Practicing Death in Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis and Plato's Phaedo

Abstract

While scholars have long recognized Petronius' ironic use and inversions of Plato's Symposium in his Cena Trimalchionis, this paper argues that Petronius has a further Platonic intertext, the Phaedo. There are two chief parallels: an ironic correspondence in the use of mythical imagery, namely Theseus' journey through the labyrinth, and the Cena's final scenes, which consciously echo the final scenes of Socrates' life as depicted in the Phaedo. Scholars have long recognized that Petronius uses a contrast with Plato's Symposium to underscore the pretensions, narrow outlook and lack of refinement of the freedmen in Trimalchio's milieu.1 Whereas in the Symposium Athens' highly educated elite discuss the nature of eros, Trimalchio's triclinium rarely wavers from the topics of money, food and death. One of the most vivid images of the Cena is the final one: Trimalchio lying dead in bed, slumped on cush ions, trumpets blaring, slaves moaning and, finally, firemen breaking in with axes (78.5-7). The dinner party, so dominated by the theme of death, thus reaches its fitting climax. In this context, Petronius owes a further debt to Plato's account of Socrates' final day and death in the Phaedo. I argue here that there are two chief parallels: first, an ironic correspondence in the use of mythical imagery, namely Theseus' journey through the labyrinth used as an image of a jour ney through death in life. Second, and more concretely, the Cena's final scenes?from the reading of Trimalchio's will to his mock death?consciously echo the final scenes of Socrates' life as depicted in the Phaedo. These contrasts and parallels further delineate the limbo-like lives of Trimalchio and his freedman companions. The Cena Trimalchionis is an elaborately structured and symmet rically balanced piece, in which a series of episodes return in reverse order only to begin again. As Bodel concludes: structural pat terning enables the narrator to shape the events he relates to reflect the experience of them at the time: Trimalchio's house was a trap from which there seemed no exit.... [a] labyrinthine experience of 1 Cameron (1969); Bodel (1999) 39-41; Courtney (2001) 103-4, 109-10,123; cf. n. 4, below. I wish to thank Jenny Strauss Clay, Ted Courtney, Stephanie McCarter, John Paul Russo and the anonymous readers of CJ for their helpful comments at various stages in the writing of this article, the final version of which was immensely im proved by the keen editorial eye of S. Douglas Olson. THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 104.1 (2008) 43-58 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 07:33:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms