Petronius: A Handbook by Ian Repath

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BOOKREVIEWS 253 Petronius: A Handbook. Edited by Jonathan PRAG and Ian REPATH. Oxford, Chichester, and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xiv + 256. Hardcover,£65.00/$100.00. ISBN 978-1-4051-5687-5. This volume presents twelve essays on various aspects of Petronius’ Satyrica. The introduction states that these essays are written primarily for students, presumably those with little previous knowledge of Petronius. But this should not deter those who have more experience with this text from reading the volume: as the editors observe, there is much of value here for anyone interested in the Satyrica. One of the editors’ stated goals is to bring together approaches which are elsewhere generally kept separate. This goal is well met: the essays are divided between literary and social or historical approaches, and each presents an interesting issue inPetronianscholarshipinalucid and thought-provoking way. The first four essays present literary and linguistic aspects. Niall Slater sets the stage for all that follows with his treatment of textual matters, and most importantly , of the single most significant fact about the text of the Satyrica: its fragmentary nature and the implications thereof for how we read it. Slater intersperses a narration of the process of reading the novel with the problems thus encountered; overall the essay is a good introduction to several of the most important issues in Petronian scholarship. J. R. Morgan introduces the topic of the Greek literary tradition in the next essay. He chooses to focus on three particularly important Greek predecessors: Homer, Plato, and the Greek Novel. He explicitly rejects the simple enumeration of Petronius’ Greek “influences,” and focuses instead on “what [Petronius] did with his own and his reader’s awareness of Greek literature” (32). The essay thereby effectively summarizes some of the more important questions concerning Petronius’ relation to the Greek literary tradition. Costas Panayotakis addresses the even more complex topic of Petronius ’ relationship to other Latin authors in the third essay. An example of his thought-provoking approach is the argument that Petronius’ irreverent treatment of some of the “classics” cannot have any debasing effect on the earlier text or its conceits. A reader might ask: can there not be those who read at least some of Petronius’ epic allusions as send-ups of epic and its conventions? Panayotakis thus piques the reader’s interest even as he introduces some of the more prevalent Roman influences on the Satyrica. Victoria Rimell rounds off the “literary” segment of the essays with a contribution on a more fluid topic: Petronius’ use of language and sound. This is a delightful essay; Rimell’s emphasis on the sounds of the Satyrica as worth noticing calls our attention to an aspect of the work that has 254 BOOK REVIEWS not been sufficiently discussed, and at the same time points out some of the pleasures of Petronius’ language. There follow two essays on the social context of the Satyrica; the first, by Amy Richlin, focuses on the issue of sex, beginning with a very brief summary of the social context of the Satyrica as far as the sex/gender system is concerned, followed by an exploration of how the roles presented in the novel “complicate the norms depicted above” (84). This piece is entertaining and incisive, and provides a solid examination of one of the more difficult aspects of this novel. Caroline Vout provides the second treatment of the Satyrica’s social context in the next contribution. She examines the generally accepted ascription of the Satyrica to the Neronian period and asks how this dating shapes our reading of the novel. While rejecting any straightforward attempts to read the Satyrica as a novel “about” Nero’s Rome, she argues that it can be read as a novel about “ways of representing reality in a given period” (102), e.g., in Nero’s Rome. More importantly , she pointsout that dating a work like this, even if done far more securely , is not a way of “solving” the text: there is no shortcut to understanding this complicated novel to be found in paratextual material from the Neronian period any more than the Flavian. It is a thought-provoking piece, and is to be commended on its...