QUEER SOCIALITY AND PETRONIAN FRATERNITY

Abstract

‘How tough it is for outlaws’ (quam male est extra legem uiuentibus, Sat. 125.4), laments Encolpius, the petty-criminal narrator of Petronius’ Satyrica, as he frets about whether he and his buddies will be found out as they engage in a scheme to fleece the legacy hunters of Croton. But Encolpius and his crew are outlaws in more senses than one. Having forgotten, or simply disregarded, marital-reproductive household arrangements, they engage in novel forms of relationality that their cultural lexicon can barely cover as they quest after sex, feasts, money, or simply subsistence. Much Petronian scholarship, promoting a reading that looks down on the characters, views these forms of relationality as parodic and ‘purely comic’, ludicrously failed attempts by low, satirized characters to appropriate sublime Roman social institutions like fraternal pietas. In this article, taking as my primary example the reformulation of brotherhood and the use of the kin term frater by Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton, I read these forms of sociality as queer: that is to say, potentially challenging to normativity rather than simply inadequate to meet its demands. Petronian brotherhood, read in this light, appears richly shaded and contested, not merely a one-dimensional misappropriation composed for the benefit of a ‘superior’ elite audience. What exactly it means to be a ‘brother’ in this postlapsarian world is always an active question in the scenes involving the trio. I offer in this article a more detailed close reading of Petronian brotherhood than has been possible in other, briefer scholarly accounts, focusing in particular on the competing conceptualizations of ‘brotherhood’ by different characters, from Encolpius’ exclusive use of the term as something like ‘boyfriend’ to Ascyltos’ more capacious use of the word.