The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of Petronius' Satyricon

The first four chapters of this book form a single unit since they deal with the same general thesis. In fact I can see no reason to divide this part of the book into chapters except that (I suppose) they originally represented four different lectures in the Sather series. Two ideas are developed here. The first is that Encolpius has a tendency to impose literary models on reality. The second is that the “hidden author” is lurking behind Encolpius, laughing at him, and that the reader is “alerted by Petronius” (29) to interpret the text differently from the narrator. Thus, according to Gian Biagio Conte, a bond of complicity is created between the reader and the author, who “sets his traps and waits to laugh when his victim [Encolpius] falls into them” (27). Encolpius, therefore, is viewed as a “naive victim of events” (24), a man who wants to be a “sincere and trustworthy narrator” (24) but who cannot distinguish between fact and myth.

The first of these ideas has been fully discussed elsewhere and is generally well accepted. I have discussed it myself (“Petronius, the Mime, and Rhetorical Education,” Helios 3 [1976] 67–74). I have problems with the second. First of all, I think that it is very risky to try to see a “hidden author” in a text where the narrator is different from the author. Moreover, Conte acknowledges that there is really not much difference between what has been called the “narrating I” and what he calls the “hidden author” (84). This makes me wonder what is the point of complicating the whole issue by positing a hidden author at all, especially since I do not find convincing the examples that he gives of instances when Petronius supposedly intervenes to alert the reader not to take Encolpius too seriously. When the latter, for example, describes Eumolpus in the art gallery as someone qui videretur nescio quid magnum promittere (83.7), does this really indicate a “narrator who is victim of his own illusions” (21)? Is this really an instance of the “hidden author” intervening in the text to give us an “advance notice of the deflation of the sublime” (21)? It seems to me that whatever discrepancy exists here can be explained by Beck’s observations, made long ago, concerning the difference between Encolpius the actor and Encolpius the narrator (see “Some Observations on the Narrative Technique of Petronius,” Phoenix 27 [1973] 42–61).

Secondly, it has always seemed to me that it is Encolpius himself who consciously chooses to see his life in terms of literary models, simply because the patterns that he sees are more exciting than the reality which he experiences. Again, I myself have argued this point elsewhere (“Petronius and ‘Camp,’” Helios 11 [1984] 133–39). This, however, makes him a shaper of events, not a naive victim of them, and the reader smiles with Encolpius, not at him. Moreover, as regards the whole idea of literary models, Conte’s theory about the role of the “hidden author” seems to me to complicate the issue more than is necessary, or is warranted. He says, for example, that Petronius wants to discredit, through parody, those forms of literature, such as the romance, from which Encolpius draws many of his models. On the other hand, he argues, strangely, that Petronius does not mean to devalue other genres, such as epic, from which (as Conte himself has so clearly shown) many of these models come: “the hidden author . . . constructs the story of Encolpius like a continuous parody of the tale of love and adventure. In turn, it is the function of Encolpius . . . to control relations with high epic and heroic literature and the high oratory studied in school” (37). However, as Conte himself points out (49), there are many similarities between the novels and declamations. Would it not be easier to assume that it is Encolpius who imposes the...