Week 3: contextualising Petronius

“What an artist dies with me.”—famous last words…

Recap: prose vs. verse

• Muses, authority, and truth-claims: ‘cultural capital’
• The rise of Greek prose in the Hellenistic and Roman era
• But what do Romans do with it? — Vitruvius and Frontinus vs. Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius…

1. Artifice and irony in Nero’s Rome

• Dissimulation and doublespeak: Dio (16.9.3) on Julius Montanus’ fatal apology
• Actors in the Audience: Dio (62.15.2-3) on Nero’s tour of Greece
• ‘Fatal Charades’: Loukillios (AP 11.184) on Meniscus / ‘Hercules’
• Flights of violent fancy: Suetonius, Nero (12.2) on ‘Icarus’ and ‘Pasiphae’
• par’ historian: Loukillios (AP 11.254) on fake authenticity
• The Domus Aurea: fictions of space. (Trompe l’oeil, sfx, irony…)
• Receptions of the Domus Aurea: inventing the ‘grotesque’

2. smoke and mirrors: Hero and Seneca as prose exponents

• Playing with scale: Hero of Alexandria and his puppet theatre
• A technology of imagination / fibbing with precision: Hero’s Dioptra
• Following Cicero: Seneca as correspondent
• Following Plato: Seneca as philosopher and political adviser
• Lucan, and Nero as poetic rival: is prose just a safer bet?

Further reading:

Shadi Bartsch (1994), Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian
Glen Bowersock (1994), Fiction as History: Nero to Julian
Kathleen Coleman (1990), ‘Fatal Charades: Roman executions staged as mythological enactments’, JRS 80: 44-73.