Satyricon (Annotated)

This is the Annotated Version of the original book. This book is in 7 volumes and contains 141 chapters in it. This is the complete Book with Images. We had annotated this book by adding a long summary in approximate 72000words and Short Summary in approximate 19000 words at the end of this book. This is a very long novel.
The Satyricon is considered one of the gems of Western literature, and, according to Branham, it is the earliest of its kind in Latin.
The Satyricon, Satyricon liber (The Book of Satyrlike Adventures), or Satyrical, is a Latin work of fiction believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as Titus Petronius. The Satyricon is an example of Menippean satire, which is different from the formal verse satire of Juvenal or Horace. The work contains a mixture of prose and verse (commonly known as prosimetrum); serious and comic elements; and erotic and decadent passages. As with the Metamorphoses (also called The Golden Ass) of Apuleius, classical scholars often describe it as a "Roman novel", without necessarily implying continuity with the modern literary form.

The surviving sections of the original (much longer) text detail the bizarre exploits of the narrator, Encolpius, and his slave and boyfriend Giton, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy. It is the second most fully preserved Roman novel, after the fully extant Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which has significant differences in style and plot. Satyricon is also regarded as useful evidence for the reconstruction of how lower classes lived during the early Roman Empire. The name "Satyricon" implies that the work belongs to the type to which Varro, imitating the Greek Menippus, had given the character of a medley of prose and verse composition. But the string of fictitious narrative by which the medley is held together is something quite new in Roman literature. The author was happily inspired in his devices for amusing himself and thereby transmitted to modern times a text based on the ordinary experience of contemporary life; the precursor of such novels as Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage and The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett. It reminds the well-read protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours of certain nineteenth-century French novels: "In its highly polished style, its astute observation, its solid structure, he could discern curious parallels and strange analogies with the handful of modern French novels he was able to tolerate."

Unlike Fellini's film discussed below, the caricature of the Satyricon does not deform the everyday life of the Roman people. Petronius uses real names for all his characters, most of them laypeople, who talk about the theatre of ancient Rome, the amphitheater and the circus with the same enthusiasm of today's fans of football and other team sports. If there is a parody in the Satyricon it is not about the main charactersEncolpius, Giton, and Ascyltosbut of the described social reality, and the literary genres of certain famous poets and writers, Homer, Plato, Virgil, and Cicero included. Petronius's realism has a Greek antecedent in Aristophanes, who also abandoned the epical tone to focus on ordinary subjects.
Gaius Petronius Arbiter (27 66 AD) was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian era (5468 AD)

Fiction > Literary
Fiction > Romance > Erotica

Gems of Western Literature

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