Satyricon

The Satyricon is a work of Roman prose fiction attributed to Petronius, written in the late first century AD during the reign of the emperor Nero and surviving today only in fragments. Written as a Menippean satire mixing prose with verse, the surviving narrative follows the wandering, morally disreputable Encolpius and his companions through a series of misadventures across southern Italy, most famously the Cena Trimalchionis, the dinner party of the vulgarly wealthy freedman Trimalchio, whose ostentatious excess the episode satirizes at length. Regarded by scholars as the second most fully preserved Roman novel after Apuleius's The Golden Ass, the Satyricon is prized as important evidence for the colloquial Latin and everyday life of the early Roman Empire, particularly among its freed and lower-class characters. Its influence has been traced into much later literature, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's consideration of Trimalchio as a working title for The Great Gatsby and T. S. Eliot's use of a Satyricon passage as the epigraph to The Waste Land.