The Satyricon and Seneca the Apocolocyntosis (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Do not read and drive!
Review: It may be tempting, but my experience with reading this book and operating a motor vehicle came out badly. There was a red light and obviously the book was good enough that putting it down to go twelve blocks was unthinkable, but it ended up being decidedly unpleasant for myself and all involved. I would suggest carving out a couple of hours where you don't need to leave the house for this hilarious mock epic about one man's quest to regain his erection.

Rating:
Summary: Do not read and drive!
Review: It may be tempting, but my experience with reading this book and operating a motor vehicle came out badly. There was a red light and obviously the book was good enough that putting it down to go twelve blocks was unthinkable, but it ended up being decidedly unpleasant for myself and all involved. I would suggest carving out a couple of hours where you don't need to leave the house for this hilarious mock epic about one man's quest to regain his erection.

Rating:
Summary: Darkly Fascinating
Review: It was not easy being a poet and scholar in Nero's day. Since the Emperor regarded himself as the poet par excellence, everyone else was ultimately disposable. Both Petronius and Seneca were ultimately requested to commit suicide and did so, lest the Praetorian Guard were called in to "assist" them.

In the earlier days of Nero's rule, when there was some possibility that his would be one of the rare enlightened reigns, Petronius and Seneca joined Nero in a regular after-dinner literary society where the humor was frequently raunchy and the sex more often than not perverted.

The SATYRICON was originally a fairly long episodic spoof of the ODYSSEY: its hero offends the God Priapus by ransacking his temple and is stricken with impotence. He and his friends and bedmates wander through Italy recounting their adventures. The only fairly intact sequence tells of a dinner by a nouveau-riche merchant named Trimalchio who holds an elegant banquet but whose base-born origins are always showing. All the rest of the episodes are fragmentary, though not without interest.

Seneca takes the recently poisoned Emperor Claudius down a peg by spoofing his deification. Starting with Julius Caesar, the Romans turned many of their leaders into gods upon their demise. Claudius -- who was by no means the nice guy portrayed in the Robert Graves books -- gets short shrift in the underworld. A clue: The title is usually translated as "The Pumpkinification of Claudius." Seneca was treading carefully here, as Nero's mother was Claudius' wife and is generally considered to have been the one who poisoned him.

These are not works that you can sit down and read as if they were novels. The introductions are not only helpful, but mandatory to understanding what follows. Both works, along with the works of Lucan, are essential to understanding this darkly fascinating period of Roman history.

Rating:
Summary: A classic that should still be read....
Review: This book, when, as here it is translated well (i.e. in a fashion that renders it valid to a modern reader as opposed to one in which it is more a word-for-word translation from the Latin), is one of the funniest books of which I know. Roman literature typically seems derivative-- less real, less well-thought out than Greek stuff-- this book is one of the major exceptions to this rule.

If you know of this book and want to read it, this translation here is a good place to start. This is the first novel (whatever that means!), and just an all-around good time....