The Conversation

Guide to the classics: Petronius’s Satyricon – sex, satire and naughty boys

02-03-2020 Author: Tom Stevenson, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient History, UQ, The University of Queensland

Musée d'Orsay

The Satyricon by Petronius is an unusual surviving text from the ancient world. It is not a work of history, nor a work of soaring epic poetry like Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid, and for various reasons it is hard to get a handle on.

Its contents are pretty grubby because it is about lowlifes and lowlife...

More...

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