attention. In the year 62, Aulus Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento was found guilty of insulting senators and priests and all his books were burned; we can only imagine what Nero would have done to a lampooner of his divine self and company. Another reason to believe that Petronius kept the Satyricon more or less to himself during his lifetime is that by far the most scathing and damning
episode, Trimalchio's banquet, was not discovered until the mid-seventeenth century, when a later transcription was found in a small village on the coast of Dalmatia. How was this section of the book preserved intact when so much of the manuscript is almost certainly lost forever? It is not implausible that, for reasons of self-preservation, Petronius kept the Trimalchio chapter sequestered, separate from the rest of the novel and safely hidden from the gossips and professional informers who infested the imperial court.

  Because of the fragmentary nature of its surviving portions, there is not much of a discernible plot to the Satyricon. In the convention of Menippean satire, it parodies contemporary philosophical thought, partly in verse, partly in prose. It is especially harsh on rhetoricians. The story follows the adventures and misadventures of the student Encolpius; Giton, his beautiful slave boy and lover; and Ascyltos, his friend and sometimes bitter rival for Giton's affections. They argue and part; they meet up again and reconcile; Giton abandons Encolpius for Ascyltos, then returns; they encounter the poet Eumolpus, who is viciously assailed for the mediocrity of his verse; they are attacked, seduced, enslaved, and freed; Encolpius suffers a debilitating and humiliating bout of impotence that is ultimately cured by a sorceress. The book begins in midsentence and ends in mid-sentence. The longest continuous episode of the book is that in which Encolpius and Ascyltos, through their teacher Agamemnon, are invited to supper at the home of the enormously wealthy freedman Trimalchio. The meal is attended mostly by the host's aging cronies, who, like him, are poorly educated former slaves who have made good. Trimalchio is tirelessly, epically vulgar. Throughout the night, he and his guests talk about little but money, how to get it and how to spend it. His household gods are Gain, Luck, and Profit. At one point, he has his bookkeeper read out the daily profit sheet from his estates, including the birth of seventy slaves, five hundred thousand pecks of wheat put up in the barn, five hundred oxen broken in, and ten million sesterces locked up in the strongbox. Trimalchio boasts loudly of his constipation, cured by "suppository of pomegranate-rind and pine sap boiled in vinegar." He discusses in great detail the design of his future tomb, to be engraved with scenes of the entire town carousing at his table and to be inscribed prominently with the epitaph "HE NEVER ONCE LISTENED TO A PHILOSOPHER!" He thinks it the very height of sophistication to have his slaves sing as they serve, but, for all his efforts, the entertainment is dismissed as "low cabaret." Like prompters at a sitcom, the servants must lead the audience in clapping.

  The fare served up is as excessive as the host. A partial list of appetizers includes roast dormice sprinkled with honey and poppyseeds; Syrian plums and pomegranate seeds; fig-peckers marinated in peppered egg yolk and stuffed into peahen eggs; testicles and kidneys; cheese tarts; lobster; sow's udder; and snapper in pepper sauce. A wild boar is roast, stuffed with live quail, and garnished with cake piglets. A roast pig is brought in and the cook threatened with a beating for having forgotten to gut it; but when he proceeds to slit it open before the horrified company, it disgorges a cascade of cooked sausages and giblets. For dessert, cakes and fruits are served suffused with saffron; pastry thrushes are stuffed with nuts and raisins; quinces are adorned with thorns to look like sea urchins.

  No reader, ancient or modern, can fail to recognize in Trimalchio the eternal nouveau riche, who has the means to inspire envy but inspires equal contempt for his lack of subtlety and the low-bred company he keeps. Nothing has changed in two thou sand years to soften or mitigate that portrait - only recently the Times carried the story of six bankers who treated themselves to sixty-two thousand dollars' worth of vintage Petrus at one meal. Each one of us probably carries with him the image of some news-making plutocrat whose money and gorgeous arm-candy he delights in despising. We sneer at his greed but cannot help imagining ourselves in his place, consoling ourselves that we would know the best and most tasteful ways of spending his riches if we had them. We might even imagine that we deserve them more than one who puts them to such vulgar use. We flatter ourselves with the understated simplicity of our own tastes and picture ourselves, invited to the ball, rejecting the garish display and all it represents.

  Few critics doubt that, in the words of one, "the prototypes of the guests at Trimalchio's table were almost certainly actual people known to Nero no less than to Petronius." We will never know, of course, whether certain characters correspond specifically to courtiers of the author's acquaintance, but that is irrelevant. No one would suggest, either, that Trimalchio is an explicit portrait of Nero, but the similarities between them would have been more than enough to cost Petronius his life if the emperor had chanced to read the manuscript. There is, of course, their shared aversion to philosophers. Both are wildly profligate and believe that a man is at least partly defined and ennobled by his willingness to spend recklessly. Suetonius' description of Nero - "He thought that there was no other way of enjoying riches and money than by riotous extravagance, declaring that only stingy and niggardly fellows kept a correct account of what they spent, while fine and genuinely magnificent gentlemen wasted and squandered" - readily applies to Trimalchio. Both were shameless exhibitionists with terrible voices; both shared a keen and well-informed interest in architecture. Both preserved their first beards in golden caskets. Both had dining rooms with mechanical ceilings that opened to shower gifts and perfume on their guests. Both had a decided penchant for scenting the soles of their feet. I think it's fair to assume that no one in Nero's court was ever offered the opportunity to read the Satyricon.

  The thing about Trimalchio is that, for all his trumpishness, we cannot help but like him, as Petronius clearly intended us to. He is brash, coarse, and temperamental, but he is also unapologetically himself, larger than life, a carousing Bacchus, a hungry maw, still greedy at an advanced age for everything life has to offer. He is unstintingly generous to friends and strangers alike and enjoys a surprisingly casual and empathetic give-and-take relationship with his slaves. He has triumphed over terrible odds and come away with an unsentimental but not at all bitter assessment of the rules of the game: "Take my word for it, if you have a penny you're worth a penny, you are valued for just what you have." Contrast this philosophy with Nero's darker conviction that "no man was chaste or pure in any part of his body, but that most of them concealed their vices and cleverly drew a veil over them; and that therefore he pardoned all other faults in those who confessed to him their lewdness" and it becomes obvious that if Trimalchio is a stand-in for the emperor, he is one with all the mercurial cruelty, madness, and blood-lust bleached out of him.

  Every paradox of Petronius' personality and the dangerous choices he knowingly made come together and are illuminated by Trimalchio. It seems obvious that, since the book cannot have been read by many, if any, of its contemporaries, it was written as a kind of self-exorcism - part expiation, part wishful thinking - a drawn-out analytical exercise in which the author is attempting to understand and justify his own impulses and conflicting desires. Petronius does not need Nero, his money, his influence, or his protection; he sneers at the emperor's crude depravity, artistic mediocrity, and lack of aesthetic refinement; he finds no intellectual peers at court. And yet he is not only attracted by the emperor's hospitality and intimacy, but also actually co-opts them to his own mortal peril. Is it a fatal addiction to debauchery that killed him or a fatal addiction to observing debauchees? Excess or introspection? Gaius or Titus? Either way, he can't help himself, but he can feel terribly confused by his own conflicting desires. They inspire shame, self-reproach, anger. Which is better: intellectual sophistication or naked power and the freedom to wield it? He can't compare himself to Nero, who is a fiend and does not offer a useful foil, but he can contrast himself without guilt to Trimalchio, who represents all the forbidden attractions without the atrocity. Trimalchio is the Frankenstein monster, created from Nero's body parts once the vicious heart, diseased mind, and incestuous loins have been discarded. Because he is likable and his vices are generous, Trimalchio make
s it ethically permissible for Petronius to be perverse. Unlike Nero, he is the moralist's vulgarian. If Petronius can look at the emperor, his host and boss, and see Trimalchio, he can remain at court, indulge his pleasures, and still distance himself morally from the orgy of blood.

  On the very first page of the Satyricon, Agamemnon poses a rhetorical question: "Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?" I imagine that this was the question that haunted Petronius throughout his years - the good along with the bad - as guest and dean of the Domus Aurea. It is easy to see him harassed by it, waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the afternoon; pondering it solemnly in his bath as the fading light and muffled din of the Roman evening wafted in on a dusty breeze; shaking it off as he set out in his chair for yet another long night of pleasure (or feigned pleasure) at the palace. Maybe it came back to him as his retinue glided through the palace gates while the guards held back the throngs of beggars, petitioners, and onlookers at spear-point. Maybe he heard it again later as he reclined on his dining couch in Nero's banquet hall, deep in his cups in the dark hours, as a slave girl anointed the soles of his feet with scented oil and the ceiling disgorged flower petals and perfume and the artificial stars revolved through the artificial sky overhead. "Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?" It must have been exhilarating and terrifying for him to see those words written down for the first time, a rebuke that had taken almost a lifetime in the formulating. Finding the answer to the charge was the challenge he set for himself in the final years of his life, in his work and in his death. Is there any way at all to live in the kitchen and not be a stinker? One way or another, it's a question we might all stand to ask ourselves a little more often.