Like the work of Rabelais, Swift, and Joyce, Petronius’s satire achieves a rare blend of literary artistry, moral intelligence, and downright raunchiness. His Satyrica energetically explores the moral landscape of early imperial Rome, a corrupt, sprawling empire populated by lechers, gluttons, pansies, vixens, acrobats, and creeps. Amid this decadence, Petronius holds Rome to a measure of decency—not to a priggish or prudish measure, but to a standard of decorum or moral elegance. Even at the hour of his death, urged if not ordered by the Emperor Nero in A.D. 66, Petronius retained the right to judge what counts for civilized behavior and what does not. So, Tacitus tells us, Petronius met death with that same grace, composure, and dislike of phony heroics that he displays throughout his writing: as he bled slowly to death he dined, slept, listened to recitals of light verse, rewarded and flogged his slaves according to their due, and composed a catalogue of Nero’s vices, a copy of which he remitted to the very emperor who had dubbed him elegantiae arbiter, arbiter of elegance.

Only three of the Satyrica’s original sixteen books survive; the work as we have it reads at times like a fragmented, ancient Huckleberry Finn, and at others like a Roman Tristram Shandy. Those who (like the two translators of the present volume) credit Petronius with having invented the novel, or a literary form very much like the novel, are not so far from the mark. In