Roman Fever: Petronius' Satyricon and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar

Abstract

The first time Gore Vidal read Petronius, "an electrical current was switched on." Vidal's biographer proposes that the Roman satirists "seemed models for some synthesis of his own that would capture in modern terms the tradition in fiction that brought together humor, satire, and high intellectual seriousness about society, culture, and the human condition." In both The City and the Pillar (and other texts by Vidal) and the Satyricon, everything is shipwrecked: love and sex, reality, men and women, the military, direction, life, the body, religion, education, the self. Once again, the Early Empire amazes by its modernity.